Interview: On Art and Consciousness

Interview: Susan Sontag On Art and Consciousness Susan Sontag is the author of Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will. In addition to numerous essays on literature and the arts, she has published two novels and made three films. Recently she edited and wrote the introduction to Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. Susan Sontag's On Photography will be published this Winter. This interview was taped by the Editors in February 1977. PAJ: What performances in the last few years have you felt were worthwhile experiences? Susan Sontag: Lucian Pintilie's Turandot. Robert Anton's puppet theatre. Merce Cunningham. Peter Brook's The Ik. Beckett's Berlin staging of Waiting for Godot. Plisetskaya doing Ravel's Bolero. Watergate. Franz Salieri's La Grand Eugene (the original Paris production, not the 25 one that went on tour). Strehler's production of The Cherry Orchard. The invented Act Three of the Met's recent production of Lulu. Maria Irene Fornes's staging of her play, Fefu and Her Friends .. . Shall I go on? PAJ: Why haven't you written about these events? SS: I'm writing other things. Mostly fiction. PAJ: Don't you want to go on writing criticism? SS: I don't consider that I ever was a critic. I had ideas, and I attached them to works of art that I admired. Now I attach them to other things. PAJ: How do you view the current critical scene? SS: You mean monitoring productions and giving out grades- the kind of consumer reporting that decides whether something is good or not good, well performed or not well performed? PAJ: If that is what people are satisfied with, isn't it due to the lack of a new critical vocabulary with which to treat the new theatre? SS: I don't expect ideas from critics. They come from poets and painters and novelists and even playwrights- doing a stint of writing about the theatre. And from directors who found their own theatres. PAJ: But the current experimental theatre is such a radical break from our theatrical past, not part of a developing American tradition. No one seems to know quite how to deal with it. SS: I think the problem is that the more than sixty-year-old international tradition of modernism has bequeathed us a surfeit of critical perspectives -Constructivism, Futurism, Brecht, Artaud, Crotowski, et al. And that we give an open-ended but increasingly limited credence to them all. It's not lack of familiarity with experimental theatre that explains the critical vacuum. It's the mounting disenchantment- partly justified, partly shallow and philistine-with modernism. And a widespread boredom with high culture itself. PAJ: You mentioned Artaud and Grotowski. Their theories-which go back to the origins of theatre in ritual and ceremony-seem to be a negation of everything that's transpired in Western culture. Isn't that a regression? And doesn't their kind of theatre remove one from the immediacy of the moment? SS: There's no opposition between the archaic and the immediate. PAJ: I see such theatre as a form of hermeticism, a withdrawal into a world that we have no contact with whatsoever. 26 SS: Well, I've no objection to art that is hermetic. (Some art should be hermetic, I think.) But, far from being hermetic, the theatre influenced by Artaud and by Grotowski is very much about immediate, present experience . The difference is that both Artaud and Grotowski believed in the reality of evil- the reality treated superficially, or denied by, socalled realistic theatre. PAJ: Why do you emphasize evil? SS: First of all, because it exists. And because an awareness of the reality of evil is the best defense against artistic trivialization and vulgarity. PAl: The modern attack on "dialogue" or realistic theatre seems to have taken two directions. One, represented by Artaud and Crotowski, explores feelings. The other, represented by Foreman, is more interested in exploring the thinking process and modes of perception. SS: Perception in and for itself? PAJ: Yes. In order to perceive better. SS: Perceive what better? Doesn't the material offered for perception have to be trivial, precisely so that the audience can't be...