Barry Schwabsky : Vitamin P 2002 - Introduction

 

I regard material experimentation as inherently conceptual, meaning that painting, too, is capable of manifesting its own signs. This is to say it is capable of producing meaning from within, not as merely 'process' but as embodied thinking. This position is held neither to reassert the pre-eminence of painting nor to avow its uniqueness, but to claim that painting has become more, rather than less, viable after conceptual art, as an option for giving idea form and hence for differentiating it from other possibilities. As American writer Glenn O'Brien humorously put it in form and hence for differentiating it from other possibilities. As American writer Glenn O'Brien humorously put it in conversation with Albert Ohlen and Christopher Wool: 'Why are all the conceptual artists painting now? Because it's a good idea”….Suzanne Hudson,

American Painting has yet to recover from the mid century onslaught of conceptual art. Its demise may have been exaggerated, but there remains a “ highly charged territorial conflict between them-at least at the administrative level of the art bureaucracy.”

So that was the topic of Barry Schwabsky’s essay as discussed below - and it was also addressed 20 years later by Suzanne Hudson, as shown above, in the introduction to her 2022 survey of contemporary painting.

As Hudson concludes : “Painting is a good idea”.  But it’s also a very, very old one, and while conceptual art has many histories, it’s hard to find any surveys of contemporary practice. Who would be interested in buying a book that’s outdated the moment it's printed?

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Vitamin P : New Perspectives in Painting, 2002 

Introduction by  Barry Schwabsky

 I Painting as Art

One often hears it said these days that contemporary painting-or at least contemporary painting of any significance-is essentially conceptual. But what does that mean? The title of this section echoes the title of a book by the English philosopher and critic Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, but notice the difference between them: The implicit distinction between painting as art and painting as an art refers to a possible distinction "art" in general on the one hand and the various fine arts, of which painting would be one, on the other. So it refers to the question that the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy posed at the beginning of his recent book The Muses: "Why are there several arts and not just one?" 

Ominous that the introductory essay in the entire Vitamin P series should query whether it still makes sense to assemble pieces of “art” that are restricted to the conventional components of painting ( paint stuck to a firm rectangular surface hung vertically and parallel  to the horizon) .  It’s a traditional practice whose expiration date may have already passed  wherever  “new perspectives” are being sought.

Or to put it another way, why-above all today-do we need a book about painting and not simply a book about art? After all, as long ago as the late 1950s certain artists, as Thierry de Duve has put it, felt it necessary "to produce generic art, that is, art that has severed its ties with the specific crafts and traditions of either painting or sculpture. "2 The artists who began producing Happenings and environments" around the end of the 1950s (Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Red Grooms, Robert whitman, etc.) were among the first of these, soon to be followed by the practitioners of Minimalism and Conceptual Art (Donald Judd and Joseph Kosuth, among others); but today this desire for an art not limited to any particular métier or medium has become general. This can be seen, for instance, in the fact that fewer and fewer art schools require their students to enroll in departments of painting, sculpture, or printmaking; in the new "deskilled" academy, there is typically one overarching department of, say, visual arts, whose students are expected to apply ad hoc whichever techniques happen to be most appropriate to a given project. In order to understand the situation of painting today, it is important to look to the late 1950s and 1960s, when art was redefined. But we should not overlook what gives painting its specific importance to art in general-its engagement, not so much with the eye as is sometimes thought, but with the body of both the maker and the viewer. 

‘Engagement with the body” hardly relates to anything other than action painting or East Asian brush painting.  Not surprising that Schwabsky never mentions it again.

But without that - well - what might be the specific importance of painting - with its unique limitations and opportunities -  to art in general?

If the purpose of Art is to sanctify human life,  painting can sanctify visions, sculpture can sanctify space, music can sanctify feelings, and so forth. But that discussion is for another place, and another kind of artworld.

But even before the 1950s, the project of a more "generic" art had already been inherent in abstraction, though it may be that only a few artists-Alexander Rodchenko and perhaps Piet Mondrian among them-had quite realized its implications. After all, abstract art was supposed to lay bare the structures underlying all art-formal structures, to be sure, but more important, what might be called structures of desire. Abstract painting made manifest the desire for painting in as general and as "naked" a form as possible. revealed that all painting worthy of the name had already been essentially abstract, though unconsciously so. We are used to hearing that Modernism-the period from Impressionism through abstraction to Conceptual Art-was imbued with the idea of progress. If abstract painting represented a kind of progress, it was essentially in the form of consciousness-but consciousness of something that was always inherent in painting. 

