Ajanta caves mural, detail
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. ”…. Susan Sontag
This epigram led me to the full essay (1964).
Before discussing it, here’s my take on the above:
Interpretation should follow engagement ( your own, not somebody else’s), but it’s tricky because they occur nearly simultaneously from moment to moment. The artworks worth viewing must always be allowed to be their own strange, unknowable selves. They are beyond understanding - by you as well as the artist.
Revenge is a reactionary and shallow motivation - but this epigram does not say that “interpretation is merely revenge”, nor call it either useless, destructive, or avoidable.
The image shown above is one that continues to draw my attention and make me glad to be alive. It’s like an alluring, mysterious fragrance. Scholars tell us it presented a cautionary tale to the Buddhist monks for whom it was created. Beautiful women are demons in disguise. I am glad to know that - but it does not change how the image makes me feel. Haven’t desire and caution always shared the same bed?
Likewise with this ambivalence. Interpretation has been given great priority in our secular, scientific age. It needs to be disparaged until art institutions again require staff to be as astute in eye as in mind. But some humans will always want to interpret experiences that they find inexplicably compelling - and nothing is going to stop us. It’s too much fun.
(Here's a riotous example)
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Moving on to the full polemic
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Ronan Catholic gift store
The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.)
It's problematic to introduce this discussion with ab origine speculation. The languages of cave painters are utterly lost, No one will ever know whether they used a word like “art”.
If “art” refers to what we now call it, the institutional theory is most relevant. So the earliest experience of something as art could not have occurred before the opening of the first art museum. AI dates that to 1731 upon the Papal establishment of the Capitoline Museum in Rome.
Sontag’s 1964 essay predates that theory. She does not offer her own, but given emphasis to experience, so some notion of aesthetic must apply.
Above, I've posted a contemporary "instrument of ritual", a gift shop Madonna. Any chance of ever finding such things in an art museum ? Any chance that anyone actually wants to see it there? Its use as an object of religious devotion does depend upon a certain aesthetic - but who else would be interested in it just for that? It’s form is banal.
Why assume that ancient cave dwellers felt any differently about whatever artifacts they used? Both the banal and the aesthetically intense objects may have been just as effective for their rituals.
The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality. It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.
My first response was:
To say that art is mimetic is not to say that everything mimetic is art . It is not to claim that any degree of mimesis is a sufficient condition for art, or that some higher degree is necessary. So how is art being challenged?
But upon reflection:
I can’t find where any Greek philosopher asserted anything like “art is mimetic” - despite their interest in imitation.
Nor can I find where the distinction between art and not-art was addressed by the ancient Greeks- or anyone else before the 20th century. Art theory is a modern concern, provoked by an art market whose prices are driven more by the unexpected than anything else.
And in chapter 25 of the Poetics, Aristotle writes that faults of imitation are allowed “ if they serve the ends of poetry itself” - and he doesn’t limit what those might be.
Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to
rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material
things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or
structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an “imitation of
an imitation.” For Plato, art was not particularly useful (the painting of a
bed is no good to sleep on nor, in the strict sense, true. And Aristotle’s
arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all
art is an elaborate trompe l’oeil, and therefore a lie. But he does dispute
Plato’s idea that art is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according
to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all, Aristotle
counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous
emotions.
Plato advocated beauty to promote personal and social harmony ( as did Confucius a century earlier). It’s not clear that he had any other interest in mimesis other than forbidding certain kinds of representation.
Aristotle writes much about art, but the term includes every purposeful human activity. He proposes that the purpose of poetic tragic drama is to produce catharsis. But says little about all the various other kinds of literatures, music, and visual arts.
In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand
with the assumption that art is always figurative. But advocates of the
mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art.
The fallacy that art is necessarily a “realism” can be modified or scrapped
without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic
theory.
As when Aristotle proposes that music imitates emotions. The problem being, is there any way to identify those emotions other than by performing the piece ?
The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have
remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as
mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such—
above and beyond given works of art—becomes problematic, in need of
defense. And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by
which something we have learned to call “form” is separated off from
something we have learned to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned
move which makes content essential and form accessory.
