ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book talks about art and animals, and it includes history and philosophy, but it is not a traditional social history of the art discussed, nor a history of human-animal relationships, or philosophical tract. It includes a collection of essays to show how humans' experiences with art enliven human awareness of being and beings, the relationship to phenomena, and caring reciprocity with Earth. The book discusses the presence and absence; awareness and veiling; sight and insight; the existential questioning of all the stuff in the chaos of the world. This aesthetic of reception is the dialogue between work and viewer where each is contingent to the other— through the interplay of presence/absence, awareness/veiling, and the awareness of looking. The book presents something like the connective energy Beuys thought flows through time and space.
