Susan Sontag's Theory Video Art

Susan Sontag, a writer as well as an art critic with public influence, is one of thescholars who early studied image art. this article takes the moral sensibility as the startingpoint to interpret Sontag’s views on the theory of image art, especially the relationshipbetween the word and people’s aesthetic sensibility.This article is divided into six parts.Introduction: Susan sontag’s research contents are numerous and complicated,involving novel, drama, movies, garden architecture, etc, and full of contradiction, but it isprecisely because of its complexity that attracts many domestic and foreign scholars to thestudy of her thoughts. In recent years, a large number of domestic researches on sontag’sacademic works and papers arise, but studies on her views of image still need perfecting.This thesis analyses Sontag’s viewpoint from the macroscopic angle on her image artthought, centering on the relationship between the image art and the world and thatbetween the image art and people’s aesthetic feeling.The first chapter: The social and theoretical background of Sontag’s image artisticview. The thesis investigates the political, economic and cultural background of Sontag’simage view comprehensively. The turbulent political environment and the radical culturalbackground makes Sontag pay more attention to image art which can enrich people’semotional experience and hope to turn the sense of heaviness brought by the disorderedand complex reality to moral experience of the value pursuit. Walter Benjamin, RolandBarthes and John Berger, and others thought inspired Sontag to further explore therelationship among image art, the consumer society and the culture.The second chapter: the image and the possible world. Imaging technologydevelopment is not only a matter of technical innovation or art creation. It is liberated fromthe narrow category of pure technology and art and makes philosophy, sociology,aesthetics and politics have a profound change. The thesis analyses from the perspective ofthe nature of image, centering on three aspects to explain: First, seeing and seen of thesubject and object. The target which is to be seen is spliced and reformed by the subject onthe basis of interest and ethics, reflecting the requirements of the subject towards the objective world and finally forms the mixed relationship of seeing and seen in real life.Second, image and literature. Image art’s development depends on the development ofliterature. It forms the negative and complementary relationship with the literary world.Third, image and consumer society. Human desire in image art is everywhere. It forms twokinds of consumption patterns which are image consumption and desire consumption in thecourse of consumption.The third chapter: image and aesthetic feeling. sontag discusses the quality of the realsensibility which can evoke images. And it is discussed from the following three points:First, the infatuation on the new movies. People watching movies out of curiosity has risento the height of aestheticism. Image art should be directly and strongly arouse theaudience’s real feeling and aesthetic experience. Second,"Camp". Sontag expounds theimage of art should be "Camp"--in the form of exaggeration to collapse the ultimatemeaning. Third, the image, new sensibility and morality. In Sontag’s eyes, the image of artis not a simple rational construction. Built rationally at the same time committed to theexperience of passion and the expression of sensibility to prompted people’s sensibilityinto moral experience of value pursuit.The fourth chapter: the critical thinking to Sontag’s image art theory. Sontag paidattention to the change power of morality to realistic ideas. The interpretation of theauthenticity of the image, the limit of video watching, photography, and the aestheticfeeling finally rests on moral issues of image art. Her comments on image art, in fact, arethe thinking and judgment on political, cultural and other social phenomena, openingthinking in its true sense on the image art, that is, the image should be aesthetic, politicaland scientific, which has practical and guiding influence on the development of image artindustry in our country.Conclusion: Sontag’s thinking on the creation of image art gives us a lot ofenlightenment. On one hand, the thesis makes an attempt to enrich the connotation ofimage art, on the other hand, it also expands the research view based on Sontag’s theory ofimage art full of moral sensibility. Evoking people’s numb moral sensibility with image artand reflecting the demands of the original value of art not only has the connotation of “originality”, is also an effective way to liberate human desires.