Rejecting the Interpretation of Art
A Comparison of Critics Susan Sontag and Svetlana Alpers
Feb 14, 2009
Is understanding art through interpretation necessary for one’s enjoyment of it? Or is the pleasure one derives from its formal quality enough? That is the question that Susan Sontag and Svetlana Alpers investigate in their respective essays, “Against Interpretation” and “Interpretation without Representation, or, The View of Las Meninas.”
Sontag’s View
In her straightforward 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag makes one essential point: the emphasis on interpretation of art—instead of focusing on its formal qualities—has allowed us to ‘forget’ what is there before our eyes. Starting with Plato, she argues, there has been an urge to interpret (therefore, to defend) art. Ultimately, she says, this has caused the divorce of form and content. Not only have form and content been forever split up on the grounds of irreconcilable differences, but content has taken the kids, the house, and the dog, leaving form stuck with the alimony and child support.
All kidding aside, Sontag is concerned about iconography being primary and form secondary; she fears that actual experience has become almost unnecessary. She holds the collectivist theories of Marx and Freud’s psychoanalytic methodology partly responsible, yet does concede that some interpretation is unavoidable. There is no going back to the pre-mythic “innocence.”
So, is interpretation simply a matter of degree? In a word, yes. Sontag refines the task of the critic and offers to throw out the most “obtuse”, “onerous”, and “insensitive” criticisms. She suggests a refocusing of the emphasis back to form, with a “vocabulary” to describe and illuminate the “sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.”
Alpers’ View
While Sontag includes an Erwin Panofsky essay on film as one of the more valuable criticisms, Svetlana Alpers censures Panofsky for creating “an iconographic straitjacket for his followers”. To validate her claims, she discusses a particular painting, Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez [1656], and argues that her analysis could not have been possible without the rejection of current art historical methodologies.
She concludes that Velázquez deliberately combined the active and passive experiences—the observant and descriptive modes—in Las Meninas. In other words, by setting aside the strictly iconographic approach, she has arrived at a whole new conclusion about a work of art; one which she obviously thinks is the most genuine and relevant.
Alpers praises Michel Foucault’s commentary on the same subject because he is not an art historian, views the painting with fresh eyes, and is therefore undaunted by prevailing disciplinary rhetoric. She seeks to show how representation does engage a social order, not just an aesthetic one.
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