Camp (style)

Camp is an aesthetic and sensibility that regards something as appealing or amusing because of its heightened level of artifice, affectation and exaggeration, especially when there is also a playful or ironic element. ''Camp'' is historically associated with LGBTQ culture and especially gay men. Camp aesthetics disrupt modernist understandings of high art by inverting traditional aesthetic judgements of beauty, value, and taste, and inviting a different kind of aesthetic engagement.

Camp art is distinct from but often confused with kitsch''.'' The American writer Susan Sontag emphasized its key elements as embracing frivolity, excess and artifice.'''' Art historian David Carrier notes that, despite these qualities, it is also subversive and political. ''Camp'' may be sophisticated, but subjects deemed ''camp'' may also be perceived as being dated, offensive or in bad taste.Babuscio (1993, 20), Feil (2005, 478), Morrill (1994, 110), Shugart and Waggoner (2008, 33), and Van Leer (1995) ''Camp'' may also be divided into ''high'' and ''low'' ''camp'' (i.e., camp arising from serious versus unserious matters), or alternatively into ''naive'' and ''deliberate camp'' (i.e., accidental versus intentional camp).Dansky, Steven F. "On the persistence of camp." ''The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide'' 20, no. 2 (2013): 15-19. While author and academic Moe Meyer defines ''camp'' as a form of "queer parody", journalist Jack Babuscio argues it is a specific "gay sensibility" which has often been "misused to signify the trivial, superficial and 'queer'".

''Camp'', as a particular style or set of mannerisms, may serve as a marker of identity, such as in ''camp talk'', which expresses a gay male identity. This ''camp style'' is associated with incongruity or juxtaposition, theatricality, and humour, and has appeared in film, cabaret, and pantomime. Both high and low forms of culture may be ''camp'', but where high art incorporates beauty and value, ''camp'' often strives to be lively, audacious and dynamic. ''Camp'' can also be tragic, sentimental and ironic, finding beauty or black comedy even in suffering. The humour of ''camp'', as well as its frivolity, may serve as a coping mechanism to deal with intolerance and marginalization in society.

Origins and development

The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' notes that the word ''camp'' was used as a verb since at least the 1500s. Writer Bruce Rodgers also traces the term ''camp'' to the 16th century, specifically to British theatre, where it referred to men dressed as women ( drag). ''Camp'' may have derived from the gay slang Polari, which borrowed the term from the Italian ''campare,'' or from the French term ''se camper'', meaning "to pose in an exaggerated fashion". A similar sense is also found in French theatre in Molière's 1671 play '' Les Fourberies de Scapin''.

Writer Susan Sontag and linguist Paul Baker place the "soundest starting point" for the modern sense of ''camp'', meaning ''flamboyant'', as the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Writer Anthony Burgess theorized it may have emerged from the primary sense of the word'','' as in a military encampment, where gay men would subtly advertize their sexuality in all-male company through a particular style and affectation.

By 1870, British crossdresser Frederick Park referred to his "campish undertakings" in a letter produced in evidence at his examination before a magistrate at Bow Street, London, on suspicion of illegal homosexual acts; the letter does not make clear what these were. In 1874, the ''Manchester Courier'' printed the description of a ticket for a Salford drag ball, called the "Queen of Camp" ball. According to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', the first definitive use of ''camp'' as an adjective in print occurred in the writing of J. R. Ware in 1909.''Oxford English Dictionary'', s.v. "camp (adj. & n.5)", December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7181450905. In the UK's pre- liberation gay culture, the term was used as a general description of the aesthetic choices and behavior of working-class gay men.Esther Newton (1978): ''Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America'', University of Chicago Press. . The term ''camp'' is still sometimes used in the UK to describe a gay man who is perceived as outwardly garish or eccentric, such as Matt Lucas' character Daffyd Thomas in the English comedy skit show '' Little Britain''.

