Latest news with #SusanSontag
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Boys by Leo Robson review – a likeable debut with aimless charm
Early on in Leo Robson's debut novel, the narrator, a likable, aimless, rather detached young Londoner named Johnny Voghel, reads 'a book of Susan Sontag essays and interviews'. Johnny's copy of what he later identifies as A Susan Sontag Reader is an heirloom. It has been extensively underlined by his mother, who has just died, and by his estranged half-brother Lawrence. Johnny wonders if reading Sontag, or his family's other heavily annotated books, will 'unlock a secret or hint at one, offer a glimpse of their dreams or invite them into mine'. A Susan Sontag Reader includes Sontag's 1968 defence of Jean-Luc Godard, the great modernist and Marxist provocateur of French New Wave cinema. If Johnny, in search of family connection, happened to read that essay, he would encounter a paragraph that rather neatly describes the novel that he is in the process of narrating. Godard's films, Sontag writes, 'show an interrelated group of fictional characters located in a recognisable, consistent environment: in his case, usually contemporary and urban'. But 'while the sequence of events in a Godard film suggests a fully articulated story, it doesn't add up to one […] actions are often opaque, and fail to issue into consequences'. There is almost always a kind of ulterior quality to the debut novel of a very good critic, stemming perhaps from a willed suppression of all that the critic knows about novels – how they can go wrong, how they must go right. And a very good critic is what Leo Robson is. For years he has been publishing long, formidably intelligent essays and reviews in venues including the New Statesman, the New Yorker and the London Review of Books. He is one of a handful of working critics worth reading not merely for the rigour of his arguments but for the pleasures of his unfailingly witty prose. He is a great articulator of minority opinions, having dared, among recent sallies, to defend the unfashionable oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates, diss the films of Pedro Almodóvar, and express deep scepticism about Paul Murray's widely beloved The Bee Sting. With such a reputation, the actual production of a first novel could be construed as either reckless or brave. And the fact that The Boys more or less begins with its narrator reading Susan Sontag might perhaps ring alarm bells, not least because Sontag herself, a superb critic, wasn't much cop as a novelist. But one of the interesting things about The Boys is the way in which it both invites and refuses a 'literary' or 'critical' reading. As in Sontag's account of Godard's films, The Boys goes to some trouble to avoid being obviously 'novelistic'. It has no clanging symbols or coy thematic statements. Scenes and even sentences appear ready to lurch toward event, toward meaning, only to collapse abruptly into a bemusing bathos. It is a pottering-about sort of book. It delivers great pleasure, actually, at the level of humble perception, of anticlimax. It does indeed remind you of a French New Wave film – not one of Godard's spiky assaults on bourgeois complacency, but perhaps something gentler by François Truffaut (who is not mentioned) or Eric Rohmer (who is). Setting and period are hyperspecific: certain parts of London, in and around Swiss Cottage, during the 2012 Olympics. (In some ways it's a London-geography novel, a tube-nerd's dream.) The narrator, Johnny, seems to be looking for love – but is he? He has a girlfriend, whom we barely meet, named Chloe. He muses on the history of his family, Viennese Jews who fled to London during the second world war. His older half-brother, Lawrence, is the book's magnetic core: half hooligan, half intellectual, passionate about city planning and social care. Around Lawrence's charismatic instability, the Voghel family revolve and reshuffle their priorities. A plot, sort of: Johnny and Lawrence repair their estrangement; Lawrence's teenage son Jasper is having a baby with his girlfriend LouLou; Johnny, in trying to find Lawrence a job, discovers himself, in the novel's longest section, deeply attracted to two young postgrad students at the university where he works as an administrator, Harvey (male) and Rory (female). This is a bit Jules et Jim, except that it doesn't quite go anywhere. Instead, Robson lets us hang out with his characters until we find ourselves thinking of them as real people. The Boys, in its prose and in its structure, is almost entirely made up of odd kinks of specificity – as are we all, of course, and as is the world. Hardly bothering with the conventions of 'the novel', it nonetheless – or perhaps I mean therefore – creates a mood that is less like fiction and more like life. It is a rather luminous, eccentric and memorable book. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Boys by Leo Robson is published by Riverrun (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Daily Mail
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Artist who had multiple orgasms in public museum reveals the 'exhausting' effect it had on her
