Yes I absolutely agree with this. Until you said so, I had not remembered that it was Pinochet's uniform and had just seen it as a uniform, a more general symbol of strutting dictatorship. My comments were made in that light, sorry for my denseness.


Re message 58

Ian,

I agree with you about making clear that such awful things can never be seen as trivial. It is just that I am not a part of a repressed minority and it seems to me fair and rational that if I were I might want to somehow rid myself of some of my chains by making gestures in this way. But I do accept that it can be dangerous to treat such things in any other way than revealing them in their true grotesqueness.

That's all extremely interesting, roslynmuse - please do 'be back'!

To be fair, Reiner, Ian only brought the subject of "musical camp" up because he believes it to be already politicised, in which I suppose I'd agree with him, although, as I said before, as subjects for political discussion go, it doesn't really register on my own scale of significance (or do I mean private obsession?).

Well, I'm hardly alone in bringing the other areas to bear upon such a discussion; most commentaries on Sontag, the foremost theorist of camp, also do so, as she does herself in her later essays! Camp in a wider sense is more just an artistic movement, it is a whole outlook on art, people and the world, which comes with numerous claims made for it. You wrote quite a bit about 'camp send-ups of the Nazis' in the context of your reading of George's comments, as being about camp's ability to 'deflate and emasculate threatening ideas'. I can hardly see how this is other than 'political'. I'm trying to look at these things, as well as the work of Wilde, in terms not just of their intentions but also their effectiveness. There is a liberal view of art which is happy to make claims for it, politically, but not happy if those claims are examined more critically. I don't think you can real have one without the other. On the whole, I believe a lot of art and artists like to overstate the impact and importance of their work in wider terms. Wilde is one of these; if he had said simply that 'Art can provide solace in difficult times', I wouldn't have a problem (I'm not going to get stentorian on the 'aesthetics of distraction', as would Kracauer or Adorno, in such a context). But he wasn't content with such a thing, he had to make much more extravagant claims for art in terms of enabling us to 'realize our perfection' (I shudder a bit at talk of human beings' achieving 'perfection') and that 'through art only' can we be shielded from things. I find those claims ridiculous.


I'm sorry, but you were the one to first use the phrase 'direct means'. All I'm saying, contrary to aesthetes, is that art isn't a substitute for political action (one doesn't have to be on the far left to believe that). And in the context of camp, to look more closely at its claims to 'subversion' and the question of whether what is supposedly being subverted might not be equally camp (and 'performative') if not more so. When I read claims being made for certain music's being 'subversive' (and such things are very common), in order to privilege it over other types, I think such claims should be examined for what they really mean. And especially in terms of the 'bad is good' aesthetic; I reckon there's enough bad stuff around without needing to make 'badness' into a virtue.

Well, that Karl Marx did something with his writings, which undoubtedly had an enormous impact.


Who knows how you've arrived at the conclusion that I was implying that? You might try reading.


Not at all, I just find the subject interesting. I don't know why you're posting in this thread if it bothers you so much. Have you got a particular axe to grind about the SWP?


How wider ideals of Camp relate to musical Camp was something I was asking people and offered some thoughts of my own in post #40.


I think you'll find that Susan Sontag did that long before I did. These issues may not be entirely irrelevant to discussions of Wagner, or Orff, also.


I don't know why you think that. I have thoughts, certainly (doesn't anyone who writes or posts?) but in no sense claim to have definitive 'answers'. And I'm very interested in other perspectives (and much of what I think is influenced by reading a variety of perspectives on subjects like this), in particular of those here - that's why the thread was started. But when some of your rather precious assumptions about art and artists are challenged, you seem to fly off into this type of rant.

