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life | susan sontag
TEXT BY ELLEN LUPTON
Susan Sontag (1933–2004) chronicled and critiqued the cycle of styles, asking how art forms become symbols of revolution one day and signs of ordinary consumer- ism the next—or, conversely, how popular banalities morph into signifiers bearing in- effable emotional complexity. According to Sontag, popular culture constantly ingests and regurgitates its creative offspring.
Sontag wrote “Notes on ‘Camp’” in 1964. She defined camp as a coded sensibility— commonly embraced by queer communi- ties—that exaggerates familiar notions
of beauty and elegance until they become a parodic commentary on themselves. Camp is stylized, ironic, and quotational rather than authentic, heroic, or original.
It embraces artifice over nature and an- drogyny over fixed gender roles. In camp, “It’s not a lamp but a ‘lamp’; not a woman but a ‘woman.’”
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Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility....What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.
Less well known is her 1970 essay “Post- ers: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity.” She wrote that posters assimilate radical artistic ideas into an easy-to-eat medium. Nineteenth-century lithographs sold cookies, booze, nightclub acts, and the city itself, creating “urban, public space as an arena of signs: the image- and word-choked façades and surfaces of the great modern cities.”
Sontag was reticent about her private life. She announced her bisexuality in 1995 but rarely spoke publicly about her rela- tionships with women. The photographer Annie Leibowitz was her longtime compan- ion. After her death in 2004, lesbian activist Sarah Schulman said, “Sontag never applied her massive intellectual gifts to- ward understanding her own condition as a lesbian, because to do so publicly would have subjected her to marginalization.”
SOURCES Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964); “Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity,” in Dugald Stermer, ed., The Art of Revolution:
96 Posters from Cuba (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970); Patrick
Moore, “Susan Sontag and a Case of Curious Silence,” Los Angeles Times, Jan 4, 2004 >latimes.com/archives/la-xpm- 2005-jan-04-oe-moore4-story.html. Our portrait is inspired by a photograph of Sontag relaxing on her Eames lounge chair, a mid-century symbol of power and status.