An artist who had multiple orgasms in public gallery revealed the 'terrible' effect it had on her in the following years. Marina Abramović, from Serbia, is a performance artist who spent over five decades pushing the limits of art through controversial performances, including switching places with a prostitute in the red light district in Amsterdam in the 70s. Among her controversial stunts is a performance in the 2005 series, Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, in which she masturbated for eight hours straight. The series, which comprised of several performances, took place across a number of days at the museum and was dedicated to the artist's late friend, Susan Sontag. But the performance that stood out was the second, in which she recreated another famous performance piece from 1972 by Vito Acconici, and masturbated underneath a stage for several hours. Reflecting on the controversial performance several years on, Abramovic told fashion designer Bella Freud it had been an 'exhausting' experience. Speaking on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, the artist said: 'I had to do this for seven hours, I think I had more than five orgasms. It was really difficult because the next day I had do another performance. I was exhausted.' Marina took inspiration from another artist named Vito Acconci, who developed a performance called 'Seedbed' where he hid underneath a ramp at the Sonnabend Gallery in NYC and masturbated while speakers played him talking about his fantasies of people walking above him. She said she wanted to recreate 'Seedbed' from the perspective of 'female energy', which prompted her to add the performance into the Seven Easy Pieces series. Her conversation with Bella Freud follows comments Abramovic made to New York Magazine in which she said she'd 'never concentrated so hard in my life'. 'The problem for me, with this piece, was the absence of public gaze: only the sound. But I heard that people had a great time; it was like a big party up there! I ended with nine orgasms,' she said. 'It was terrible for the next piece - I was so exhausted!' The Seven Easy Pieces series isn't the only work of Abramovic's to have made waves in the art industry - after her 1970s stunt shocked the world. However the 79-year-old is most famous for her 'Rhythm 0' piece, a now notorious six-hour performance which tested her will - and the self control of audience members. Carried out in 1974, Abramović lay prone on a table surrounded by 72 objects which included matches, saws, nails and a gun loaded with a single bullet. As audience members interacted with her, they were invited to use the objects in any way they desired. She'd been stripped of her clothes and had her skin slashed with blades, one person even held a loaded gun to her head and put her finger on the trigger. She later said she was 'ready to die' if that was the consequence of that performance. In the 1970s Marina swapped places with a prostitute in the red light district in Amsterdam for six hours for a performance called Role Exchange. She said: 'I asked her to go to the gallery at be me and I sit in the window and become her. 'It was pretty scary stuff to do, but this was in 1975, I did it for six hours, it was so fascinating. 'It was my first time in Amsterdam and my first time to do a performance there. 'This was logical for me to do because in that time my education was always that being a prostitute was the lowest thing to be and my mother would just die when found out I done this work, so all the reason to do it.' On her website, she spoke about the exchange, saying: 'She give me only the instruction that I should never go below her price because I will ruin her business. 'So I had the two customers; one asked about her, and the second one didn't want to pay the price. 'She said to me that I would starve if I will be prostitute because I don't have any talent for that role.' One of her most celebrated artistic performance, known as The Artist Is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2010. The exhibition featured Marina's performance piece, where she sat at a table in the atrium gallery and invited visitors to sit opposite her for silent contemplation. The performance lasted for 736 hours, and over 1,500 people sat opposite her during the show. She said: 'Anything I do before I start I have enormous fear, I have cramps in my stomach, I got the bathroom, I just sit there, but if I don't have fear I will panic that I don't have fear. 'Fear is incredible, it is an indication that I am here 100 percent, but the moment that I am in front of the audience it disappears. 'Then I just there with them, I have to be with my mind and my body and the public, they feel the fear, they feel the insecurity, they feel everything so you really have to be present for them.
Deccan Herald
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Deccan Herald
Endlessness at Serengeti
Through extensive archives and personal diaries, Pulitzer-winner Benjamin Moser delves into the revolutionary ideas of Susan Sontag, an avant-garde pioneer of art criticism and a heroine of photography studies. He tells Saurabh Sharma how everyone is conforming to something, but Sontag was a real countercultural, aggressive figure
Deccan Herald
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Deccan Herald
Reinventing Sontag
Through extensive archives and personal diaries, Pulitzer-winner Benjamin Moser delves into the revolutionary ideas of Susan Sontag, an avant-garde pioneer of art criticism and a heroine of photography studies. He tells Saurabh Sharma how everyone is conforming to something, but Sontag was a real countercultural, aggressive figure
Washington Post
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
3 new novels offer thrills with a campy sense of style
Campy crime has nothing to do with tents and roasting marshmallows. It's not the zany comedy of 'Meatballs,' nor the horror of 'Friday the Thirteenth.' A campy crime novel has themes and preoccupations derived from Susan Sontag's 1964 essay 'Notes on Camp.' In Sontag's theory, camp can include playing with gender roles; gaudy settings that run from glamorous to cringey; delightfully over-the-top characters; and a context in which extravagance is expected. Sontag wrote that camp 'converts the serious into the frivolous,' and camp mysteries take this to heart; they over-index on style and have no truck with gore or violence. They embrace artifice, exaggeration and glamour.
