Susan Sontag in Artforum

This month's issue of Artforum is the first since the death of Susan Sontag and contains three tributes, one by Arthur Danto.

I'm going to try to keep this post from branching off into fifteen directions but I need to branch a little. This is a branch. I've never seen or heard Arthur Danto in person but he writes like such a kind, generous-spirited person. Couple of examples: the art world seems to me to be extremely harsh, critical, personal and petty. That's all I'll say on that and it's just meant to contrast some things I've read Danto write.

Danto is the champion of the seriousness, indeed the genius, of Andy Warhol. Tough sell. In one of his books he wrote that when he said that Warhol was the closest thing to a philosophical genius in art in the twentieth century, Robert Motherwell, an artist who had some formal training in philosophy, was aghast and insulted. Danto wrote that apotheosizing Warhol as such "nearly cost me Robert's friendship." Just that, nothing more but that says a lot about the things that are important to Arthur Danto: friendship, human kinship, generosity of spirit.

In his obit of Sontag, he says "we were usually happy to be in one another's company when we were on some panel together or at the same dinner," although "we were often on opposite sides of an issue."

I was not on any of those panels, nor at any of those dinners but I believe Danto to be very generous to Sontag and to their relationship in that description. But then, as if that may have sounded a bit damning by faint praise he follows that right up with the conclusion to his tribute.

"But when, in the days after her death,
people told me about their difficulties
with her ideas, I didn't want to hear about
it. As often happens with a death, we
realize what our true feelings are. I knew
from the intensity of my grief that she
was irreplaceable as only someone we love
is irreplaceable."

That speaks for itself as to Susan Sontag, and as to her friend, Arthur Danto.

One more branch. In a post a few days before I got the new issue of Artforum I wrote of Dennis Dutton's little blurb in Arts and Letters Daily on the art of Henry Darger--"Does it move anybody?"--as reminding me of the difficulty that I had with Danto's and Clement Greenberg's definitions of art, or of "good" art anyway, that their definitions missed in not giving preeminence to the emotive, soulful ability of art. People are not just brains in a vat in Descartes famous conception. We have intellect and we have a soul and the ability of art to go right by the intellect into our souls is unique. That does not happen with philosophy or with mathematics or with logic. There can be soulful bliss and beauty in those fields but the ability of art to get us right in the heart is different.

I have never read any of Susan Sontag's work but perhaps I shall after reading what Danto says of her:

"We need an erotics of art, she insisted,
rather than a hermeneutics: a way of
responding to passion with passion rather
than stifling it under the apparatus of deep
interpretation, in the manner of heavy
explainers. 'Who any longer dares confess
pleasure in the presence of art?' the art
historian James Ackerman once wrote in
a letter to me, thinking of the way works
of art were now occasions for the dispas-
sionate subjection to what his professional
colleagues called Theory. I think Sontag's
argument would have been that that cannot
be why art exists. It exists to satisfy the
one set of needs that is uniquely human...
The difference between [aesthetics] and the
relation to art that Sontag exemplified and enjoined
was like the difference between sex education and
the Kama Sutra."

Just so.

I did see Susan Sontag live once, and on another occasion, of a fashion.

Several years ago I went to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. One of the exhibits I viewed was a series of five minute films he made of several of his friends. He simply kept the camera on their faces for five minutes. No script, no dialogue, just five minutes with the camera in their faces continuously. Five minutes is a LONG time in our Warholian fifteen minutes of fame culture as Warhol understood better than anyone else, and the effect was fascinating. It was a five minute psychoanalytic session.

I remember some of Warhol's friends being goofy at times, not knowing what to do for five whole minutes. Others didn't giggle or smile abruptly but seemed similarly shallow or at least not revealing of their substance.

Then there was this one of this attractive, black-haired young woman, that the camera seemed to me to reveal as the incarnation of Narcissus. That was the first and instantaneous reaction I had.

But there were other reactions, some of them contradictory with narcissism. Never was there so much activity in an inactive five minutes. The woman's eyes darted and flitted, they did not seem to want to make contact with the lens. She seemed restless, not of course, just physically BUT IN HER SOUL; distracted, but not obviously in a "serious"--a word she used a lot--way; I thought, "she was going to get her hair done or shopping when this nutty friend of hers asked her to pose for five straight minutes with a camera in her face and she's thinking "Can I go now?" It's so trite here but you could see the proverbial "wheels turning."

Afterwords, when I read in the pamphlet that the woman in was Susan Sontag I was delighted at having seen...historical footage. I didn't know what else.

The other thing that jumped out at me in the loop of her was that she was so--trite alert-- "striking." Not beautiful, but close to it; gorgeous hair, full lips, a pretty face,very soulful and deep looking, and those eyes that spoke so much and so little and of so many different things.

The photograph that Artforum uses to introduce the three eulogies to Sontag is perfect. She was forty-one at the time and dressed in a long-sleeved turtle-neck; she is lying on her back with her arms stretched out above her, her hands cradling her head. She looks in the photographer's direction but not at the camera lens, off into a world not the one she's physically in.

Reclined, her sexuality is more evident. Her lips, Angelina Jolie-luscious and inviting, her body open and ready to be pleasured (apparently not by a man of the male persuasion as I read in the three tributes). The line of her chin is nearly perfectly straight, strong but not in the least mannish. Her nose is well-proportioned to her face, her eyebrows symetrically and dramatically frame those restless eyes and at the edges that gorgeous black hair is now edged with gray.

The one time I saw Sontag live was at a symposium at N.Y.U. on David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge and his sensational claim that many Renaissance artists had used lenses to paint their humanity-defying realism. All manner of people spoke, Michael Fried, Hockney's optics collaborator Charles Falco, the head of the Met.

Apparently one of Sontag's catch-phrases, in addition to "serious," was "move one." "Move on" from interpretation, move on, or beyond, feminism, just move on. She got up at the symposium and said, "There seem to be three reactions to David Hockney's book. One, it's true and we always knew it. Two, it's not true. And three, it doesn't matter."

It was glib, pithy, funny and also flittingly dismissive. I heard in that the same narcissism that I had seen in Andy Warhol's loop, the same restlessness, the same "Can I go now?, the same "move on."