‘Laying bare the underlying structures” is the conventional approach to understanding modern painting - and I agree the structures of desire are more important.  But have any iconic painters in the modern tradition desired a form independent of whatever feelings it may have provoked?  I suppose Rodchenko might have un-felt that way about his color squares.  But thank God, he and analytic Cubism  are exceptions. Modern art would certainly be boring if they were typical.

Thus, Clement Greenberg, the theoretician of Abstract Expressionism, once noted that one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture, " whereas one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first. " But what starts out as a simple descriptive difference turns out to be something more: The Modernist way of seeing, he says, is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist." In other words, Modernism took what was already implicit in classical painting and made it explicit. that is, brought it to a more articulate point of self-consciousness.

And what have we gained through such articulate self consciousness? A pat on the back for being so hip or well educated?  While ignoring, as Schwabsky does , the importance of what paintings can express.

 An even more aggressive version of this position was taken by Ad Reinhardt, for instance, who asserted that abstract painting such as his own was "the first truly unmannered and untrammeled and unentangled, styleless, universal painting." 

Well spoken, Ad Reinhardt ….. but who wants to look at your  paintings more than once?

Art for art’s sake requires  a “generic art” ideology for validation. Which does not make it any better or worse to look at.

And yet, of course, abstract painting was not only more abstract, more general than other painting; it was at the same time, and by contrast, a specific kind of painting, one type among many others -an addition to the vocabulary of painting and not necessarily a revelation of painting at its best or most basic. The fact that abstraction keeps turning into something in particular-a genre like still life, landscape, or history painting-reveals its failure to connunicate the essence of all painting. That project, that generalization of painting, could not be fulfilled within painting. 

 Which brings us back to Happenings, Minimalism, and Conceptual art.  In retrospect these movements, especially the last, can be seen as attempts to attain sonething that would be even more abstract and generalized-more "nothing in particular"-than abstract art. And like abstraction, they turn out to have failed at this totalizing project. Even Conceptual Art has become just one more genre among the many that constitute art. Abstraction benefited for a long time from the elan of its own unfulfilled ambitions; at least for a couple of generations, abstract painting really was where the great drama of art was being most decisively played out. As a result, representational painters and sculptors found themselves in a defensive position that often had a genuinely narrowing effect on their art. Similarly, today Conceptual Art (in the broadest sense) and its various successors retain a residual prestige that comes not only from ite relative recentness as a genre, but also from its original assumption of triumphal progress, the sunnation of all art, inherited from abstraction. 

All of the above is both credible and sad - and it does hint at why  postwar American figure sculpture was so bad: it was over styled  to look abstract for no good reason.

“The great drama of Art” is that a handful of easily accessible materials can summon mankind’s greatest aspirations.  It’s not  calling any unlikely thing “Art”.

When Kosuth wrote in 1969 that all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only existe conceptually, " he must have meant to say that almost all so-called art was really not art at all, because only his own and a very few other people's work qualified in his judgment as truly and self-consciously conceptual. But Kosuth's words turned out to be true in a way that may be the opposite of what he intended. Just as abstract art revealed that art had always been, in a way. essentially abstract, so Conceptual Art revealed (or rather reiterated, since it is an old ides going back as least as far as Leonardo da Vinci's observation that painting is "una cose mentale") that all art is conceptual, painting included.

I''d leave Leonardo out of this. Form is a mental thing as well.  Thinking need not be restricted to the verbal.

But I agree that every thing can be conceptual if you choose to think about it that way.  And there is no limit to how complex or profound those concepts might be.  Which is why conceptual art is only identified as such by institutional recognition.

Where does that leave painting? As Conceptual Art, only less so? As Conceptual Art using Ironically retrograde means? Or does painting still have specific capacities of ite own to discover and exploit? Is painting art? Or is painting an art? 

