THE MIDGET STOOD ON TIPTOE, TELEPHONING

Voices battled with other voices, landslides of laughter and the juke-box that never stopped.  People carried glasses above their heads as they made their way through the dancers.  In one corner the midget stood on tiptoe, telephoning.

 

Excerpt from: Gavin Lambert, “Nukuhiva,” first chapter in “The Slide Area,” New York, The Viking Press, 1959.

Note:  I learned about Gavin Lambert’s “The Slide Area” from Tom Clark’s Beyond The Pale blog.  It’s extraordinary and the first book I’ve felt compelled to read compulsively by candlelight (that’s the way it is 2/6/14 A.D. in Chester County, Pennsylvania) for a long, long time.  More soon, in daylight I trust.

Artwork:  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.  Upper:  At The Moulin Rouge (1892-95); Lower:  Dancing At The Moulin Rouge (1897). 

 

The Wager

It has already become apparent that one of the dangers constantly threatening a sociology of art is a static definition of social life.

 

And such terms as ‘environment,’ ‘institution,’ and ‘infrastructure’ ought to be consigned to museums because they tempt us to think of collective experience as fixed, immobile and similar to the inert matter studied by physicists in the past.

The better our understanding of the fact that there is a permanent relationship, varying according to the social setting, between all the forces at work within the framework of collective life, the deeper our awareness of the existential reality of the work of art. Is not one of the most harmful illusions that of regarding artistic expression as some kind of specialist activity, completely foreign to the reality of current  problems?

It seems to us, on the contrary, that all artistic creation, on whatever level it takes place and whatever the ideologies used to justify it, is directly linked to that collective freedom which is a vital part of the human condition, which overthrows even the most inert and petrified of structures and which forces human groups (from whom collective representations and classifications are the means by which they achieve integration and immobility) to make changes and to become involved in history.


This relationship is not always perceptible.

NOTE:  My enfeebled brain deciphers that my utterly static social life stands in dangerous and threatening defiance to a sociology of art or, as Professor John Fletcher describes it: “a prologemenon to a sociology of the imaginative function itself.”  (Who knew?) 



But at this point in my turning-and-tossing I haven't decided whether I should somehow try to remedy this situation or simply incorporate it as a credential, a "resume item." It’s all marketing and, as Lou Reed temporized the issue for the ages, “I guess that I just don’t know.” 

Lou Reed: I Can't Stand It (Link)

Text:  "The Wager" (excerpt) from "The Sociology of Art" -- Jean Duvignaud, New York, Harper & Row, 1972.