Camp (style)
Camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value.[1] Camp aesthetics disrupt many of modernism's notions of what art is and what can be classified as high art by inverting aesthetic attributes such as beauty, value, and taste through an invitation of a different kind of apprehension and consumption.[2]
"Campy" redirects here. For other uses, see Campy (disambiguation).
Camp can also be a social practice and function as a style and performance identity for several types of entertainment including film, cabaret, and pantomime. Where high art necessarily incorporates beauty and value, camp necessarily needs to be lively, audacious and dynamic. The visual style is closely associated with gay culture.[2]
Camp art is related to and often confused with kitsch and things with camp appeal may be described as cheesy. In 1909, Oxford English Dictionary defined camp as "ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual"[3] behavior, and by the middle of the 1970s, camp was defined by the college edition of Webster's New World Dictionary as "banality, mediocrity, artifice, [and] ostentation ... so extreme as to amuse or have a perversely sophisticated appeal".[4] The American writer Susan Sontag's essay Notes on "Camp" (1964) emphasized its key elements as: "artifice, frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness, and shocking excess".[5]
Contemporary culture[edit]
Television[edit]
The Comedy Central television show Strangers with Candy (1999–2000), starring comedian Amy Sedaris, was a camp spoof of the ABC Afterschool Special genre.[13][14][15] Inspired by the work of George Kuchar and his brother Mike Kuchar, ASS Studios began making a series of short, no-budget camp films. Their feature film Satan, Hold My Hand (2013) features many elements recognized in camp pictures.[16][17]
Film[edit]
Famous representatives of camp films are, for example, John Waters (Pink Flamingos, 1972) and Rosa von Praunheim (The Bed Sausage, 1971), who mainly used this style in the 1970s, created films which achieved a cult status.[18][19]
Distinguishing between kitsch and camp[edit]
The words "camp" and "kitsch" are often used interchangeably; both may relate to art, literature, music, or any object that carries an aesthetic value. However, "kitsch" refers specifically to the work itself, whereas "camp" is a mode of performance. Thus, a person may consume kitsch intentionally or unintentionally. Camp, as Susan Sontag observed, is always a way of consuming or performing culture "in quotation marks".[39]
Sontag also distinguishes between "naive" and "deliberate" camp,[40] and examines Christopher Isherwood's distinction between low camp, which he associated with cross-dressing practices and drag performances, and high camp, which included "the whole emotional basis of the Ballet, for example, and of course of Baroque art".[41]
According to sociologist Andrew Ross, camp combines outmoded and contemporary forms of style, fashion, and technology. Often characterized by the reappropriation of a "throwaway Pop aesthetic", camp works to intermingle the categories of "high" and "low" culture.[42] Objects may become camp objects because of their historical association with a power now in decline. As opposed to kitsch, camp reappropriates culture in an ironic fashion, whereas kitsch is indelibly sincere. Additionally, kitsch may be seen as a quality of an object, while camp "tends to refer to a subjective process".[43] Those who identify objects as "camp" commemorate the distance mirrored in the process through which "unexpected value can be located in some obscure or exorbitant object."[44]
In the Western World[edit]
Comedian Kenneth Williams wrote in a diary entry for 1 January 1947: "Went to Singapore with Stan—very camp evening, was followed, but tatty types so didn't bother to make overtures."[45] Although it applies to gay men, it is a specific adjective used to describe a man who openly promotes the fact that he is gay by being outwardly garish or eccentric, for example, the character Daffyd Thomas in the English comedy skit show Little Britain. "Camp" forms a strong element in UK culture, and many so-called gay icons and objects are chosen as such because they are camp. Performers such as Elton John,[46] Kylie Minogue, John Inman, Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen, Lulu, Graham Norton, Mika, Lesley Joseph, Ruby Wax, Dale Winton, and Cilla Black, as well as the music hall tradition of the pantomime are camp elements in popular culture. The British tradition of the "Last Night of the Proms" has been said to glory in "nostalgia, camp, and pastiche".[47] Thomas Dworzak published a collection of "last portrait" photographs of young Taliban soldiers about to depart for the front, found in Kabul photo studios. The book, titled Taliban,[48][49] attests to a campy esthetic, quite close to the gay movement in California or a Peter Greenaway film.[50]
The Australian theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky is renowned for his use of camp in interpreting the works of the Western canon, including Shakespeare, Wagner, Molière, Seneca and Kafka; his 2006 eight-hour production for the Sydney Theatre Company The Lost Echo was based on Ovid's Metamorphoses and Euripides's The Bacchae. In the first act ("The Song of Phaeton"), for instance, the goddess Juno takes the form of a highly stylized Marlene Dietrich, and the musical arrangements feature Noël Coward and Cole Porter. Kosky's use of camp is also effectively employed to satirize the pretensions, manners, and cultural vacuity of Australia's suburban middle class, which is suggestive of the style of Dame Edna Everage. For example, in The Lost Echo Kosky employs a chorus of high school girls and boys: one girl in the chorus takes leave from the goddess Diana, and begins to rehearse a dance routine, muttering to herself in a broad Australian accent, "Mum says I have to practice if I want to be on Australian Idol." Australian writer/director Baz Luhrmann, in particular "Strictly Ballroom", constitutes another example.
Since 2000, the Eurovision Song Contest, an annually televised competition of song performers from different countries, has shown an increasing element of camp—since the contest has shown an increasing attraction within the gay communities—in their stage performances, especially during the televised finale, which is screened live across Europe. As it is a visual show, many Eurovision performances attempt to attract the attention of the voters through means other than the music, which sometimes leads to bizarre onstage gimmicks, and what some critics have called "the Eurovision kitsch drive", with almost cartoonish novelty acts performing.[51]
The 2019 Met Gala's theme was Camp: Notes on Fashion, co-chaired by Anna Wintour, Serena Williams, Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, and Alessandro Michele.[52] Lady Gaga's entrance took 16 minutes, as she arrived to the gala alongside an entourage of five dancers carrying umbrellas, a make up artist, and a personal photographer to snap pictures of Gaga's poses.[53] Gaga arrived in a hot pink Brandon Maxwell gown with a 25-foot train[54] and went through a series of four "reveals," paying homage to drag culture,[53] debuting a new outfit each time, until reaching her final look: a bra and underwear with fishnets and platform heels.[55] Other notable ensembles included Katy Perry wearing a gown that looked like a chandelier, designed by Moschino, and Kacey Musgraves appearing as a life-size Barbie, also by Moschino.[56]
Literature[edit]
The first post-World War II use of the word in print may be Christopher Isherwood's 1954 novel The World in the Evening, where he comments: "You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance." In the American writer Susan Sontag's 1964 essay Notes on "Camp", Sontag emphasized artifice, frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness, and shocking excess as key elements of camp. Examples cited by Sontag included Tiffany lamps, the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, and Japanese science fiction films such as Rodan, and The Mysterians of the 1950s.
In Mark Booth's 1983 book Camp, he defines camp as "to present oneself as being committed to the marginal with a commitment greater than the marginal merits". He makes a distinction between genuine camp, and camp fads and fancies, things that are not intrinsically camp, but display artificiality, stylization, theatricality, naivety, sexual ambiguity, tackiness, poor taste, stylishness, or portray camp people, and thus appeal to them.