The Review of Metaphysics

This book harkens back to the root meaning of aesthetics as perception. Artworks invite us to see. When insightful, artworks enable glimpsing hidden details. When transgressive, they reveal avoidable suffering or unjust social arrangements. When cementing social ties, they show threads of overlap, shared vulnerabilities, or render concrete the [End Page 136] urgency of some communitarian objective. Outcroppings of such insights are irreducible to their content. Recalibrating our perceptions, potent art offers new lenses, not merely more visions. Artworks—to arrive at this book's title—accordingly do not merely feed our perception. They cultivate it.

The idea is not new. It surfaced in one form or another in any account that linked art with edification or with social critique. Fielding's project stands out in being anchored in phenomenology—Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Irigaray—and exemplifying the theory through detailed readings of particular creations. Fielding always begins from her immediate experience of a work and, when extrapolating, is careful to remain in contact with it. It matters where the work is situated (in/outside a museum), who engages with it (adults/children), the quality of processing the work (smooth/interrupted), or when it gets presented (after 9/11). The process of comprehensively recording and reflecting upon her holistic response to artworks establishes a unique demonstration of phenomenology. Critics or advocates of phenomenology would appreciate this candid attempt to exemplify the approach. Moreover, unlike phenomenology's founding fathers, Fielding offers an understanding of embodiment in which gender turns from a coincidental into a central component: For Merleau-Ponty, external inputs play on slightly different violins; for Fielding, the processing world includes violins and pianos. Experience-oriented engagements must fully acknowledge the kind of instrument upon which the world's tunes get played.

A theoretical introduction is followed by six detailed case studies. Chapters are grouped into three parts ("enacting ethics," "enacting politics," and "enacting culture"). Because Fielding is not committed to a corpus, a period, or a particular art form, she permits herself to move from Rembrandt's Bathsheba to Joan Mitchell's expressionist paintings, and from these to Louise Bourgeois's sculpture piece The Welcoming Hands. A chapter is devoted to a contemporary poem cycle (NourbeSe Philip's Zong!). Another chapter discusses an intricate sixteenth-century musical piece (Thomas Tallis' Spem in Alium) and its installation via a set of speakers in a museum by a contemporary artist (Janet Cardiff). Such liberty in traveling among creative disciplines, particular artists, and different periods is responsibly handled and justified: What prevents the impression of superficial hopping about is the phenomenological method being reused. Complaints about missing contextualization, historicization, or comparison with other works within the relevant practice are beside the point. We are invited to appreciate the fruitfulness of the method by reapplication in markedly different contexts.

The book opens with a rewarding distinction between seeing and perceiving. Perception differs from mere sensation because it incorporates reflexivity, not merely conceptualization. Reflexivity includes awareness of the encounter without belittling its enveloping situation. It includes awareness of one's predilections and vulnerabilities. [End Page 137] It includes awareness of alternative ways for conceptualizing that which is being encountered. Perception that thus "thinks alongside" artworks is a space in which the immediate response can be withheld, and aspects of one's visceral and gendered reaction can be reflected upon and made to signify.

Here is an example. The final chapter provides a close reading of Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. Zong was the name of a slave ship that, in 1781, was delayed on sea. Zong's captain then proceeded to drown 150 slaves. He calculated that by them drowning rather than starving, the insurer of the ship could be sued. The poems in Zong! re-presence (some) of the meanings of such commodification. Because the language was absencing people who were being drowned as property, the poetry must nudge words to their limits. In a striking reading of...