I wondered, roslynmuse (or anyone else), if you know Faure and Messager's Souvenir de Bayreuth? I suppose many would identify that as a Camp piece; for those who don't know it, it's a very silly (and witty) selection of five bits from the Ring (including the Ride of the Valkyries and the Tarnhelm motive, for example) for piano duet, with daft oom-pah accompaniments, presumably no expansive rubato (or no rubato at all), to make the whole thing sound utterly frivolous. It's very enjoyable to hear and play (I did it with Finnissy last year), but in the end I do not find it particularly changes the way I hear Wagner. It doesn't 'deflate and emasculate' in such a manner that the original can never be heard in the same way again, at least not to my ears, though others might have different reactions. And I was wondering the possible reasons for this: I reckon it has to do with questions of tempo, rubato, and above all orchestration being so intrinsic to Wagner's music rather than merely appendages to it (in the sense of essentially decorating some deeper 'content'). And when those things are drastically altered, as in the Faure/Messager work, the resulting piece obviously shares many common features with the original, but is genuinely a different piece rather than simply a different rendition. It cannot wholly deflate because it has to strip the music of some essential attributes in order to attempt to do so (if that indeed was what was being attempted), which thus cannot themselves be deflated.

This makes me think also about the extent to which approaches to performance might not simply be seen as something external to compositions 'themselves'. To give a light-hearted example, compare traditional renderings of 'The Red Flag' (or, indeed, the setting by Cardew) with the signature tune to Citizen Smith (which can be heard/viewed here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt3WlkOTpHc ). In order to present the tune mockingly (as part of the process of deflating Wolfie Smith's rather ridiculous aspirations to lead a workers' revolution), it has to be significantly speeded up, made into four- rather than three-in-a-bar (to give it a more militaristic quality - however, note that Cardew also does this, though at a much slower tempo), whistled rather than sung, and so on. But this foregrounds performance attributes as much as anything else and to me makes clear how much the very impact 'The Red Flag' makes is tied in with its performance attributes, as well as the basic melodic, harmonic and rhythmic properties. It's not simply an appropriation but a wholescale modification.

Now that I've read all this, I don't quite know what to add!

I think my views are probably closest to those put by GG early on - camp as a deflater, even a defuser of unpleasant situations. I wonder if its true place is amongst the few, rather than the many; by which I mean it is effective in small communities with unusually close shared interests/concerns (eg a conservatoire or concentration camp - that sounds more flippant than I intend, but I'm sure you understand what I mean); to have an effect on a wider audience it needs to turn into something else (satire?) or else it fails because it is too weak a force. That is why I personally find Oscar Wilde misses the target more often than he hits it - in his comedies, at least (he isn't quite satirical enough, although the wit would go down a storm at a dinner party); and why W S Gilbert hits it more often than he misses it (he is genuinely satirical). The same point I made earlier come into play here again - Wilde is (like a glam-rocker!) just too self-aware in certain of his works to be anything other than camp.

I also partly agree with whoever started to say that camp is in the eye of the beholder. I certainly think that is the case with music. I made a mental review of all those pieces and composers I mentioned yesterday and I can't believe there was any intention to be camp on their part in those pieces. I'm sure it is all in the mind of the listener - I heard part of Sleeping Beauty this morning, and because this thread had been in my mind, I found it fitted many of the criteria we have been discussing. But - I think they fitted MY mind, TODAY, not Tchaikovsky's mind in 1890 (or whenever it was written). We live in an age which, though probably no more or less innocent, is more ready to find ready targets for deflation. Nothing is sacred, and so why should we be surprised to find anything (for example) associated with the world of ballet - including the music - suitable for mockery? I'm not sure if I've put that very clearly; perhaps another humourous example might help, by analogy. Anyone remember Melanie singing about Freud at Woodstock (to the tune of Batle Hymn of the Republic, I seem to recall) - something about him making a phallic symbol out of anything that was longer than it was wide? That's the danger we have here, it seems to me, and it's not far removed from finding rape in Beethoven 9 - if you want to find it you will; then after a few more discoveries you can't help finding it everywhere.

I haven't mentioned The Rocky Horror Show or The Producers, or Monty Python or even The Two Ronnies... perhaps that's just as well...

Messager/ Faure - don't know it, but I know Chabrier's equivalent on themes from Tristan (Souvenirs de Munich); also Peter Warlock's Cod-Pieces (on Beethoven 5 and the Franck Symphony) - affectionate mockery, gentle fun-poking; maybe camp-by-association.