About the Author

Mark C. Taylor is professor of religion and chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His most recent book is After God, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"Death? Forget roses. A bone is a bone is a bone. Can you get more basic? Like stones, bones mean everything and nothing. Because they are speechless, they are eloquent. Because they are deader than dead, they are surprisingly alive. Sparse and dry like the desert bones of cattle filling this unique book, Mark Taylor's images join an art of nature to the art in nature, thanks to the captions the bones emit like hardened chips of themselves. Death? Bones like this gives us mortals the grip we need to deal."--Michael Taussig, Columbia University

"Like the desert in which they were found, Mark Taylor's Mystic Bones hover between abstraction and figuration. Considering Taylor's moving photographic and written meditation on bones through art, philosophy, and religion, we may divine our own understanding of the creative space between death and life."--Michael Govan, Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"Natural forms have always had their allure for artists. But skulls and bones have an added mystique of life and death close to home. I must admit I've looked at bones and even emulated the horse skull or my fantasy of it in the conference room of the DZ Bank of Berlin. It was an intuitive expression, not an intentional one, and I only recognized it after the fact. What mystical process led me there, Mark Taylor might speculate on that. His book leads from the religious and mystic to the spiritual and aesthetic. His insights give depth and reason to the ephemeral subject and may open some doors for us form givers to walk through."--Frank Gehry