It’s also sad that Schwabsky feels he must ask these questions.  As if a painting's looks could not be sufficient for some kind of  discovery

II.  Painting after Modernism

We do not need to be able to define Modernism exactly to know that painting was terribly important to it. Sonetines not painting could be terribly important too, as it was for Marcel Duchamp, nost obviously. And sometimes Modernism rejected the past-as when the Futurists urged to "destroy the museums"-but more often it was about revising the past. 

Schwabsky is cautious about asserting that “Modernism” exists independently of those who use the word, but not cautious enough.  

While there is some dispute whether Duchamps should be called a modernist, he himself did not think so.

Painting, not painting, and what to do with the past- those problems are still with us today. In some ways they have becone more urgent. for instance, now that not painting is no longer a rebellious gesture against an art discourse primarily defined by painting, but rather sonething approaching a fully institutionalized practice - highly charged territorial conflict has arisen between them-at least at the administrative level of the art bureaucracy. 

This essay on behalf of painting participates in that territorial conflict - even if it is of no consequence outside the “art bureaucracy” who run art museums.

But in other ways, these problems have become softer, less politicized. An artist such as karen Kilinnik could make her name with "scatter art” installations and then switch to painting with none of the agony a Modernist like Philip Guston faced when he nade the transition from abstraction to representation within painting back in the late 1960s. Guston's actione were seen by some of hie best friende as a betrayal. Such strict adherence to positions taken is no longer required of serious artists. 

Not sure that the dispute was ever about anything other than authority.  Also doubt that such disputes are avoidable.

So there are two reasons that talking about today's painting means seeing it against the background of Modernist painting: One is that the situations of the two seen remarkably similar, and the other in that they seem so distinct as to be almost incomparable. If deepening self-consciousness is the only form of progress that could have credibly placed abstract painting beyond representation, or Conceptual Art beyond abstraction, here too the distinction may be best imagined as a difference in consciousness. Put another way, today' painting is not necessarily more conscious than Modernist painting, but it is conscious of different things. 

In the above, Schwabsky begins writing about “deepening self-consciousness” as a potential form of progress…... and  then switches over to “conscious of different things”. (instead of "self-conscious of different things"). Not sure what to make of this.  Was it a clerical error?  

Mondrian painted flowere alongside his abstractions, but these two strains in his work are not exhibited side by side. (The flowers were excluded, for instance, from the 1995 Mondrian retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New vork.) And now co underscand che late represento" tional paintings by Russian avant-gardista like Kasimir Malevich and Viadimir Tatlin renains difficult. Do they represent a true renunciation of abstraction or merely a pitiable though understandable submission to the realities of survival under Stalinism? The question is vital for the reception of their entire oeuvre. By contrast, no one sees a contradiction between Gerhard Richter's photo-realist paintinge and his abstractions. Each needs to be looked at in a somewhat different way, but there is no longer any question, as Greenberg once thought, of determining the "best way" of seeing any painting. Today It would more likely be thought that neither way of looking is sufficiently powerful or all-encompassing to take in all possible pictorial effects-a sort of aesthetic equivalent to Godel's theorem of undecidability and incompleteness, which showed that no one set of axions could solve all mathematical problems.

Godel’s theorem makes my eyes glaze over - but yes, the aesthetic equivalent does make sense.  I do feel  that there’s a way of looking that can relate to everything so long as it ignores context. But it’s only a feeling - completely intuitive - so outside the logic of  Godel’s  theory.

I remember a Richter exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago about 30 years ago, and was indeed surprised that it included photo realist landscape as well as completely non-representational smooshes of thick paint.  But both did seem to say: “ nothing matters, and what if it did?”

III. PAINTING NOW

“There are two problems in painting," a young but already notorious Frank Stella once told an audience of art students. "One is to find out what painting is, and the other is to find out how to make a painting”  One of the possible distinctions between Modern and what we all seem to have agreed to call contemporary (rather than Post-modern) art would be to say that Modernist painting was more urgently concerned with what painting is. In general it was thought that if one could come to a clear sense of what it is, it would already supply or at least inply the answer-one might even say, the formula-for how to make it. Anything like virtuosity for its own sake would only hamper the complete realization of the defining conception. That is why Greenberg could say, for example, that “the onlooker who says his child could paint a Newman may be right but Newman would have to be there to tell the child exactly what to do.- 

Yes - we do have  Stella, Newman, and Greenberg “concerned with what painting is”. 