As a counter example from the history of art criticism, here is a snippet from
Diderot’s 1765 critique
of a painting by Carle Van Loo:
….It seems to me that the temple, not being here a pure accessory, a simple background decoration, should have been given emphasis rather than depicted as such a paltry, impoverished structure. The iron bands traversing the doors are wide and make a fine effect. As for the Janus, he almost looks like two bad Egyptian figures joined together. Why flatten the saint of the day against the wall? The priest pulling the doors pulls them marvelously, his action, drapery, and characterization are all beautiful. I say the same of his neighbors; their heads are beautiful, painted in an idiom that's grand, simple, and true, their handling is virile and strong. If another artist would be capable of doing as well, I'd like to know who he is. The little urn-bearer is heavy-handed and perhaps superfluous.; The other child throwing flowers is charming, well conceived, and could hardly have been better posed; he tosses his flowers with grace, perhaps too much grace, he brings to mind Aurora shaking them from the tips of her fingers . As for your Augustus, Monsieur Van Lao, he's miserable. Wasn't there a single student in your studio who dared tell you he was stiff, ignoble, and short, that he was made up like an actress, that this red drapery in which you've decked him out offended the eyes and threw the painting out of kilter? This is an emperor? With the long palm he carries flush against his left shoulder, he's a member of the confraternity of Jerusalem returning from the [Palm Sunday] procession. And this priest I see behind him, what am I to make of his little casket and his foolish, embarrassed air? Or of this senator encumbered by his robe and his paper, his back turned to me, mere figural padding, the amplitude of whose lower drapery makes his upper portion seem thin and insubstantial? And what's the significance of the whole? Where's the interest? Where's the subject?
To close the temple of Janus is to announce a general peace throughout the Empire, an occasion for rejoicing, for celebration, and in examining this canvas I can't find the slightest indication of it. It's cold, it's insipid; everything is gloomy silence, dreadful sadness; it's the burial of a vestal virgin.
I will leave it to you, dear reader, to judge whether Diderot's interpretation of the “ Significance of the whole”, seems grounded on his aesthetic response. He feels no need to explicate it. You just look at the painting and know that its significance is nill. It's a dry and tedious pantomime.
So I disagree about what has made "content essential and form accessory." It's not 2500 years of Western Civilization. It's a hundred years of domination by those institutions of professional intellectuals of which Sontag was then about to leave.
Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded
the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory
of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory
persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture
(art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the
statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have
changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still
assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that
a work of art by definition says something. (“What X is saying is…,”
“What X is trying to say is…,” “What X said is…” etc., etc.)
Hear! Hear !
Ouch! It’s been sixty years since this essay was written, and we are indeed still "stuck with the task of defending art"
Or, at least, those who want to work in the big cultural instructions might feel that way.
There remains ongoing genres that need no defense: landscape, portrait, Western narrative, erotic
BAnd even some abstract painters - including my friend
Bruce Thorn . Here is his obligatory artist statement:
So maybe the future need not be so bleak after after all. Especially if outsiders come to agree with Sontag that the mainstream commercial/university artworld is never going to accept them , so they need to build their own.
This is the case, today, with the very idea of content itself. Whatever
it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a
hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism. Though the
actual developments in many arts may seem to be leading us away from
the idea that a work of art is primarily its content, the idea still exerts an
extraordinary hegemony. I want to suggest that this is because the idea is
now perpetuated in the guise of a certain way of encountering works of
art thoroughly ingrained among most people who take any of the arts
seriously. What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the
perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely,
it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that
sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work
of art.
Yes! The content that is spoken exists only as a gambit in discussion.
Of course, I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain “rules” of interpretation. Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really— or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?
I’m off the hook!
I’ve never done that in my reviews.
What situation could prompt this curious project for transforming a
text? History gives us the materials for an answer. Interpretation first
appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and
credibility of myth had been broken by the “realistic” view of the world
introduced by scientific enlightenment. Once the question that haunts
post-mythic consciousness—that of the seemliness of religious symbols—
had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer
acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient
texts to “modern” demands. Thus, the Stoics, to accord with their view
that the gods had to be moral, allegorized away the rude features of Zeus
and his boisterous clan in Homer’s epics. What Homer really designated
by the adultery of Zeus with Leto, they explained, was the union between
power and wisdom. In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the
literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms.
The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty
years, and the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an
allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations, and final
deliverance. Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the
clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to
resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has
become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a
radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious
to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or
rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims
to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However
far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the
Rabbinic and Christian “spiritual” interpretations of the clearly erotic
Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already
there.
Interpretation in our own time, however, is even more complex. For
the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted
not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an
aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for
appearances. The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful;
it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of
interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the
text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and
influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount
to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of
interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud’s
phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and
pushed aside to find the true meaning—the latent content beneath. For
Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of
individual lives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well
as texts (like a dream or a work of art)—all are treated as occasions for
interpretation. According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to
be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To
understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon,
in effect to find an equivalent for it.
