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Susan Sontag, 1933-2004
Art in America, March, 2005 by Ted Mooney
Susan Sontag, the novelist, essayist and critic whose ardent advocacy of artistic innovation, together with her acute sense of political responsibility and its imperatives, made her for more than 40 years one of the most influential and controversial figures in postwar American culture, died Dec. 28 in Manhattan, of myelogenous leukemia. She was 71.
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From the very outset of her career, beginning in 1964 with the publication of "Notes on Camp" (collected with other essays in Against Interpretation the following year), Susan declared her interest in sensibilities and cultural practices that till then had been seen as outside the arena of serious critical consideration, whether because they emerged from popular culture (movies, science fiction) or because they belonged to marginalized or otherwise suspect constituencies (pornography, Camp). It is a measure of the impact of these early essays (another collection, Styles of Radical Will, was published in 1969) that today we take for granted so much of what they passionately espouse: the elevation of modern art forms to the status of classical ones, the dismantling of the critical apparatus that separated popular culture from high art and the legitimizing of the fragmentary over the ever more remote (or depleted) whole. These were all radical notions at the time, and they were staunchly resisted by much of the intellectual establishment. Later, when the esthetic and cultural transformation she had called for was a fait accompli, accepted by everyone, Susan came to regret the extent of its triumph. "I was assuming that a principal task of art was to strengthen the adversarial consciousness," she told an interviewer in 1995. "Now simply to defend the idea of seriousness has become an adversarial act."
While Susan wrote infrequently about specific artworld developments during the 1960s (an essay on Happenings, another on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures), in early 1972 a visit to the Diane Arbus retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art prompted her most sustained critical engagement with visual art. In a series of six essays written over the next five years, she scrutinized the photographic medium and its multiple meanings--esthetic and moral--with an intensity unprecedented among non-photographers. Published serially in the New York Review of Books, then collected in 1977 under the title On Photography, these fiercely intelligent essays attracted a degree of public attention that caught even their author by surprise, making the book an international bestseller. Curiously (or perhaps not), this success did not mean the book met with widespread approval or even acceptance. In the art world in particular, it sparked at least as much outrage as admiration. Her contention that the omnipresence of photographic images had led to a debasement of the world at large and of our moral relationship to it infuriated many, but especially those invested in the artistic possibilities of the medium. It is not difficult to see why. "Photography," she wrote in a representative passage, "though not an art form in itself, has the peculiar capacity to turn all its subjects into works of art." While today, almost 30 years later, photography's status as an art form may no longer be in doubt, the medium's effect on its subjects remains a hotly contested issue and has become, not incidentally, a principal preoccupation of much contemporary art.
From the late 1970s through the '80s, Susan continued to write essays on a variety of subjects, prominent among them the critics Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, whose works she was instrumental in bringing to a wider American audience. Her longstanding interest in avant-garde film (Bresson, Resnais, Godard, Fassbinder) and epic theatrical spectacle (Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine) led her to champion the German filmmaker Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, whose seven-hour Hitler, A Film from Germany (1977) received significant art-world notice for its phantasmagoric imagery and tableau-style presentation. Also during this period, she wrote three articles for this magazine, on subjects ranging from the dancer/ choreographer Lucinda Childs [A.i.A., Dec. '83] to the photographic collaborations of Holger Trulzsch and Vera Lehndorff (formerly Veruschka) [A.i.A., Sept. '86], to the pleasures of Dutch church painting [A.i.A., Nov. '87]. In each of these enterprises, she brought to bear her characteristic rigor and discernment, as well as the pellucid prose style for which she was justly celebrated.
It was one of Susan's signal virtues--rare to the point of extinction in contemporary letters--that her devotion to a subject outlasted her own initial reading of it, and as her thinking on a given topic evolved, she was not afraid to change her mind. In Regarding the Pain of Others, her 2003 treatise on war photography, she revisited some of the positions staked out in On Photography, citing her own "irresistible temptation to quarrel with them." Most importantly, she questioned her earlier argument that reality itself has been degraded by the ceaseless proliferation of photographic images; rather, she qualified, it is our sense of reality that has suffered. Referring to the French critics Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard--though not just to them--she wrote: "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism."
