Interpretation, Intellect and Art
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Recently I was exposed, very intimately, to the works of Susan Sontag. Sontag was an American writer who wrote on many themes which I feel particularly drawn to; modernity, photography, critique of both, philosophy and society. You can read more about her online but for now, I would like to bring forward a text by her, which is really the epicenter of my brain storm for this letter.
Some thoughts that kick started this discussion (with myself, and now with you):
Why do we feel the urge to explain a piece of art? Do we respect something less because we find that it is not difficult? Do we have a reaction against easiness? As self proclaimed art praisers do we want to only dispense praise where there is less understanding?
These questions came up around the same time as my interaction with Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”, a collection of essays offering an intellectual back and forth about how we view art. A text I urge you to read for two main reasons: it is a sharp and witty critique on our ways of interacting with aesthetics, and because it is a literary delight to follow the workings of a brilliant mind whose opinions are as relevant today as they were 60 years ago. Following are some excerpts (in no particular order) from the essay, “Against Interpretation” which dampened my inquisitions above and were simply awesome to read:
“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.”
“To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience.”
“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 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.”
“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
Sustan Sontag from Peter Hujar archive, 1975
While Sontag refers to the postmodern itch to explain and speak in the ‘defense’ of art, I think we may now be in an era where we are detached and unbothered to defend, but also not willing to fully submerge ourselves in the dimensionality of the art in question. We are quick to snap, quick to post, quick to double tap—but beyond that, have we lost touch with the form and just been absorbed by the content? ‘Content’ here referring to a word that brings with it a prescription of “quickly consumed” or “to be forgotten easily”. In a world that lends so much (mostly false) sense of control, we cannot resist the allure of aloofness, the white space. We are so cluttered in our compartments of consciousness, our tactile environment and our social equations, that we are seduced by vagueness. Tempted to be vague about our analysis, play safe, not hold clear stances and lend ambiguity to an otherwise very decided society. Our desire to interpret is intercepted by our need to be accepted. As an audience, if we have become lazier, is our lack of intellectual defense proportional to the “steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience”? It’s possible that because our experience of receiving art has massively evolved (from public to private) and our mode of consumption is so far removed from how we historically interacted with art— we are reinventing our relationship to the discipline in entirely news ways. Ways in which maybe neither matter, the form nor the content—leaving art to be a fleeting experience of escapism, parody or ‘non-art’. This modality of consumption is just a broader reflection of how nuclear our experiences with art have become, and may continue to stay.
ON BARO MAG
The Body - Photoworks of the Human Form’ by William A. Ewing, 1997. “The Body navigates the shoals and rapids of an aesthetically and politically loaded topic, and manages not only to survive the journey but also to shed substantial light on how photographers have used the human figure for a variety of pictorial purposes through more than 150 years…”
A few interesting readings/watchings/listenings:
- From the archives of NYT, an interview with Susan Sontag on rise of photography in the 1970’s and how she felt about the audience becoming “lazier”
- Architectural writer and historian Shumi Bose talking about the damage done by the western gaze to oriental pieces of art/architecture/works. The deep eroticisation of ‘Thousand and One Nights’ and other interesting perspectives on curation and aesthetic consumerism
- A visual history of the Chandigarh Chair by Pierre Jeanneret
- Volume I of my playlist on Spotify
Till next month,
M
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