This is directed at the academic profession Sontag would abandon the following year. But there are people who enjoy hermeneutics - and why shouldn’t they ? Whether it belongs in the education of young people is another question. Rather than introducing students to high culture, it seems to serve to innoculate them against it - offering the illusion that they already know all about it - so further engagement is not necessary.
Actually, most of the interpretations I find are less agressive. Indeed the artists, or their galleries, may offer it themselves. Growing up in a home drenched with high culture, I was taught to always look for myself - and that is basically what this entire blog is all about. Limitless images on the internet has made that more convenient than ever.
Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value,
a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities.
Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human
consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act.
It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In
other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling. _
4
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely
reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy
industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of
interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose
already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the
expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of
the intellect upon art.
Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To
interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a
shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world.
(“This world”! As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is
depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we
again experience more immediately what we have.
“Hypertrophy of the intellect” is another fine phrase. ( though I needed a dictionary to parse it)
I’m disappointed, however, with “ expense of energy and sensual capability” because it ignores a judgment of quality. Wish she had said “at the expense of aesthetics”- but perhaps that sounds too outdated.
5
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal
to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us
nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting
that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable,
comformable.
Wish she had said “real art has the capacity to make us joyful"
I don’t need to be any more nervous than I already am.
This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any
other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their
task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into
something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked
power of his art that he will install within the work itself—albeit with a
little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony—the clear and explicit
interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an
overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is
only too happy to perform the job.
Not sure how to identify when a novel includes a “clear and explicit interpretation” of itself. If you feel an obvious answer to “what does this novel mean?”, would that be an example?
The work of Kafka, for example, has been subjected to a mass
ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read
Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity
of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state.
Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate
revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense
of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka
as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access
to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable
and mysterious justice of God…. Another oeuvre that has attracted
interpreters like leeches is that of Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s delicate
dramas of the withdrawn consciousness—pared down to essentials, cut
off, often represented as physically immobilized—are read as a statement
about modern man’s alienation from meaning or from God, or as an
allegory of psychopathology.
Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Rilke, Lawrence, Gide…one could go on
citing author after author; the list is endless of those around whom thick
encrustations of interpretation have taken hold. But it should be noted
that interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to
genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is
applied to works of every quality. Thus, in the notes that Elia Kazan
published on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear
that, in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley
Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was
engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilization,
poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a
little the worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams’ forceful
psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about
something, about the decline of Western civilization. Apparently, were it
to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski
and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be
manageable.
I vaguely recall this kind of thing back in high school English class. Good students were supposed to repeat it back on tests.
6
It doesn’t matter whether artists intend, or don’t intend, for their works to
be interpreted. Perhaps Tennessee Williams thinks Streetcar is about what
Kazan thinks it to be about. It may be that Cocteau in The Blood of a Poet
and in Orpheus wanted the elaborate readings which have been given
these films, in terms of Freudian symbolism and social critique. But the
merit of these works certainly lies elsewhere than in their “meanings.”
Indeed, it is precisely to the extent that Williams’ plays and Cocteau’s
films do suggest these portentous meanings that they are defective, false,
contrived, lacking in conviction.
From interviews, it appears that Resnais and Robbe-Grillet
consciously designed Last Year at Marienbad to accommodate a
multiplicity of equally plausible interpretations. But the temptation to
interpret Marienbad should be resisted. What matters in Marienbad is the
pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its
rigorous if narrow solutions to certain problems of cinematic form.
She might well have said the same about “Cleo from 5 to 7” by Agnes Varda. I recently discovered it and was
stunned by its wealth of metaphor and symbol. Beginning with the title itself. Your experience of the whole would be lacking without knowing that “from 5 to 7” referred to the hours when French gentlemen visit their mistresses. Yet, it’s also true that the cinematic flavor of the moment (image, acting, and sound) is what connects me.
Again, Ingmar Bergman may have meant the tank rumbling down
the empty night street in The Silence as a phallic symbol. But if he did, it
was a foolish thought. (“Never trust the teller, trust the tale,” said
Lawrence.) Taken as a brute object, as an immediate sensory equivalent
for the mysterious abrupt armored happenings going on inside the hotel,
that sequence with the tank is the most striking moment in the film. Those
who reach for a Freudian interpretation of the tank are only expressing
their lack of response to what is there on the screen.
It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a
dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to
replace it by something else.
