One brilliant essay, dense with gravity and shrewdness, on Walter Benjamin: "The melancholic sees the world itself become a thing: refuse, solace, enchantment." A depredation of Leni Reifenstahl's fascist aesthetics—with some significant revision by Sontag re "camp": "The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues as the property of a minority become corruptions when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context is change." A pair of fond, sleek envois—to Paul Goodman, to Roland Barthes. And three sacks of cement: lumpy, slow-setting impactions around Artaud, the German film-maker Syberberg, and Elias Canetti. With Artaud, Sontag can go only as far as the obvious limitations of the work allow: the mad Frenchman's pain, radical unentertainment, and turgidity (although Sontag does not see madness—or any illness—as an excuse for us to distance ourselves from the thought thus enveloped). But to some degree on Canetti, and wholly about Syberberg, Sontag wields a bludgeon. Is Syberberg's film on Hitler a Symbolist/Surrealist dysutopia or "moral or cultural science fiction, Starship Goethe-Haus?" The ratified categories Sontag sometimes comes up with are boggling; the polymath qualities she admires so in her subject are precisely those which she herself shares, splendidly—yet hanging over these Europhile appreciations is a thick carapace of opacity and respect solely for the total art object (intellectual Syberberg's, not unintellectual Riefenstahl's) that beetles as much as Artaud's unreadable ravings. Sontag's prose is clear, her mind amazingly nimble—and her points of concentration alas, targets for Teutonic heavy-armor fire. More so than most Sontag—of distinctly limited interest.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1980
ISBN: 0312420080
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1980
An ambitious, glossy, consumer-friendly package that has a wide range of people commenting on photographs that have affected their lives. Heiferman and Kismaric run Lookout Books, a producer of popular photography titles (notably, William Wegman's children's series). Here, they interview some 69 individuals—celebrities, artists, laypeople—after having asked each to choose an image he or she finds powerful. Works of photojournalism, from the old Life magazine in particular, awoke feelings in many. G. Gordon Liddy tells of having a gut reaction at age 11 to a stark WW II image of dead Marines washed up on a New Guinea beach. Benjamin Spock speaks of being shocked to pacifist activism by Nick Ut's 1972 shot of children fleeing a napalm strike in Vietnam. From the other side of the camera, lensman Eddie Adams walks readers through a graphic account of how he happened upon his Vietnam-era picture of the execution of a Vietcong lieutenant. Elsewhere, art photographers such as Bruce Weber, Duane Michals, and Mary Ellen Mark weigh in, personalizing aspects of their craft. Celebrities contribute also, and strive not to sound vapid. These include: Ginger Rogers, Joan Rivers, Tony Bennett, Dennis Hopper, and Naomi Campbell. More lively are the views of everyday folks. Rock fan Gina Greco nimbly explains the ``wild monster'' appeal she finds in a portrait of Guns N' Roses lead singer Axl Rose. For some, family snapshots are the most emotionally loaded, as with convict Aida Rivera, whose HIV-positive sister Yvette poses proudly with her children, presaging her death. Other inclusions run the gamut—high-tech scientific studies, snapshots, advertising imagery, film stills, pornography. The book will accompany a traveling exhibition, which opens at New York's International Center of Photography this fall. Its contents are also being issued on CD-ROM. A slick and calculated crowd-pleaser of a project that ably pits fine art against popular culture.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0382-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Meticulous research by an international team of scholars, complemented by magnificently reproduced illustrations, creates an impressive portrait of the fin-de-siäcle French artist Odilon Redon (18401916). Although Redon was once ranked with artists like Seurat and Gauguin, he has lately received less attention than his peers—a situation that the current retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, which this volume explicates, should help redress. Redon is best remembered today for his visionary monochromatic prints and drawings. Among his most frequently exhibited pictures are such fantastic dream images as an eye set within an ascending balloon and a giant smiling spider poised at a jaunty angle. Many public collections also display colorful pastel drawings of flower bouquets from the latter part of his career. It has proven difficult to explain his work according to the grand narratives of art history. Redon was neither an impressionist nor a modernist; even the label of symbolist threatens to assimilate his works to literature and philosophy rather than grant them the independence that their singularity demands. The authors, led by the Art Institute's Druick, recontextualize Redon by carefully unraveling his relationship to the romantic esthetics, spiritualist theologies, and art-market imperatives of his time, while offering a convincing psychoanalytic account of how his art reflects his unhappy childhood, his difficult apprenticeship, and his struggle to emerge from the shadow of his talented elder brother. Dark clouds and landscapes from his early life mark his noirs, they argue, but dissolve to reveal the no less mysterious, but finally joyous, light and color of his last decades. Many heretofore unknown full-color images brought to light by their investigations give a fuller sense of the development of themes in this late period. A superb art book for aficionados of occult ideas, of the graphic arts, or simply of striking images and effusive colors.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8109-3769-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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