Abstract
With Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” as starting point, this chapter discusses what silence could mean in modern art. While the chapter’s argument acknowledges Sontag’s emphasis on silence as a relation—silence is always related to sound in different forms—it refutes her view of the artist as a liberal subject administering, applying, and ultimately controlling the presence of silence, as being too instrumental. This chapter uses works by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Rancière, respectively, in order to articulate and emphasize the presence of silence in the work of art as a structural element, that the artist—whether painter, writer, musician, dancer, …—has to listen to and provide a form for. Works by American painter Agnes Martin exemplify how an experience of silence can be expressed in what Martin calls an “artwork which is also wordless and silent.” The activity that for Martin generates this silent work of art is “waiting”: both artist and beholder must wait for silence to make itself heard.
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Notes
- 1.
Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Essays of the 1960s & 70s, ed. David Rieff (New York: The Library of America 2013), p. 292. I will quote her essay with page numbers in brackets in the running text.—The essay was originally published in the journal Aspen 5–6, Fall-Winter 1967, and a couple of years later in its most widespread form as part the collection of essays called Styles of Radical Will, 1969.
- 2.
See my Silence and Subject in Modern Literature: Spoken Violence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 3.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997), 205.
- 4.
Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work (New York: Ecco, 2019), 291.
- 5.
Mena Mitrano, In the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag’s Critical Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 7.
- 6.
Mitrano, In the Archive of Longing, 50.
- 7.
Ross Posnock suggests in his Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2016) that Sontag “becomes the most influential American celebrant of immediacy, what she calls ‘transparence’” (131).—See also Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (Chicago & London The University of Chicago Press, 2017), on Sontag’s “struggle to retain agency over one’s inner state” (98), or George Cotkin, Feast of Excess A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), who repeatedly claims that Sontag “translated her inner needs into cultural imperatives,” and that, since “feeling herself bereft of pleasure in her private world, she sought it in the avant-garde culture” (188).—See also Sabine Sielke’s discussion of Sontag in this volume.
- 8.
See Sohny Sayres, “Susan Sontag and the Practice of Modernism,” American Literary History, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Autumn), 1989: 593–611.
- 9.
Cary Nelson, “Soliciting Self-Knowledge: The Rhetoric of Susan Sontag’s Criticism,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer), 1980, 724.
- 10.
Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy & Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006) [1972]), 114.
- 11.
On silence as a response to power, see my Silence and Subject in Modern Literature: Spoken Violence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 12.
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 286.
- 13.
Sontag, “Nathalie Sarraute and the Novel,” in Essays of the 1960s & 70s, 103. Sontag refers to Blanchot also in a couple of other texts, as well as in her diaries from 1964 and 1965—see As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964–1980, ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), where she on p. 51 refers to Le Livre à venir, in which Blanchot reflects on the “Death of the Last Writer,” see also pp. 91 and 104. Sontag also wrote a blurb for The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1998).
- 14.
Horace Engdahl, “Efterskrift,” in Maurice Blanchot, Essäer (Lund: Propexus/Kykeon, 1990), 126.
- 15.
Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003 [1959]), 218.
- 16.
Blanchot, The Book to Come, 219.
- 17.
Blanchot, The Book to Come, 219.
- 18.
Blanchot, The Book to Come, 220.
- 19.
See Foucault’s essay “The Thought of the Outside,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2 (New York: The New Press, 1998), 147–170.
- 20.
Blanchot, The Book to Come, 220.—On the theme of the “book-as-statue,” see also Mahshid Mayar’s contribution in this volume.
- 21.
Blanchot, The Book to Come, 221.
- 22.
Blanchot, The Book to Come, 220.
- 23.
Blanchot, The Book to Come, 220–221.
- 24.
Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, trans. Debra Keates & James Swenson (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 33.
- 25.
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 112.
- 26.
Rancière, The Edges of Fiction, trans. Steve Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 150.
- 27.
Alison Ross, “Expressivity, Literarity, Mute Speech,” in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. Jean-Philippe Deranty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 137.
- 28.
Ross, “Expressivity, Literarity, Mute Speech,” 140.
- 29.
Ross, “Expressivity, Literarity, Mute Speech,” 135.
- 30.
Blanchot, The Book to Come, 221.
- 31.
Lawrence Rinder, “Reflections on Agnes Martin,” in Agnes Martin (Saskatchewan: The MacKenzie Art Gallery & Berkeley: The University Art Museum, 1995), 10.
- 32.
Quoted after Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 105.
- 33.
Agnes Martin, quoted after Tiffany Bell, “Happiness is the Goal,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris & Tiffany Bell (London: Tate Publishing & New York: D.A.P., 2015), 31.
- 34.
For examples of these critics, see Lena Fritsch, “‘Well, I Sit Here and Wait To Be Inspired’—Photographs of Agnes Martin,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris & Tiffany Bell (London: Tate Publishing & New York: D.A.P., 2015), 212.
- 35.
Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 7 and 9.
- 36.
Nancy Princenthal relates Martin’s work to Sontag’s essay “The Aesthetics of Silence,” see her Agnes Martin, 14, 149f., and 207.
- 37.
Agnes Martin, Writings/Schriften, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Stuttgart: Cantz, 1991), 89.
- 38.
Briony Fer, “Drawing Drawing: Agnes Martin’s Infinity,” in 3XAbstraction: New Methods of Drawing – Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Agnes Martin, ed. Catherine de Zegher & Hendel Teicher (New York: Drawing Center, 2005), 193.
- 39.
Tiffany Bell and Frances Morris, “Introduction,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris & Tiffany Bell (London: Tate Publishing & New York: D.A.P., 2015), 13.
- 40.
Cindy Richmond, “Agnes Martin: The Transcendent Vocation,” in Agnes Martin (Saskatchewan: The MacKenzie Art Gallery & Berkeley: The University Art Museum, 1995), 26.
- 41.
Martin, Writings/Schriften, 98.
- 42.
“Leaf” can be seen for instance at https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/336624.
- 43.
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 208.
- 44.
“Morning” can be seen at for instance https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/martin-morning-t01866.
- 45.
Rachel Barker, “Morning 1965,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris & Tiffany Bell (London: Tate Publishing & New York: D.A.P., 2015), 90.
- 46.
Martin, Writings/Schriften, 29.
- 47.
On music and silence, see Johannes Voit’s contribution to this volume.
- 48.
“On a Clear Day” can be seen at for instance https://www.moma.org/collection/works/portfolios/63682.
- 49.
This in a letter to Princenthal, and quoted after her Agnes Martin, 210.
- 50.
Jaleh Mansoor, “Self-Effacement, Self-Inscription: Agnes Martin’s Singular Quietude,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, & Barbara Schröder (New York: Dia Art Foundation & New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 156.
- 51.
“Words” can be seen for instance at https://www.sfaq.us/2016/08/the-poetics-of-the-grid-agnes-martin-at-lacma/.
- 52.
Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge 2006 [1972]), 33.
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Olsson, U. (2022). Dissonant Silence: Susan Sontag and the Aesthetics of Silence. In: Mayar, M., Schulte, M. (eds) Silence and its Derivatives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06523-1_4
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