Art practices reveal the entwinement of perception and understanding, opening possibilities for new ways of enacting the political. An artwork can serve as more than solely an aesthetic object: in the public sphere it beckons us to resist, challenge, and change the world around us. Wide-ranging in scope and application, Life in Art showcases how, at the intersection of art and phenomenology, sociopolitical issues can be examined anew. Eleven diverse, international, established and emerging academics and artists reveal how art opens possibilities for breaking colonial logics, resisting injustice, and addressing climate catastrophe. Through their multilayered and multidisciplinary phenomenological analyses, these original essays reveal how a variety of artworks from diverse fields-dance, sculpture, performance, photography, literature, architecture, film, and virtual reality-can engage perception in ways that transform the self and the world. Some essays focus on specific artworks; others consider theoretical questions that frame the intersection of aesthetics and phenomenology; and still more expand on the ways art can lead to political and social action. Offering a multiplicity of diverse views on the intersections between phenomenology and aesthetics, Life in Art highlights how this entanglement fosters our desires to mend, repair, and make new worlds.
Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Carnalities, The Art of Living in Latinidad (2025) and In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (2016). She is co-editor of Theories of the Flesh, Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation and Resistance (2020) and Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader (2009).Helen A. Fielding is Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at Western University. She is author of Cultivating Perception Through Artworks (IUP, 2021), and co-editor with Dorothea E. Olkowski of Feminist Phenomenology Futures (IUP, 2017), and with Christina Schuees and Dorothea E. Olkowski of Time in Feminist Phenomenology (IUP, 2011).
Introductions, by Mariana Ortega and Helen A. Fielding Part I: Sensing Anew, Decolonial Trespassings 1. Perceptual Thinking through Movement, by Helen A. Fielding 2. Perceiving in Red: The Visible, the Invisible, and Aesthesic Trespassing, by Mariana Ortega Part II: Spectralities 3. The Pink Crosses of Juarez: On Ephemeral Art's Power to Memorialize and Denounce Feminicidal Violence, by Martina Ferrari 4. Disrupting Spirits: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Ancestrality, by Stefan Kristensen and Anna Barseghian Part III: The Intimacies of Space 5. On Melting Ice with Jessie Kleemann, by Amanda Boetzkes 6. Deconstructing the Fetishist Aura of Capitalist Tech-Spectacles, by Nader El-Bizri Part IV: Art and the Political 7. Pictorial Rationalities and Why They Matter in Our Struggles for Identity and Community, by Jorella Andrews 8. Aesthetic Experience as a Site of Social Transformation: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of the Call, by Monique Roelofs 9. Distance and Proximity in Merleau-Ponty: Literary Usages of Language and New Usages of Power, by Rajiv Kaushik Part V: Artists' Mending Work 10. Blessings of Liberty and Interpretative Horizons, by Sarah Stefana Smith 11. Decolonial Re-worlding: Potential Ecologies of the Virtual, by Dolleen Tisawii'ashii Manning and Mary Bunch Index
"What is so remarkable about this volume, at the heart of which lies the dialogue between phenomenology and the embodied experience and creation of art, is the way in which it challenges and subverts Eurocentric colonial logic and systems of domination, privileging mind over body and the cognitive over the imaginative. . . . This is a book of great beauty and importance. It is also a book about care and caring for others, and about movement and moving: its reflection on movements of sensing and shaping anew will move and shape its reader."-Ariane Mildenberg, author of Modernism and Phenomenology: Literature, Philosophy, Art