From the mid-1940s, numerous representations of ''camp speech'' or ''camp'' ''talk'', as used by gay men, began to appear in print in America, France and the United Kingdom. By the mid-1970s, camp was defined by the college edition of ''Webster's New World Dictionary'' as "banality, mediocrity, artifice, ndostentation ... so extreme as to amuse or have a perversely sophisticated appeal".In America, the concept of camp was also described by Christopher Isherwood in 1954 in his novel '' The World in the Evening'', and later by Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay ' Notes on "Camp"'. Two key components of the "radical spectacle of camp" were originally feminine performances: swish and drag. With swish's extensive use of superlatives and drag's exaggerated female impersonation, camp occasionally became extended to all things "over the top", including women posing as female impersonators ( faux queens) such as Carmen Miranda, while also retaining its meaning as "queer parody".Moe Meyer (2010): ''An Archaeology of Posing: Essays on Camp, Drag, and Sexuality'', Macater Press, .Moe Meyer (2011): ''The Politics and Poetics of Camp'', Routledge, .Cohan, Steven. ''Incongruous entertainment: Camp, cultural value, and the MGM musical''. Duke University Press, 2005. p.11, 274.

In her study of drag, cultural anthropologist Esther Newton argued that ''camp'' has three major features: incongruity, theatricality, and humour. In his 1984, writer George Melly argued that the camp sensibility allowed almost anything to be seen as a ''camp'', and that this was a way of projecting one's own queer sensibility upon the world to therefore reclaim it. Conversely, he argued, the biggest threat to camp wasn't heterosexuals ("who tend to accept it, although usually at a fairly broad and superficial level"), but "a neo-puritanism, a received conformism" emerging among gay people at the time.

The rise of postmodernism and queer theory has made ''camp'' a common perspective on aesthetics, not solely identified with gay men.Morrill, Cynthia. "Revamping the Gay Sensibility: Queer Camp and ''dyke noir''." In Moe Meyer (ed). ''The Politics and Poetics of Camp''. Routledge, 2005. p.94. Women (especially lesbians), trans people, and people of colour have described new forms of ''camp'', such as ''dyke camp'' (including subcategories such as ''cubana'' and ''high-femme dyke camp'') and ''queer of color camp''.

''Camp'' has also been a subject of psychoanalytic theory, where it has been portrayed as a form of performance or ''masquerade''. Scholar Cynthia Morrill has argued that the conception of "camp-as-masquerade" ignores the specifically queer sensibility of ''camp'' by interrogating queerness through a heteronormative lens (i.e., solely in relation to the symbol of the phallus).

''Camp'' has become prevalent in mainstream popular entertainment such as theatre, cinema, TV and music. In reaction to its popularisation, critics such as Jack Babuscio and Jeanette Cooperman have argued that ''camp'' requires the alienation of LGBTQ+ people from the mainstream to maintain its edge. Poet and scholar Chris Philpot, like Cooperman, nevertheless argues that ''camp'' can still be a viable "survival strategy" for marginalized queer people, so long as it evolves with them. Curator Andrew Bolton, after his show ''Camp: Notes on Fashion'' at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, explains that context is also important for understanding the power and relevance of camp: "Camp tends to come to the fore through moments of social and political instability, when our society is deeply polarized. The 1960s is one such moment, as were the 1980s, so, too, are the times in which we're living."

''Camp'' in contemporary culture

Fashion

Patrick Kelly's designs have been described as camp and "Radical Cheek" for his ironic use of bold colours, antiquated or incongruous styles, and reclaimed racist symbols. He designed a banana dress in reference to Josephine Baker and dedicated a whole collection to her. He used mismatched buttons when creating his own take on a Chanel suit. By the time he died in 1990, he had dressed noted queer icons such as Grace Jones and Isabella Rossellini. His grave is marked with a stylized golliwog—a reclaimed symbol for his label—featuring big gold earrings and bright red lips.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. The show featured tributes to queer and camp figures, including a bronze statue of the Vatican's Belvedere Antinous, portraits of Louis XIV and Oscar Wilde, and celebrations of Black and Latinx ball culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Dapper Dan—whose luxurious fashion has been credited with camping up the hip-hop genre—designed seven camp outfits for Gucci, worn at the gala by 21 Savage, Omari Hardwick, Regina Hall, Bevy Smith, Ashley Graham and Karlie Kloss (he wore the seventh).

