Pre-Camp

It was in reading Against Interpretation cover to cover in the order the essays appear instead of selectively in what ever order piqued my curiosity (I had years ago consulted the "Notes on Camp") that I noticed that the end of the essay on Happenings made a beautiful introduction to the penultimate essay in the book "Notes on Camp" which originally appeared in the Partisan Review. So the juxtaposition of "Happening" ending and "Camp" beginning is an artefact of later placement. Yet how very telling that we leave off with a consideration of audience only to pick up a concern with sensibility.

Comedy is not any less comic because it is punitive. As in tragedy, every comedy needs a scapegoat, someone who will be punished and expelled from the social order represented mimetically in the spectacle. What goes on in the Happenings merely follows Artaud's prescription for a spectacle that will eliminate the stage, that is, the distance between spectators and performers, and "will physically envelop the spectator." In Happening this scapegoat is the audience [1962]

Susan Sontag provides here in "Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition" a marvellous key to reading the difficult-to-describe sensibility of the 1964 "Notes on Camp". There too audience plays a role:

The peculiar relation between Camp taste and homosexuality has to be explained. [...] Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

I am reminded of the comments years later by Fran Lebowitz on connoisseurship and the gay public of the New York City Ballet. Somehow along the way we have lost the scapegoat and the monopoly on camp or moral seriousness. Still worth remembering the history.

And so for day 1086
03.12.2009