Rent Your Textbooks
Save up to 70% when you rent your textbooks on Amazon. Keep your textbook rentals for a semester and rental return shipping is free.
Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art documents the growing presence of Buddhist perspectives in contemporary culture. This shift began in the nineteenth century and is now pervasive in many aspects of everyday experience. In the arts especially, the increasing importance of process over product has promoted a profound change in the relationship between artist and audience. But while artists have been among the most perceptive interpreters of Buddhism in the West, art historians and critics have been slow to develop the intellectual tools to analyze the impact of Buddhist concepts. This timely, multi-faceted volume explores the relationships between Buddhist practice and the contemporary arts in lively essays by writers from a range of disciplines and in revealing interviews with some of the most influential artists of our time. Elucidating the common ground between the creative mind, the perceiving mind, and the meditative mind, the contributors tackle essential questions about the relationship of art and life. Among the writers are curators, art critics, educators, and Buddhist commentators in psychology, literature, and cognitive science. They consider the many Western artists today who recognize the Buddhist notion of emptiness, achieved through focused meditation, as a place of great creative potential for the making and experiencing of art. The artists featured in the interviews, all internationally recognized, include Bill Viola, and Ann Hamilton. Extending earlier twentieth-century aesthetic interests in blurring the boundaries of art and life, the artists view art as a way of life, a daily practice, in ways parallel to that of the Buddhist practitioner. Their works, woven throughout the book, richly convey how Buddhism has been both a source for and a lens through which we now perceive art.
{"itemData":[{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":48.99,"ASIN":"0520243463","isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":49.5,"ASIN":"0520242084","isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":34,"ASIN":"B007K5DTJW","isPreorder":0}],"shippingId":"0520243463::PxzF4nzo5dvNGU91GAkmfrEY2dbLAUGNDQjLaIPec4ZgIvWRVJytf1Vd5wHr6g1fKIWITKCMzfG6Ix3yCmUk7gZWPMCmzuuysHVfNXkQFCg%3D,0520242084::Cjo2HrOkHpGFQufwz1%2FrsP%2FXWg4KIPqk4oOCN%2Fr6iivkIGxjanS%2Bog8Gu%2BmN2GdlXQEkcI6XBP7lbldP1aDJd1Z8F0ETZVArRBa7b6OD%2BV%2FJx1po4BxyYA%3D%3D,B007K5DTJW::U%2FfqpHo2G1Jy9QW%2Bk5wjoyZ5Xa%2B6odv6%2Fe%2FiQUa9hmnBMeM38BOMvAYiM1W%2FS5btSp9LV5BqbUsvZCgH0m8osWc1eQQs%2FZovm0MPOyVvaO1PZBx8qJyI3A%3D%3D","sprites":{"addToWishlist":["wl_one","wl_two","wl_three"],"addToCart":["s_addToCart","s_addBothToCart","s_add3ToCart"],"preorder":["s_preorderThis","s_preorderBoth","s_preorderAll3"]},"currenyCode":"USD","shippingDetails":{"xz":"same","yz":"same","xy":"same","xyz":"same"},"tags":["x","y","z"],"strings":{"addToWishlist":["add to wishlist","Add both to Wish List","Add all three to Wish List"],"addToCart":["Add to Cart","Add both to Cart","Add all three to Cart"],"showDetailsDefault":"Show availability and shipping details","shippingError":"An error occurred, please try again","hideDetailsDefault":"Hide availability and shipping details","priceLabel":["Price:","Price for both:","Price for all three:"],"preorder":["Pre-order this item","Pre-order both items","Pre-order all three items"]}}
"Eminently readable and extremely meaningful. The contributors tackle essential questions about the relationship of art and life. The book is also very timely, offering a way to approach Buddhism through unexpected channels."--Lynn Gumpert, Director, Grey Art Gallery, New York University
From the Back Cover
"Eminently readable and extremely meaningful. The contributors tackle essential questions about the relationship of art and life. The book is also very timely, offering a way to approach Buddhism through unexpected channels."-Lynn Gumpert, Director, Grey Art Gallery, New York University
Jacquelynn Baas (BA Michigan State, PhD Michigan) was founding director of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College after having served as Hood Chief Curator and, previously, as Registrar and then Assistant to the Director at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. In 1988 she was appointed director of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Named Director Emeritus in 1999, she returned to BAM/PFA as Interim Director in 2007-08 and served as Interim Director for the Mills College Art Museum in 2008-09.
In 2000 Baas co-founded the arts consortium, Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness, which over the course of its five-year existence generated some fifty exhibitions, educational programs, artist residencies, and two books: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (California 2004) and Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today (California 2005). She is co-editor of Learning Mind: Experience into Art (California, 2009), Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life (Chicago 2011), and Chicago Makes Modern: How Creative Minds Changed Society (Chicago 2012), and has published a number of essays, including "The Epic of American Civilization" in Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States (Norton 2003), "Unframing Experience" in Learning Mind (cited above), "Meditations on the Medium of Time" in Measure of Time (BAM/PFA, 2006), and "Before Zen: The Nothing of American Dada" in East-West Interchanges in American Art (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2012).
Baas has organized over thirty exhibitions and has published, lectured, and conducted numerous workshops on modern and contemporary art and architecture, with subjects ranging from print culture to the Mexican muralists to Asian perspectives in European and American art. She was curator for the 1990 exhibition, The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (ICA London; LAMOCA; UC Berkeley; Hood Museum, Dartmouth; IVAM Valencia); for No Boundary: Duchamp, Cage, and Mostly Fluxus at the 2006 Gwangju Biennale; and for Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, which traveled from Dartmouth to NYU and the University of Michigan in 1911-12 and was voted "Best Show in a University Gallery" by the American Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics.
Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art is such an extraordinary book that, as an art critic, I can only applaud its editors, Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, as well as the writers who participated in its creation. The innovative concept of exploring artistic responses to, or reflections on, Buddhist philosophy and practices, has been dealt with thorough care and inclusiveness.
The artist interviews in the second section of the book open up a deeper understanding and awareness of contemporary visual artists. Happily, the emphasis is on artists, who have achieved a significant amount of international recognition for their work. What has been less well known, and what this book so admirably illuminates, are the links between their artwork and Buddhist thought.
I would highly recommend this book for artists in all disciplines as a potential source of inspiration for their own artwork. Educators, and all those interested in contemporary culture and the arts, would find much food for thought in the essays and the many color images.
After reading several articles in this book I've found some to be very interesting and others rather dry in their content. It's hard to engage people's minds into reading about art or religion. Combine the pair and you are asking for a turn off of learning. This book though has parts to it that peak the mind's interest and keep it thinking about what art is and how it ties to the thoughts of Buddhism.
