Life as Trauma, Art as Therapy Peter Heinegg The Work of Art: Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life. By Michael Jackson, New York, NY: Columbia U.P., 2016. xvi + 235 pp. $40. Part memoir, part cri de coeur, part wide‐ranging meditation, this book has a simple thesis, but complex arguments. Jackson (Distinguished Professor of World Religions, HDS) begins from the broadest of bases, “the mysterious interplay between the world within and the world without,” and proceeds to examine “how material impoverishment, social injustice, and psychic wounds often undermine our capacity to live as we wish,” though they don't necessarily preclude our obviating or overcoming them through, among other things, the work of art, with “work” understood as, not a noun but (emphatically) as a verb. Jackson knows all about these painful “limiting conditions,” first of all from his many years of ethnographic fieldwork among oppressed native peoples in Aboriginal Australia and West Africa (northern Sierra Leone); secondarily from the tormented oeuvre of the artists he focuses on; suicides like Van Gogh and New Zealand painter Philip Clairmont, troubled souls like Edvard Munch, Australian painter Ian Fairweather, and Colin McCahon, another Kiwi (like Jackson himself) and perhaps his country's greatest painter, but whose life ended in alcoholism and dementia. Finally, Jackson's personal life seems overshadowed by the loss of his beloved wife Pauline, when he was in his early forties. Even memories of his mother Emily, who like most of his clan (and Jackson himself, for a time), was a painter, are darkened by the fact that she drew “accidented landscapes” because of unrelieved rheumatoid arthritis. But before proceeding to what Jackson makes of all this, it has to be noted that The Work of Art isn't really about “rethinking” Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), not in any straightforward way at least. Jackson says that, for all his sensitivity to his subjects, Durkheim (who never visited Australia) lapsed into describing them as “simple,” “archaic,” and “primitive”; and he stressed the old categories of community belief and ritual, thus tending toward “sociological reductionism,” while underplaying individual experience. Fair enough, but Jackson opts for a very broad “ascriptive” model that defines religion as “those experiences we decide to import into a box we have predesignated in this way or that scholarly consensus has agreed to label ‘religious’.” So “religion” could mean almost anything; and Jackson never suggests what implications his thought might have for such well‐trodden territory as Christian or Jewish creed, code, and cult. Artists, Jackson maintains, have a harder time than most people accepting the world as it is. (The same could be said about the Hebrew prophets.) This is not because they have a more skeptical turn of mind; but more likely due to some traumatic experience that broke “their trust that life will give one at least as much joy as grief, as much acceptance as rejection, and on balance be worth living.” (But then shouldn't there be billions of artists at work today? Or have we failed to perceive the medium they create in?) And so they set out to transform and transcend their painful disillusion. But even if their efforts succeed, there is a catch. “Great art,” in the end, amounts to “heroic failure.” (Is the same true of great liturgy?) In aiming to imitate nature, it can at best result in a “simulacrum of life.” In going beyond the particular to abstract generalization, it “risks gratuitous obscurantism.” (That charge applies much more readily to the jangled expressionism of Philip Clairmont's Staircase Night Triptych than to, say Guernica or older, more accessible classic works, such as Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked or Titian's Christ's Bearing the Cross (both of which Jackson reproduces here, along with the Clairmont). In a final irony, politically or spiritually revolutionary works like Goya's Third of May 1808 undermine themselves by becoming “institutionalized, marketed, revered” (even if not in the lifetime of the artist). But for all these “paradoxes and contradictions,” the show must go on because there's no substitute for it. Both art and religion, Jackson says, are similar to humbler everyday tasks like building a...
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Sep 1, 2017
Ken Feil 
Open Access