Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Most of the interesting art of our time is boring. Jasper Johns is boring. Beckett is boring, Robbe-Grillet is boring. Etc. Etc. Maybe art has to be boring, now. (Which obviously doesn’t mean that boring art is necessarily good—obviously.) We should not expect art to entertain or divert any more. At least, not high art.53

  Flag’s uninterestingness and illegibility made it irresistible to critics, who plastered it with the very interpretations it deliberately thwarted. They posed a classic question—a classical question, indeed: derived from Plato—that animated much of the art of the day: Was Flag a flag, or was it simply the image of a flag? Johns answered that it was both. With that, he addressed a question that had preoccupied philosophers for centuries: Could a thing be both itself and a symbol of itself?

  In later years, he would paint objects whose contents were deliberately obscured—books that could not be opened, newspapers that could not be read, canvases with their backs turned toward the viewer—all hinting at some unknowable meaning. In lieu of that content, viewers projected their own interpretations onto them, which could be neither confirmed nor denied. In this case as in so many others, the questions (Can language and metaphor be transcended?) were far richer than the answers (So that’s what’s on the second page of that newspaper!).

  But the answers meant a possibility of making art that might overcome the divisions postulated by the gnostics. Such art, as in the performance Susan witnessed of Medea, could dissolve the boundary between art and life, mind and body, image of self and self.

  * * *

  In the 1950s, when he was producing these works, Johns’s lover was Robert Rauschenberg, who made his name with vast “empty” paintings. One was all black, another all white. John Cage, who, with his partner, Merce Cunningham, completed this circle of young artists, responded to them with his famous piece of 1952, 4'33"—four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. He described Rauschenberg’s monochromes as “‘landing strips’ for dust motes, light and shadow.”54 But dust motes, light and shadow, were not the only things that could land on such tabulae rasae. Interpretations, too, could be cast upon their apparently closed surfaces. And Johns appreciated Susan’s.

  “I don’t think I could have easily connected my feelings about my work to the Supremes,” Johns said. “Her ability to make such connections was very attractive.”55 In her journal, she wrote that the “Feeling (sensation) of a Jasper Johns painting or object might be like that of The Supremes.”56 A version of this line appeared in her essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility”:

  If art is understood as a form of discipline of the feelings and a programming of sensations, then the feeling (or sensation) given off by a Rauschenberg painting might be like that of a song by the Supremes. The brio and elegance of Budd Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond or the singing style of Dionne Warwick can be appreciated as a complex and pleasurable event. They are experienced without condescension.57

  This dry passage set off disproportional reactions. “The lady swings,” Benjamin DeMott exclaimed, with mingled admiration and mockery, in The New York Times Book Review. “She digs the Supremes and is savvy about Camp. She catches the major Happenings and the best of the kinky flicks. . . .”58 The mention of the Supremes would be wielded against her for decades, as an illustration of her enmity toward high culture (“The Supremes, for Christ’s sake?” gasped Norman Podhoretz) and as an illustration of a supposed hipness she later abandoned. Twenty-seven years later, her friend Larry McMurtry defended her against an attack:

  She occasionally says that she likes rock music, and it’s also true that in “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” an essay published in 1965, she speaks appreciatively of Dionne Warwick and the Supremes, but does this constitute an “interest” that she can be said to have “dropped,” if indeed she’s dropped it? Perhaps she still likes the Supremes.59

  If Johns was attracted to Susan’s ability to make these connections, they rubbed many people the wrong way. What later became known as Cultural Studies was then in its infancy, and examinations of the difficult relationship between commercial art and high art were often seen as “leveling.” But between the Warhol idea of no interpretation and the Johns idea of no possible interpretation, Susan Sontag would soon come up with an even more attractive idea: of being against interpretation.

  * * *

  In Johns, Susan found the same characteristic that she often appreciated in men: he was a master—a teacher, like Hutchins at Chicago, who could give her the “right way.” Stephen Koch said that

  Jasper is as dominating, as egotistic, as ready to assume that anyone around him is going to take a secondary position, as the most besotted heterosexual alpha male who ever lived. So it’s not like she found in Jasper the sensitive man that would let her flourish as the dominating personality. That wasn’t it at all. She was very aware that Jasper never conceded anything but first place. That turned her on.60

  Susan’s desire to submit to superior influences was surely more important than whatever erotic dynamic bound them. Because Johns was a man, Susan could be in his thrall intellectually and artistically while remaining emotionally insulated. Her journals record none of the hand-wringing that makes it so agonizing to read about her relationships with women. When Jasper dumped her, he did so in a way that would have devastated almost anyone. He invited her to a New Year’s Eve party and then left, without a word, with another woman. The incident goes unmentioned in her journals.61