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. Gaga arrived in a hot pink Brandon Maxwell gown with a 25-foot train and went through a series of four "reveals," paying homage to drag culture, debuting a new outfit each time, until reaching her final look: a bra and underwear with fishnets and platform heels. 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.

Film

Melodrama films have been celebrated for their unintentional camp content by gay male culture long before critics and academics first defined the genre in the 1970s. Some writers have even considered the genre to be "cinema made for and by gay men." In addition to the films of Douglas Sirk (the greatest exponent of melodrama), several works by Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, Billy Wilder and Joseph Losey acquired cult status among gay men because of the "very excessiveness, extreme emotionality, mannered performances, style and very direct sentimental form of address that these films demonstrate". Several features of the family melodrama, later emphasized by film theorists as integral to the subversive and progressive essence of the genre, were precisely the attributes that gay men found humorous. Several later exponents of gay cinema, like John Waters, Pedro Almodóvar, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes, among others, have cited campy melodramas as a major influence.

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, and who created films which achieved cult status. The 1972 musical ''Cabaret'' is also seen as an example of the aesthetic, with film critic Esther Leslie describing the camp in the film thus:

Camp thrives on tragic gestures, on lament at the transience of life, on an excess of sentiment, an ironic sensibility that art and artifice is preferable to nature and health, in a Wildean sense.

Australian writer/director Baz Luhrmann's Red Curtain Trilogy, in particular the film '' Strictly Ballroom'' (1992), has been described as camp.
The term camp is also used prominently in the horror genre, with examples including '' Killer Klowns from Outer Space'', or The Evil Dead franchise.

Literature

'' Dandyism'' is often seen as a precursor to camp, especially as embodied in Oscar Wilde and his work. The character of Amarinth in Robert Hichens's '' The Green Carnation'' (1894), based on Wilde, uses "camp coding" in his "effusive and inverted" use of language.

The scene where Anthony Blanche arrives late to Sebastian Flyte's lunch party in Evelyn Waugh's '' Brideshead Revisited'', has been described by writer George Melly as an example of ''camp'''s "alchemical ability" to project a queer sensibility upon the world and unite one's peers in that sensibility.

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 the embrace of artifice, frivolity, naivety, pretentiousness, offensiveness, and 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. However, critics of Sontag's description, such as art historian David Carrier, say that it is outdated and that "her celebration of its ecstatic marginality downplays its implicit subversiveness".

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 camp people, and thus appeal to them.

In his 1984 book ''Camp: The Lie That Tells The Truth'', writer and artist Philip Core describes Jean Cocteau's autobiography as "the definition of camp".

In 1993, journalist Russell Davies published comedian Kenneth Williams's diaries. Williams's diary entry for 1 January 1947 reads: "Went to Singapore with Stan—very camp evening, was followed, but tatty types so didn't bother to make overtures."

Music

American singer and actress Cher is one of the artists who received the title of "Queen of Camp" through her colourful on-stage fashion and live performances. She gained this status in the 1970s when she launched her variety shows in collaboration with the costume designer Bob Mackie and became a constant presence on American prime-time television. Madonna is also considered camp and according to educator Carol Queen, her "whole career up to and including '' Sex'' has depended heavily on camp imagery and camp understandings of gender and sex". Madonna has also been named "Queen of Camp".

In public and on stage, Dusty Springfield developed an image supported by her peroxide blonde beehive hairstyle, evening gowns, and heavy make-up that included her much-copied "panda eye" look.Laurense Cole (2008) ''Dusty Springfield: in the middle of nowhere'', Middlesex University Press. p. 13. Springfield borrowed elements of her look from blonde glamour queens of the 1950s, such as Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve.Bob Gulla (2007) ''Icons of R&B and Soul: An Encyclopedia of the Artists Who Revolutionized Rhythm'', Greenwood Publishing Group This, her singing style and her sexuality made her a "camp icon" and won her a following in the gay community. Besides the prototypical female drag queen, she was presented in the roles of the "Great White Lady" of pop and soul, and the "Queen of Mods".