But we also have that seminal text in the Modernist canon, Kandinsky’s “Spirituality in art” which prioritizes something to express - and most of the iconic Modern artists would seem to share that concern.

Today, on the evidence of the most interesting work being done, the question of what painting is - the fundamental question for Newman, Lucio Fontana, Robert Ryman, and Daniel Buren - has been demoted to the secondary status once held by the problem of making. Today it seems that artists are more concerned with how to make a painting -  again, this comes out in the obsession with style I mentioned earlier - or sometimes with how to use the materials, methods, concepts, or traditions of painting to make a work that should not necessarily be called a painting. What it is will then emerge from how it is. 

Shouldn’t "how it is"   follow "how it looks"?  Why care about how something was made unless compelled by how it looks - and what that might mean.

Painters are merely the first onlookers of their own work. A thoroughly Duchampian view would say that is all they can significantly be, the fundamental artistic act being contained in the contemplative act of choice. A number of the painters whose works are included here would probably agree, for instance Hong Seung-Hye, whose paintings are industrially fabricated, or Francis Alys . who commissions some of his work from artisan sign painters. But the painters who are involved in making work by hand, through the preliminary act of choosing to enter actively into the productive process-implicitly asserts that there is more involved in art than choice or, at least, that there is something more to choice than what Marcel Duchaap and his artistic progeny imagine. (The choice to make art in this way as opposed to another is probably no more a real choice than what has become known as "sexual choice, "an analogy based on so much of the work itself. particularly that of Marlene Dunas and Ghada Aner, among others, bridging aesthetic Investment and sexual desire. Although this personal investment in the activity of forming the object can no longer be part of the definition of art, the specific contribution that painting can nake to artistic thought more generally is probably related to the value of this choice to enter a realm beyond nere choice. That is, it has to do with this cultivation of the tactile dimension of things, of a plastic relation to materials that (because of the potential this relation offers for continual feedback between matter and sensation) is also a proprioceptive activity-to the indirect benefit of the viewer who partakes of this relation only imaginatively. though as vividly as possible. For the viewer, painting is a noun: the finished object we see. For the painters it can also be a verb: the activity in which they are engaged. When painters succeed in evoking and disclosing painting-the-verb within painting-the-noun, as many of those in this book do (Suzanne Mcclelland being an particularly clear example), they offer the rest of us a rare I gift. 

Every day, millions of toddlers make paintings  that evoke the fact they were painted - so it’s hard to accept this as important criteria.

If Modernism was, as I've said, an advance in consciousness-and if Conceptual Art likewise represented an advance in consciousness within Modernism-then we can never go back to seeing what is in a painting before seeing it as a painting. Even (or rather especially) the most apparently traditional painters you'll see in Including those like John Currin or Lisa Yuskavage whose work may seem at times downright provocatively retrograde, depend on this assumption. Their paintings, like most of the work here, are always reflexIvely concerned with their own status as paintings. They are paintings, yes, but also allegories of painting. 

Actually - Schwabsky first wrote that Modernism was an advance in “self-consciousness” — so apparently he believes that self-consciousness and consciousness are one and the same.

The current canonical narrative of art history does seem premised on advancing consciousness - making it something like a religious catechism - an article of faith - which apparently a Schwabsky shares.

Needless to say - all do not.  I think of it as more like a selling point than a serious insight into human spirituality.

IV Painting where?

 Once, art historical narratives were organized by "schools"; although the notion persisted into the Modernist era (Ecole de Paris, New York School), a new historical unit, the "movement" (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism). eclipsed it. But today an introduction to contemporary painting no longer forms a chapter in the chronicle of successive movements any more than it charts a geography of adjacent schools. Positions are now multiple, simultaneous and decentered. 

The ongoing practice of Chicago Imagism being one exception - as well the West African figure painting now showing up at Art  Expo Chicago. Im sure there are many, many more  across the planet. The world is much larger than the artworld. 

