Books about Figuration from Amazon.com

In this highly original study of sexuality, desire, the body, and women,
Liz Wilson investigates first-millennium Buddhist notions of
spirituality. She argues that despite the marginal role women played in
monastic life, they occupied a very conspicuous place in Buddhist
hagiographic literature. In narratives used for the edification of
Buddhist monks, women's bodies in decay (diseased, dying, and after
death) served as a central object for meditation, inspiring spiritual
growth through sexual abstention and repulsion in the immediate world.

Taking up a set of universal concerns connected with the representation
of women, Wilson displays the pervasiveness of androcentrism in Buddhist
literature and practice. She also makes persuasive use of recent
historical work on the religious lives of women in medieval
Christianity, finding common ground in the role of miraculous
afflictions.

This lively and readable study brings provocative new tools and insights
to the study of women in religious life.

These essays—which consider a wide variety of cultures from ancient Egypt to contemporary Japan— describe the conditions under which cultures that do not dominate each other may yet achieve a limited translatability of cultures.

New Musical Figurations exemplifies a dramatically new
way of configuring jazz music and history By relating
biography to the cultural and musical contours of contemporary
American life, Ronald M. Radano observes jazz practice as part
of the complex interweaving of postmodern culture—a
culture that has eroded conventional categories defining jazz
and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by
analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton, one of the
most emblematic figures of this cultural crisis.

Born in 1945, Braxton is not only a virtuoso jazz
saxophonist but an innovative theoretician and composer of
experimental art music. His refusal to conform to the
conventions of official musical culture has helped unhinge
the very ideologies on which definitions of "jazz,"
"black music," "popular music," and "art music" are founded.

New Musical Figurations gives the richest view
available of this many-sided artist. Radano examines
Braxton's early years on the South Side of Chicago, whose
vibrant black musical legacy inspired him to explore new
avenues of expression. Here is the first detailed history of
Braxton's central role in the Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians, the principal musician-run institution
of free jazz in the United States. After leaving Chicago,
Braxton was active in Paris and New York, collaborating with
Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, and other
composers affiliated with the experimental-music movement.
From 1974 to 1981, he gained renown as a popular jazz
performer and recording artist. Since then he has taught at
Mills College and Wesleyan University, given lectures on his
theoretical musical system, and written works for chamber
groups as well as large, opera-scale pieces.

The neglect of radical, challenging figures like Braxton
in standard histories of jazz, Radano argues, mutes the
innovative voice of the African-American musical tradition.
Refreshingly free of technical jargon, New Musical Figurations
is more than just another variation on the same jazz theme.
Rather, it is an exploratory work as rich in theoretical
vision as it is in historical detail.

The traditional story of Renaissance painting is one of inexorable progress toward the exact representation of the real and visible. Georges Didi-Huberman disrupts this story with a new look—and a new way of looking—at the fifteenth-century painter Fra Angelico. In doing so, he alters our understanding of both early Renaissance art and the processes of art history.

A Florentine painter who took Dominican vows, Fra Angelico (1400-1455) approached his work as a largely theological project. For him, the problems of representing the unrepresentable, of portraying the divine and the spiritual, mitigated the more secular breakthroughs in imitative technique. Didi-Huberman explores Fra Angelico's solutions to these problems—his use of color to signal approaching visibility, of marble to recall Christ's tomb, of paint drippings to simulate (or stimulate) holy anointing. He shows how the painter employed emptiness, visual transformation, and displacement to give form to the mystery of faith.

In the work of Fra Angelico, an alternate strain of Renaissance painting emerges to challenge rather than reinforce verisimilitude. Didi-Huberman traces this disruptive impulse through theological writings and iconographic evidence and identifies a widespread tradition in Renaissance art that ranges from Giotto's break with Byzantine image-making well into the sixteenth century. He reveals how the techniques that served this ultimately religious impulse may have anticipated the more abstract characteristics of modern art, such as color fields, paint spatterings, and the absence of color.