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art
is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article
for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
Sometimes I do need to query what certain elements of a story mean. Often, it seems imponderable. Like Melville writing Moby Dick. Was he just deeply puzzled by the beliefs and actions of people around him? Yet sometimes it feels obvious - like Isaac Bashevis Singer responding to the Holocaust with magical stories of crazy Jews. Sometimes it’s far removed from the consensus of opinion - as when
I propose that Season One of White Lotus came from Mike White’s frustration with Woke ideology. And I’m always asking why it’s a story I want to follow, never taking for granted that it’s worth the time.
In most films, the first few minutes convince me that queries, as well as further viewing, are pointless. It’s not a movie, it's a business plan - so I stop viewing. ( though 50 years ago I might have watched and hated a movie all the way to the bitter end, hoping it would turn around. That’s the incredible optimism of youth)
Interpretation does not, of course, always prevail. In fact, a great deal of today’s art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation. To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become (“merely”) decorative. Or it may become non-art. The flight from interpretation seems particularly a feature of modern painting. Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation. Pop Art works by the opposite means to the same result; using a content so blatant, so “what it is,” it, too, ends by being uninterpretable. A great deal of modern poetry as well, starting from the great experiments of French poetry (including the movement that is misleadingly called Symbolism) to put silence into poems and to reinstate the magic of the word, has escaped from the rough grip of interpretation. The most recent revolution in contemporary taste in poetry—the revolution that has deposed Eliot and elevated Pound—represents a turning away from content in poetry in the old sense, an impatience with what made modern poetry prey to the zeal of interpreters.
For I am speaking mainly of the situation in America, of course.
Interpretation runs rampant here in those arts with a feeble and negligible
avant-garde: fiction and the drama. Most American novelists and
playwrights are really either journalists or gentlemen sociologists and
psychologists. They are writing the literary equivalent of program music.
And so rudimentary, uninspired, and stagnant has been the sense of what
might be done with form in fiction and drama that even when the content
isn’t simply information, news, it is still peculiarly visible, handier, more
exposed. To the extent that novels and plays (in America), unlike poetry
and painting and music, don’t reflect any interesting concern with
changes in their form, these arts remain prone to assault by interpretation.
But programmatic avant-gardism—which has meant, mostly,
experiments with form at the expense of content—is not the only defense
against the infestation of art by interpretations. At least, I hope not. For
this would be to commit art to being perpetually on the run. (It also
perpetuates the very distinction between form and content which is,
ultimately, an illusion.) Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in
another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and
clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the
work can be…just what it is. Is this possible now? It does happen in films,
I believe. This is why cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most
important of all art forms right now. Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it, and still being good.
Oh no!
Sontag wants to replace interest in interpretation with how artworks “rreflect any interesting concern with changes in their form”. Sure can’t see how the one is any less reductive and tedious than the other. Rather than wanting an engaging, subjective response to total effect - she wants objective expertise in how it was achieved.
She was only 33 when she wrote this, and still teaching. Did she ever recant? Apparently not. The essay she wrote for it’s 30th anniversary edition does not mention this issue at all. She may have left the university, but the university never left her.
Some of Bergman’s films may feel lame and pseudo-intellectual. He was, after all, the son of an important Lutheran minister. He was preachy. His being that way, and Sontag’s critical reaction are both valid as far as I’m concerned. What’s more important is that his films can grab the moral imagination and won’t let go. If they don’t grab yours, no need to analyze the technology of his camera movements, just find something else that does.
8
What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today? For
I am not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be
described or paraphrased. They can be. The question is how. What would
criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?
The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that
dissolves considerations of content into those of form. On film, drama,
and painting respectively, I can think of Erwin Panofsky’s essay, “Style
and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” Northrop Frye’s essay “A
Conspectus of Dramatic Genres,” Pierre Francastel’s essay “The
Destruction of a Plastic Space.” Roland Barthes’ book On Racine and his
two essays on Robbe-Grillet are examples of formal analysis applied to
the work of a single author. (The best essays in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis,
like “The Scar of Odysseus,” are also of this type.) An example of formal
analysis applied simultaneously to genre and author is Walter Benjamin’s
essay, “The Story Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov.”
Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a
really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of
art. This seems even harder to do than formal analysis. Some of Manny
Farber’s film criticism, Dorothy Van Ghent’s essay “The Dickens World:
A View from Todgers’,” Randall Jarrell’s essay on Walt Whitman are
among the rare examples of what I mean. These are essays which reveal
the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.
What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive
stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended
and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is
a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for
forms.*
The best criticism is personal. It comes from someone you know, who also knows you - so you know where they’re coming from, and they know to whom they speak. Yet it also must be astute - based on experience and careful attention. Professional critics are not likely to know you - but hopefully they will aim at a similar audience.