Rappers such as Lil' Kim, Nicki Minaj and Cam'ron have all been described as camp, often because of the opulence and winking humour of their personas. Dapper Dan has been credited with introducing high fashion and camp to hip hop. In pop and rock, musicians Prince and Jimi Hendrix have also been called camp because of their flamboyance and playful use of artifice.

South Korean rapper Psy, known for his viral internet music videos full of flamboyant dance and visuals, has come to be seen as a 21st-century incarnation of camp style."Exploring Psy's Digital Dandy Appeal In 'Gangnam Style' "
(3 October 2012) ''Rolling Stone'' (retrieved 21 April 2013) Geri Halliwell is recognized as a camp icon for her high camp aesthetics, performance style and kinship with the gay community during her time as a solo artist.

Dancer, singer and actress Josephine Baker has been described as ''camp.'' Her famous banana dress has been noted as particularly camp for its flamboyant, humorous and ironic qualities, as well as the way it makes a political point using outdated but reclaimed imagery.

Lady Gaga, a contemporary exemplar of camp, uses music and dance to make social commentary on pop culture, as in the "Judas" music video. Her clothes, makeup, and accessories, created by high-end fashion designers, are integral to the narrative structure of her performances. Katy Perry has also been described as camp, with outlets like '' Vogue'' describing her as another "Queen of Camp".

The British tradition of the " Last Night of the Proms" has been said to glory in "nostalgia, camp, and pastiche". ''Camp'' still forms a strong element in UK culture, and many so-called gay icons and objects are chosen as such because they are camp, including musicians such as Elton John, Kylie Minogue, Lulu, and Mika.

Musicologist Philip Brett has highlighted campness in the work of Benjamin Britten and has also argued for a camp reading of French composer Francis Poulenc's ''Concerto for Two Pianos in D minor'', noting its combination of a Balinese gamelan with a sense of "musical resignation and longing".

Musicologist Raymond Knapp has compared ''musical camp'' to jazz, especially in camp's playfulness and admiration for its subjects, which can seem mocking but often borders on veneration. He argues that musical camp draws attention to its performativity and inspirations, while engaging the audience interactively in the process of creating meaning.

Photography

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'', attests to a campy aesthetic, quite close to the gay movement in California or a Peter Greenaway film.

Television

The Comedy Central television show '' Strangers with Candy'' (1999–2000), starring comedian Amy Sedaris, was a camp spoof of the '' ABC Afterschool Special'' genre. 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.

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 LGBTQ+ communities—in their stage performances. This is especially true 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 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.

Theatre

Andrew Holleran's 1988 book of essays, '' Ground Zero'', includes an analysis of "smoldering anarchist of kitsch" Charles Ludlam—a theatre artist who produced what Garth Greenwell describes as "extravagant drag epics" with Ridiculous Theatrical Company, until his death of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. Greenwell writes: "Holleran's essay is the most concise and profound discussion of camp aesthetics I know."

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 students: 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''."

In the UK, the music hall tradition of pantomime, which often uses drag and other features of ''camp'', remains a popular form of entertainment for families and young children. Most towns and cities in the UK stage at least one pantomime between November and February, drawing in an estimated £146 million in 2014.

Distinguishing between kitsch and camp

The words ''camp'' and ''kitsch'' are often used interchangeably, though they are distinct. ''Camp'' is rooted in a specifically queer sensibility, informed by queer identity and culture, whereas ''kitsch'' is rooted in the rise of mass-produced art and popular culture for the mainstream. Both terms may relate to an object or work that carries aesthetic value, but ''kitsch'' refers specifically to the work itself, whereas ''camp'' is a sensibility as well as a mode of performance. A person may consume ''kitsch'' intentionally or unintentionally, but ''camp'', as Susan Sontag observed, is always a way of consuming or performing culture "in quotation marks".

