546
SUSAN SONTAG
of a given work of art is always charged with an awareness of the
work's historicity, its place in a chronology. Further: the visibility
of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. Were it not
for departures from, or experimentation with, previous artistic norms
which are known to us, we could never recognize the profile
of
a
new style. Still further: the very notion of "style" needs to
be
ap–
proached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable
element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only
at certain historical moments-as a front behind which other issues,
ultimately ethical and political, are being debated. Since the Renais–
sance, the notion of "having a style" is one of the solutions to have
arisen, intermittently, to the crises that have threatened old ideas of
truth, of moral rectitude and also of naturalness.
But suppose all this is admitted. That
all
representation
is
incarnated in a given style (easy to say). That there is, therefore,
strictly speaking, no such thing as realism, except as, itself, a special
stylistic convention (a little harder). Still, there are styles and styles.
Everyone is acquainted with movements in art-two examples:
Mannerist painting of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen–
turies, Art Nouveau in painting, architecture, furniture and domestic
objects-which do more than simply have "a style." Artists like
Parmigianino, Pontormo, Rosso, Bronzino, like Gaudi, Guimard,
Beardsley and Tiffany, in some obvious way cultivate style. They
seem to be preoccupied with stylistic questions, and indeed to place
the accent less on what they are saying than on the manner of
saying it.
To deal with art of this type, which seems to demand the
distinction I have been urging be abandoned, a term like "stylization"
or its equivalent is needed. "Stylization" is what is present
in
a
w~rk
of art precisely when an artist does propose the by-no-means
inevitable distinction between matter and manner, theme and form.
When that happens, when style and subject are so distinguished, that
is, played off against each other, one can legitimately speak of subjects
being treated (or mistreated) in a certain style. Creative mistreatment
is more the rule. For when the material of art
is
conceived of as
"subject matter" it is also experienced as capable of being exhausted.