  The brief relationship had a practical legacy. He left her the lease on his penthouse at 340 Riverside Drive, on the corner of 106th Street. All bright sunlight, wide terraces, and broad views, it would have been entirely unaffordable for a later generation of writers with Sontag’s income; but in the scruffy city of those years, the rent was reasonable, and when Johns moved out, Susan moved in. There was just one drawback. Johns had created elaborate preliminary sketches for his paintings directly on the walls. The apartment was littered with these drawings, and the new tenant had to decide what to do with them. Choosing the simplest option, she had them painted over.62

  Chapter 17

  God Bless America

  Three emblematic figures of the sixties—Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns—offered Susan new ways of looking, and of understanding what she saw. But Against Interpretation, published in January 1966, her own reflection on what we do with what we see, was dedicated to a fourth artist, Paul Thek, whom she called, after his death, “the most important person in my life.”1

  Today, the works of Cornell, Warhol, and Johns sell for tens of millions. Thek’s do not. His sculptures of raw meat and severed body parts, reeking of chthonic sacrifice, destined him to minority status. But if connoisseurs like Sontag admired him fanatically, this was precisely because, like Artaud, he was never assimilable. Indeed, many of his most remarkable works no longer exist: they were temporary constructions that, like dances, survive only in Photograph. To describe them, he coined the word “installation.”

  Many sixties artists—including Sontag—were determined to undermine the consumerist society they loathed. Thek was one of the few principal artists of the period who succeeded. “Now high modern art is establishment art,” Sontag lamented in 1980. “It turned out that high modernist art, far from being subversive, was perfectly compatible with the consumer society.”2 Thek, by contrast, approached painting and sculpture directly, in the body, like music or dance, and enthralled Susan, anxious to escape her head. He joined the long list of gay men she went to bed with, though their friendship was far from harmonious: Thek once accused her of “reeking of garlic and data.”3

  Nevertheless, Thek was the only man besides Philip with whom she discussed having a child. And it is easy to imagine a child that inherited equally from mother and father as a perfect union: of Susan’s intellectualism and Paul’s sensuality. Each possessed—in extreme proportions—what the other lacked.

  * * *

  “Instead of a hermeneutics we n
eed an erotics of art,” Susan wrote at the end of her essay “Against Interpretation.” The words were hers. But the title, and the idea, was Paul Thek’s. In an intellectual culture so heavily saturated with Freud and Marx, who offered vast and complicated keys to personality and society, the emphasis on immediate experience was welcome, exciting, and of a piece with the decade’s other liberations. There were political liberations (black liberation, women’s liberation, gay liberation) at home, and of colonized peoples abroad. In philosophy and sociology, there was a plea for the kind of “erotic civilization” that Marcuse proposed. This had its counterparts in music, from the Beatles to Bob Dylan, and in every area of cultural life: Vidal Sassoon banished teased hair set on rollers; Yves Saint-Laurent introduced a new informality even to Parisian couture.

  In popular culture, this movement was symbolized by the hippies and the flower children, who had dropped out of the hierarchy symbolized by the culture of Sherman Oaks. The hippies were even younger than Susan. She was thirty-one in an age whose rallying cry, issued in 1964, the year of “Notes on ‘Camp,’” was “Never trust anyone over thirty.”

  Into this atmosphere of cultural revolution came a collection of essays, Against Interpretation. Its chapters had appeared elsewhere, where they had been read, praised, and—just as often—condemned. Here was “Notes on ‘Camp,’” and the title piece, “Against Interpretation.” Here were the writings on avant-garde and popular culture, including on Flaming Creatures, science fiction films, and happenings; and on the French culture that had interested her since the fifties: writers including Simone Weil, Camus, Sartre, Genet, and Artaud; filmmakers including Bresson, Resnais, and Godard.

  Given how broad and serious the book was, it is remarkable that so much of the reaction focused on its author’s supposed determination to destroy culture. In 1969, Irving Howe wrote: “Susan Sontag has proposed a cheerfully eclectic view. . . . Now everyone is to do ‘his thing,’ high, middle, or low; the old puritan habit of interpretation and judgment, so inimical to sensuousness, gives way to a programmed receptivity; and we are enlightened by lengthy studies of the Beatles.”4 And in a review that must have stung, Peter Brooks acknowledged Sontag’s role in bringing new work to public attention: “American critical discourse has, on the whole, either neglected or failed to talk intelligently about Michel Butor, Jean-Luc Godard, Roland Barthes or Claude Lévi-Strauss—a few of the heroes on Miss Sontag’s roster,” he wrote in Partisan Review. “This neglect and failure point to Miss Sontag’s importance: with a fine sense of timing and drama she has made herself the authoritative propagandist for much that is vital in contemporary artistic consciousness.” This compliment, however, soon gives way to mentions of her “failures of logic, language, and historical understanding.”5 The criticism was often sexualized: Brooks called the book “a richly festive orgy,” and Pauline Kael, The New Yorker’s film critic, said: “I think in treating indiscriminateness as a value, she has become a real swinger.”6

  * * *

  The book closed with an essay, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” that gave a name to many of the shifts that characterized the age. Sontag’s opponents understood the “New Sensibility” to mean an equation of high culture with low: a broader collapse of values, including sexual values, leading to promiscuity both intellectual and sexual. In an article about the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, for example, a journalist attacked McLuhan’s “function as prophet of the hippies and the flower children and Susan Sontag’s new sensibility, and all the other forms and formulas of disengagement, of withdrawal, of repudiation of the dominant culture.”7 Yet the essay made obvious that Sontag’s idea of “one culture” was not to abolish distinctions between high and low but to propose a new alliance between the literary culture and the scientific culture to which it had traditionally been opposed.

