User:Ruben/Annotations/Against Interpretation

Against Interpretation - 1966, Susan Sontag

In reflecting upon art content has become essential, while form has become accessory. Due to its roots in the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation.

It is the interpretation of art that feeds the belief that there is content in a work. Interpretation art often is translating the perceived A into B. Interpreting texts started when myths had been overtaken time (and science) and they were reconciled to new demands.

Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy.

It is a strategy to conserve a text by altering it without rewriting or admitting any alteration. It often excavates and destroys the work.

Also, Marx and Freud interpreted phenomenons - that without it would have no meaning - by finding equivalents for it. So interpretation itself should be evaluated and contextualised.

It can be liberating but nowadays interpreting mainly seems stifling. It creates a shadow world of meanings.

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 has become a way of understanding, and is applied to all sorts of works. But the merit of a good work doesn't ly in its 'meanings'. Even if those meanings were put there deliberately by the maker: "Never trust the teller, trust the tale." It seems a form of dissatisfaction; that one wants to replace the work with 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.

Many new forms of art try to escape interpretation (abstract art, pop-art).

But often, many works seems to made by people who want to be journalists or psychologists: their work is rudimentary and form is clearly a secondary thought.

Good works of art resist interpretation, though. Even when ie. a director puts it in there, a 'good' film steers past these intentions. There should be more attention for these 'form' attributes.

A descriptive, rather than prescriptive vocabulary, which dissolves content and form could help.

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art [...] today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

Once it was revolutionary to experience art on multiple levels, but now it seems the sensory experience is often taken for granted.

We should cut back on content so we can see, hear and feel more.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

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