A01=Allen S. Weiss
A01=Allen Weiss
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Allen S. Weiss
Author_Allen Weiss
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=WMQL
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_home-garden
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781780231907
- Dimensions: 190 x 250mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2013
- Publisher: Reaktion Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The essential elements of the dry Japanese garden are few: rocks, gravel, moss. Simultaneously a sensual matrix, a symbolic form and a mythic domain, these gardens exhibit precise craftsmanship and exquisite miniaturization. However, their apparent minimalism belies a profound complexity, which must be approached according to the play of scale, surroundings and seasons, and especially in relation to the other arts, thus allowing us to experience them as living landscapes rather than as merely abstracted design.
These gardens partake of the Zen aesthetics of the tea ceremony, which also permeates Japanese poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, cuisine and ceramics, all of which entail different modes of representation. Japanese art favours suggestion and allusion, the indistinct over the literal: the moment when objects emerge or disappear, and the border between figuration and abstraction, are particularly valued. This is an art of the incipient and the potential, inspired by the intimation of continual transformation. This book shows how ceramics – seen as the very sublimation of the earth – plays a crucial role related at once to the site-specificity of gardens, to the ritualized codes of the tea ceremony and to the everyday gestures of the culinary table.
Zen Landscapes is the first in-depth study in the West to examine the correspondences between gardens and ceramics, suggesting new implications for theories of representation, arguing for the rightful place of ceramics among the fine arts and above all revealing original ways of seeing. This unique study will appeal to readers interested in landscape design, ceramic appreciation and the customs, craftsmanship and culture of Japan.
Allen S. Weiss teaches in the departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author and editor of over forty books in the fields of performance theory, landscape architecture, gastonomy, sound art and experimental theatre. Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th-century Metaphysics (1995), Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime (2002), Varieties of Audio Mimesis: Musical Evocations of Landscape (2008) and, most recently, Zen Landscapes (Reaktion Books, 2013)