It is no longer possible to presume to know all that is going on in painting. There are too many hidden corners. Even in the carly to mid-1980s, it was still possible to imagine that painting, not in its eternal essence. perhaps, but in its present being, was this as opposed to that. This sense of certainty had apparently been the case for a long time. In his nemoirs, Alex katz, for instance, recalls that as a young painter in New York in the early 1950s, all serious painting was white and black. "You weren't 'allowed to use color," he wrote, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically. Then after a big Bonnard show in 1953, "suddenly everyone was using color, "Thirty years later painting could not be categorized as a certain palette and not another-this aspect was ad libitum-but it seemed pretty clear that painting was figurative, for instance, rather than abstract, impulsive rather than systematic. But it used a space that was not naturalistic. Some people thought of it as expressionist, or neo-expressionist. Or as an expression of a minority taste, painting might even be abstract-a painter like Jonathan Lasker had his admirers already-but hardly geometrical or "minimal, - which signified tired and academic. (Just as in the 1960s,  by contrast, anything that smacked of lyricism or impulsiveness tended to seem boring, epigonal, provincial) Sure, established painters may still have been working away in such modes (Marden, Ryan, etc.). just as there were still realists of one sort or another (Philip Pearistein, Neil Welliver), but there seemed to be little room for new arrivals at either of those inns. 

Wow - never heard of Welliver, a landscapist who recalls Courbet and Rockwell Kent. I agree that “ It is no longer possible to presume to know all that is going on in painting”, though I doubt it ever was.

On the face of it, today there is no consistent look, - no particular method, style, material, subject, or theme that identifies a painting as credibly  contemporary  - or that disqualifies it from consideration as such.

If this means that consciousness is advancing simultaneously in all directions, then might we allow it to happen outside the studios of recognized artists?

So in perusing the pages that follow you will not be surprised to find paintings that might be immediately identified as abstract, whether geometrical, bionorphic, or gestural; or as realist, symbolist, surreal, expres sionist, narrative, and so on - however nuch one will want to qualify such rough and hasty characterizations after closer acquaintance with the work itself. Why not paint with embroidery (Aner) or elephant dung (ofill) just as well as with oil or acrylic? There are paintings that would have been accepted as such by our great-grandparents and work that ignores almost every convention, however nominal, of traditional painting: worke without inages, without drawingc, or without color. Others eschew the material basics- stretchere, canvas, paint, or the employment of the artist's hand. At the limit, it becomes fascinatingly difficult to tell what counts as painting and what doesn't- as Stephen Melville has recently pointed out. 

How certain things look fascinates me - but not whether to classify them as  paintings.  That is the job of a taxonomist.

Nor does one know where painting comes from. It is no great simplification to say that in the nineteenth century, great painting was made in Paris; or the decades following world war II, the preeminence granted New York may be exaggerated but, at its base, reflect a certain truth. 

But it truly is an oversimplification to say that in the nineteenth century, great painting was made in Paris;— just as an Art History 101 textbook might do.

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 The earlier question about whether today's painting is or is not cut off from the traditions of the European masters was seriously misleading; the question should rather be to what extent it is or is not cut off from European, East Asian, North African, or any other tradition. Artists appreciate the art of the museums but seem disinclined to worship it. The museum is not a binding institution; it is even a liberating one, insofar as it now equates many obviously unlike things (Kwakiutl masks, Impressionist paintings, Egyptian mummies, celadon pots, Empire gowns, medieval armor, Dogon ladders, Northern Renaissance altarpieces, Chinese scrolls, video installations, Roman copies of Greek marbles) and therefore exalts the potential value of almost any artifact. 

This is the application of institutional theory:  Art is whatever’s found in an Art Museum - with no other requirement.   Wonder why he felt the need for an “almost” before the “any artifact”. What might possibly be an exception?  

Those of us educated entirely in the West may be at a certain disadvantage for appreciating this multiplicity; our complacent engagement with the most familiar traditions-even where we imagine that engagement to be a critical one-may blind us to important aspects of art whose sources are more distant. We are too quick to affect the typical blasé attitude of a cosmopolitan inspecting the efforts of a provincial: very nice, but it's all been done before-the kind of attitude that led the outstanding English critic of his generation, on seeing his first Jackson Pollock painting, to dismiss it as an immature rehash of Wols and Raoul Ubac. 

