Dance, Photography, and the World’s Body

Dance, Photography, and the World's Body Roger Copeland In her influential book On Photography, Susan Sontag offers a rather uncharitable explanation for the current level of interest in the photographic arts: The seemingly insatiable appetite for photography in the 1970's expresses more than the pleasure of discovering and exploring a relatively neglected art form.... Paying more and more attention to photographs is a great relief to sensibilities tired of or eager to avoid the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical modernist painting presupposes highly developed skills of looking, and a familiarity with other art and with certain notions about the history of art. Photography, like pop art, reassures viewers that art isn't hard; it seems to be more about subjects than about art. But I'd like to suggest that the current enthusiasm for photography is evidence of something other than a growing perceptual and intellectual laziness, something much more positive (and necessary). Granted, we are at this moment experiencing a "backlash" against modernism (or more specifically, against two closely-related manifestations of "the modern": formalism and minimalism). And yes, photography has benefited substantially from this shift in sensibility. But it's essential to recognize that this widespread dissatisfaction with two of the avant-garde's most celebrated projects was initiated in most instances by the artists themselves and not in response to a restless, fickle, and inattentive public I 91 The fact of the matter is that the arts simply cannot pursue the goal of "selfpurification " indefinitely. By "self-purification" I mean the two different varieties of radical surgery that the arts have performed on themselves during the last one hundred years. First came the process that Ortega y Gasset called "dehumanization" in which the arts purged themselves of their "human content" or "lived reality." This resulted in a variety of "formalism." Art stopped serving as a "criticism of life" (Matthew Arnold's conception of art's function). Art turned its back on the world and refused to "hold the mirror up to nature." Subsequently, the:separate arts underwent an even more impoverishing variety of "purification" that Clement Greenberg calls "self-criticism . What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general but also in each particular art.... The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered "pure." ("Modernist Painting") Less, in other words, is more. But surely, at some point in time it becomes a purely practical, if not an ideological or spiritual necessity for art to reestablish relations with "the world" and to reclaim for itself those aspects of human experience once rigorously excised in the name of modernist purity. Some of the various activities loosely referred to as "conceptual art" provide a case (perhaps the case) in point. Here, the quest for self-purification led art to divest itself of its very objecthood.2 And significantly (at least for my purposes here) the only factor lending many such experiences a semblance of "materiality" was photographic documentation. Oftentimes, the photograph not only lent a touch of "permanence" to an otherwise ephemeral event, it also served to "situate" the event in the larger context of "the world" (the same world that the event itself-in its defiantly selfreferential way-often refused to acknowledge). The world, as it turns out, does not cease to exist simply because we refuse to acknowledge it. And at approximately the same time (late '60s early '70s), photography began to achieve widespread acceptance as an art in its own right. I don't think it's coincidental that dance is the only other art to have flourished so visibly in the '70s. Both photography and dance help restore to us what John Crowe Ransom called "the world's body." Ransom complained that science had robbed the world of its body by concerning itself only with the abstract principles which underlie experience, rather than with the concrete immediacy of experience itself ("as science more and more completely reduces the world to...