Sontag also distinguishes between ''naïve'' and ''deliberate'' ''camp'', and examines Christopher Isherwood's distinction between ''low camp''—which he associated with cross-dressing and drag performances—and ''high camp''—which included "the whole emotional basis of the Ballet, for example, and of course of Baroque art". ''High camp'' has also been used to describe drag that is more subtle or ironic, as opposed to drag that is more parodic and obvious (and thus ''low camp'').

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. 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". Those who identify objects as "camp" note the distance often apparent in the process through which "unexpected value can be located in some obscure or exorbitant object."

In its subversiveness and irony, camp can also suggest the possibility of overturning the status quo, making it a far more "radical spectacle" than ''kitsch''. Musicologist Philip Brett has described camp as:

a strategy which confronts un-queer ontology tates of beingand homophobia with humor and which by those same means may also signal the possibility of the overturn of that ontology—as when, on a famous night in 1969, the evening of the funeral of Judy Garland, the mood of a group of gays and drag queens reveling in the spectacle of their own arrest by members of the New York City Vice Squad at the Stonewall Bar turned to one of rage and produced the event that solidified the lesbian and gay movement.

See also

* Avant-garde
* Asemic writing
* Collection de l'art brut
* Glam rock
* Horror vacui
* Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art
* Lowbrow (art movement)
* Neo-pop
* Pop art
* Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments
* Surrealism
* Vernacular architecture

Notes

References

Sources

* Babuscio, Jack (1993) "Camp and the Gay Sensibility" in ''Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality'', David Bergman Ed., U of Massachusetts, Amherst
* Feil, Ken (2005) "Queer Comedy", in ''Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide'' Vol. 2. pp. 19–38, 477–492, Maurice Charney Ed., Praeger, Westport, CN
* Levine, Martin P. (1998) ''Gay Macho'', New York UP, New York
* Meyer, Moe, Ed. (1994) ''The Politics and Poetics of Camp'', Routledge, London and New York
** Morrill, Cynthia (1994) "Revamping the Gay Sensibility: Queer Camp and ''dyke noir''" (In Meyer pp. 110–129)
* Helene A. Shugart and Catherine Egley Waggoner (2008) ''Making Camp: Rhetorics of Transgression in U.S. Popular Culture'', U of Alabama P., Tuscaloosa
* Van Leer, David (1995) ''The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society'', Routledge, London and New York

Further reading

* Baker, Paul (2023). ''Camp! The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World''. London: Footnote Press.
* Core, Philip (1984/1994). ''CAMP, The Lie That Tells the Truth'', foreword by George Melly. London: Plexus Publishing Limited.
* Cleto, Fabio, editor (1999). ''Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject''. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. .
* Padva, Gilad (2008). "Educating The Simpsons: Teaching Queer Representations in Contemporary Visual Media". ''Journal of LGBT Youth'' 5(3), 57–73.
* Padva, Gilad and Talmon, Miri (2008). "Gotta Have An Effeminate Heart: The Politics of Effeminacy and Sissyness in a Nostalgic Israeli TV Musical". ''Feminist Media Studies'' 8(1), 69–84.
* Padva, Gilad (2005). "Radical Sissies and Stereotyped Fairies in Laurie Lynd's The Fairy Who Didn't Want To Be A Fairy Anymore". ''Cinema Journal'' 45(1), 66–78.
* Padva, Gilad (2000). "Priscilla Fights Back: The Politicization of Camp Subculture". ''Journal of Communication Inquiry'' 24(2), 216–243.
* Meyer, Moe, editor (1993). ''The Politics and Poetics of Camp''. Routledge. .
* Sontag, Susan (1964). "Notes on Camp" in ''Against Interpretation and Other Essays''. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. .

External links

*
Notes on "Camp"
' by Susan Sontag

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1900s neologisms
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LGBTQ terminology
Gay working-class culture
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Postmodernism
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