dogslife

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

I'm still wrestling with that essay, "Against Interpretation". In many ways it informs the foundation of my aesthetic sensibility, though I can never be sure how far down it goes. The trouble is, I spent a number of years with a lot of myself invested in hermeneutics. I honed my skills and built myself up into an interpretive force. And then I read Sontag's essay and found that I felt very small. That smallness sat heavily on me, and I didn't know if it was a smallness in relation to the unfathomable bigness of art or to my own untapped capacity to feel and think to extents far greater than I'd let myself when tamping down meaning was the aim of the hour. There was something about being small I didn't like, so I dropped my methods like an overstuffed hockey bag and left them behind. Still, interpretation was an art I once practiced at a high level, and it's hard for me to believe that I'm truly past it, that art in my presence is safe from reduction. The reflexes are still there. I can still pick up the old tools and work them masterfully. It's in the wrists. The difference now is, I don't believe in the work.

When I'm thinking or talking about art, the question I always bounce back to myself is, what about Sontag's essay? Not quite that, I don't actually think the question in those terms, but with her passing I realize how deeply ingrained in me is her tirade against interpretation that seeks to replace the work of art with something else. I answer to her. I don't come to a judgment without presenting my case to that essay first. I ask myself, is this about making art fit into me, or am I working at finding myself in art? Cleverness is a vice that I'm trying to cut down on. Day by day I grow quieter and more attuned to the resonances within.

Art is. It's there. Don't tell me what it means. Don't surround it with footnotes and exegesis. Back off. Take it in. Surrender your fear. Burn.

Rest in peace, mighty thinker.