If pioneering innovation is important in evaluation (cf. “New Perspectives” in the title of this book)   the critic was quite right to suggest Wols as a precursor to Pollock.  They are, of course, different - but so are contemporary Impressionists from Monet and Sisley.

What at first seems familiar may have different sources and a far wider compass than one had imagined. How can one fulfill the task of the critic-which is just to say, perhaps, the dedicated viewer-when the range of traditions and references that artists are likely to call on extends so far beyond what a single individual can know? When is it acceptable to be not just unfamiliar with what an artist is referring to, but unaware of my own ignorance? Perhaps never, or perhaps only when one accepts art's gift of openness and painting's invitation to direct experience. ………Barry Schwabsky  

Two thumbs up for “direct experience”, but it’s only mentioned here at the very end of the essay. Typically, that’s an aesthetic approach, while Schwabsky’s concerns here have been  more conceptual.  Witness  the Rodchenko color swabs placed at the very  beginning,   immediately followed by a theoretical concern for whether “painting is art”.

The artists included in this survey were nominated by 80 international artists, curators, and critics - but the actual selections were made by Schwabsky himself - so it's curious that he really had nothing to say about his criteria.  Did those chosen need to have had solo shows in important American or European galleries or museums?  Did they need to please him personally?  Was he aiming for the widest variety?  Did they need to stand out for being different as much as better ?  Did they need to observe the conventions of American museums of contemporary art ?  ( for example: no classical realism or traditional Asian brush painting or any religious subject matter)

I haven't gone through the list yet - but I'm guessing that Schwabsky's priorities will be artworld conventional for that time , and since Kerry Marshall is absent, it appears that racial identity art had not yet risen to the top, so his interests will be linguistic and ontological:  art about art. 

I will return to this post after all the artists have been viewed. 

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Below are the images that accompanied the essay.

Alexander Rodchenko, Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color, 1921, Oil on canvas, triptych, each panel: 24 5/8 × 20 11/16 inches, 62.5 x 52.5 cm, Coll. A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow

A Constructivist icon in art history,

but kinda boring, wouldn't  you say?

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1968

(One chair, one photo reproduction, one dictionary definition)

Why is this in a book about painting?

Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting #34, 1964, 60” x 60”

Jonathan Lasker, Oddness Factor, 1985,  59 x 71”

Gerhard Richter,, Lilien 870-1, 2000, 27 x 32”

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, 873-75, 2001,  79 x 71”

Kazimir Malevich, untitled, 1916, 21x 21, oil on canvas

Kazimir  Malevich, Woman Worker, 1933, 28 x 71

Susan Sontag : Against Interpretation

 

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 gives 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 !

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense. Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice. 

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

B

And even some abstract painters -  including my friend Bruce Thorn .  Here is his  obligatory artist statement:

Bruce Thorn's paintings present improvisational abstractions derived from commonly shared experiences and natural phenomena. Using traditional materials and techniques, each work offers endless interpretation, engagement, mystery and drama, pulsating with positive energy

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.

 For example, a few of the films of Bergman—though crammed with lame messages about the modern spirit, thereby inviting interpretations—still triumph over the pretentious intentions of their director. In Winter Light and The Silence, the beauty and visual sophistication of the images subvert before our eyes the callow pseudo- intellectuality of the story and some of the dialogue. (The most remarkable instance of this sort of discrepancy is the work of D. W. Griffith.) In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. Many old Hollywood films, like those of Cukor, Walsh, Hawks, and countless other directors, have this liberating anti- symbolic quality, no less than the best work of the new European directors, like Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim, Godard’s Breathless and Vivre Sa Vie, Antonioni’s L’Avventura, and Olmi’s The Fiancés. The fact that films have not been overrun by interpreters is in part due simply to the newness of cinema as an art. It also owes to the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds. Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyze. For the cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms—the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of a film. 

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? 

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.

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. 

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.

************************

****************************

**************************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 two poles of distinctively modern sentiment—of course they have a reciprocal relation—are nostalgia and "utopia." Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the time now labeled The Sixties was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian moment. 

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.

What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this) is that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, “unrealistic,” to most people; and when allowed, as an arbitrary decision of temperament, probably unhealthy, too.

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.