  This meant dethroning literature as the greatest bulwark against mechanized dehumanization, an idea derived most prominently from Matthew Arnold. Sontag sensed that a new notion of art and science was necessary now that, as Buckminster Fuller said, “all major advances since World War I have been in the infra and the ultrasensorial frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum.”8 Science had absorbed many of the great creative energies that, in another age, might have been diverted into art, and so Sontag created an alternative canon of thinkers from fields other than fiction.

  The primary feature of the new sensibility is that its model product is not the literary work, above all, the novel. . . . Some of the basic texts for this new cultural alignment are to be found in the writings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Antonin Artaud, C. S. Sherrington, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, John Cage, André Breton, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sigfried Giedion, Norman O. Brown, and Gyorgy Kepes.9

  To understand a world shaped by a mysterious and often deleterious science, philosophers, playwrights, architects, musicians, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and painters would take the scientific model as their basis: “Today’s art, with its insistence on coolness, its refusal of what it considers to be sentimentality, its spirit of exactness, its sense of ‘research’ and ‘problems,’ is closer to the spirit of science than of art in the old-fashioned sense,” she wrote.10 Like science, it would demand rigorous application:

  The music of Milton Babbitt and Morton Feldman, the painting of Mark Rothko and Frank Stella, the dance of Merce Cunningham and James Waring demand an education of sensibility whose difficulties and length of apprenticeship are at least comparable to the difficulties of mastering physics or engineering. (Only the novel, among the arts, at least in America, fails to provide similar examples.)11

  Ruskin had criticized the art of the Renaissance for its coldness, its inaccessibility to the common man; but Sontag thought that complexity offered a defense against a high culture constantly at risk of collapse under pressure from empowered philistinism. This was why modern culture so often seemed serious, humorless, earnest; and why its products, far from being popularizing, were the opposite. The thinkers Sontag admired were not the Warhols. They were the ones attempting to decipher the “infra and the ultrasensorial frequencies” that made art “a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.”12

  Here is the essay’s hidden plea. Once again, in this new guise, Sontag is depicting the relation between “rational” science and the romantic mind of the artist. This was a favorite topic, one also found in Freud, who had reflected on the tensions between freedom and repression, spontaneity and reason, and the artistic and scientific imaginations. All had once been seen as antagonists. In this new conception, they no longer would be. By adopting a scientific approach, the artist would usurp the role of guardian of meanings, traditionally reserved to scientists, scholars, and theologians. He would provide his audiences interpretations of a new and often unfathomable world, joining the previously separate roles of god and priest, creator and interpreter. This, in other words, was a vision of criticism as art; and Susan Sontag’s “new sensibility” was a vision of critic as artist.

  * * *

  Despite her stern warnings about its impenetrability, Sontag was thrilled by modern art. It helped her, and others, “to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” In “One Culture,” she expressed the hope that it would help resist the “massive sensory anesthesia” resulting from an increasingly mechanized life. Some new art took a dim view of pleasure. But she did not, and it was that pleasure she recalled when she looked back in an essay called “Thirty Years Later,” written in 1996.

  Like the best travel writing, the essay makes you want to be there. “The dedication and daring and absence of venality of the artists whose work mattered to me seemed, well, the way it was supposed to be,” she wrote. “I thought it normal that there be new masterpieces every month.” She mentions “the conviction thirty years ago that we were on the threshold of a great positive transformation of culture and society.”13 Marginal views were entering the mainstream,
or at least the mainstream of progressive thought, with a consequence she did not then anticipate.

  What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this) was 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.

  This confession places the accusations that she was a “leveler” in relief. She did indeed want to reverse arbitrary distinctions: “The hierarchies (high/low) and polarities (form/content, intellect/feeling) I was challenging were those that inhibited the proper understanding of the new work I admired.”14 These hierarchies, like others being challenged (black/white, man/woman, straight/gay, art/science) often deserved to be overturned. But that did not mean that all hierarchies were bad. The cultural conservatives were right, though not in the way they thought they were. If they wished to preserve those hierarchies, they were hardly more successful than people like Susan Sontag and Jasper Johns and John Cage, who tried to expand or redefine them. Consumerism, Sontag ruefully noted, swamped them all.