I want a personal answer to “why is this important?” Whether they talk about form or content is up to them. In the visual arts, this kind of mentorship will not be found among the few professional art critics who still get published. They must endorse whatever big money has validated. But among part-time writers in small publications
exceptions do exist . I learn something from Dmitry Samarov every time I read him.
* One of the difficulties is that our idea of form is spatial (the Greek metaphors for
form are all derived from notions of space). This is why we have a more ready
vocabulary of forms for the spatial than for the temporal arts. The exception among
the temporal arts, of course, is the drama; perhaps this is because the drama is a
narrative (i.e., temporal) form that extends itself visually and pictorially, upon a
stage…. What we don’t have yet is a poetics of the novel, any clear notion of the
forms of narration. Perhaps film criticism will be the occasion of a breakthrough here,
since films are primarily a visual form, yet they are also a subdivision of literature.
Then maybe the temporal arts need a different word. Grasping something all at once (spatial “form”) is quite different from stringing together an ongoing memory. Some minds are good at both; many are not. Rather than a duality of form/content, perhaps we should have media/content. McLuhan famously pointed out that every medium has a message. But it’s too general and impersonal to be very interesting. Form and content are so much more passionately intertwined.
Found the Jarrell essay online, and it does indeed applaud the "sensual surface" of Whitman's diction without mucking about in meaning. An enticing anthology of choice phrases and fragments that make me want to read entire poems - where, God help me - I will still want to know what they mean in the context of Whitman’s life and world. A biographical essay would have better suited me.
9
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art-and in criticism-
today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in
itself, of things being what they are. This is the greatness of, for example,
the films of Bresson and Ozu and Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.
Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary
and creative move to design works of art so that they might be
experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of
redundancy that is the principal affliction of modem life.
Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have
been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it
is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art
into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.
Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for
granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now.
Certainly agree with that. Reading a poem is not as difficult as writing one - but still it's an intuitive skill that can never be done well enough. And it's not especially cultivated in educational institutions that favor an objective, scientific approach.
Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of
us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban
environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess,
on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory
experience. All the conditions of modem life-its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness-conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the
light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of
another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.
What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see
more, to hear more, to feel more.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of
art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already
there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of
art-and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us.
The problem for me is that surface without potent meaning is boring. Something important must be at stake in the work itself, not just my imagination.
The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it
is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Sontag wants critics to mediate between art and viewer. - but mediation is the job of an editor or curator who explicates words or customs which may be unfamiliar. What criticism can share is an enthusiasm based on experience and judgment.
10
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
A dramatic, memorable, and provocative way to end the essay - but all sizzle, no steak.
What might be an "erotics of art"? AI tells us "The "erotics of art" refers to the ways in which artists have historically and contemporarily used sexuality, nudity, and erotic themes as part of their creative expression. It encompasses both explicit depictions of sexual acts and aesthetic representations that evoke erotic feelings without showing overt nudity"
Hah!
BTW : Just realized that Sontag never mentions conceptual art in either film, painting, or sculpture.
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**************************THIRTY YEARS LATER
In this later essay, published with the 1996 edition, Sontag does not recant any earlier opinions.
But she does note a change in American culture - and it’s not s good one:
The world in which these essays were written no longer exists.
Instead of the utopian moment, we live in a time which is experienced as the end—more exactly, just past the end—of every ideal. (And therefore of culture: there is no possibility of true culture without altruism.) An illusion of the end, perhaps-and not more illusory than the conviction of thirty years ago that we were on the threshold of a great positive transformation of culture and society. No, not an illusion, I think.
It is not simply that The Sixties have been repudiated, and the dissident spirit quashed, even as these have become the object of intense nostalgia. The ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons. No recommendation exists outside a certain setting. The recommendations and enthusiasms expressed in the essays collected in Against Interpretation have become the possession of many people now. But so far as my views did, to a certain degree, triumph, it was not only because of the persuasiveness and success of my book. There was something in the time which was operating to make my views more acceptable, something of which I had no inkling-and, had I understood better my time, that time, call it by its decade-name if you want (I don't), would have made me more cautious. Something that it would not be an exaggeration to call a sea-change in the whole culture, a transvaluation of values—for which there are many names.
Barbarism is one name for what was taking over. Let's use Nietzsche's term: we had entered, really entered, the age of nihilism.
Well … that was 1996…. so Sontag missed the great polarization that came twenty years later. On the one hand, an idealistic meritocracy focused on racial and gender equality - on the other hand, the darkest nihilism the country has ever seen, shared by everyone who have other agendas.
Identity art did restore seriousness - but not wholeness - which may turn out to be more important to “true culture”, and a democratic society, than altruism.
