There are few more mercurial cultural concepts than camp – or more enduring ones. America’s current king of TV camp, Ryan Murphy, is winning new accolades with his arch, neon-lit true-crime drama The Assassination of Gianni Versace. The Winter Olympics’ breakout star, ice skater Adam Rippon, set gay Twitter aflame by arriving at the Oscars wearing a Jeremy Scott tux and leather harness. Jonathan van Ness, long-haired, plaid-skirted grooming expert of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, has ensured that viewers of the Netflix show now “spray, delay and walk away” when applying cologne.
So far, so fabulous. But also so familiar: camp is, after all, a perennial feature of style for white gay men. Yet camp can also be radical. At Paris fashion week this month, Japanese label Comme Des Garçons presented an alternative vision. On displaywere ruffles, clashing polka-dot and tartan patterns, voluminous panto-dame petticoats and endless puckering layers.
Designer Rei Kawakubo declared that the collection had been inspired by the cultural critic Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay Notes on Camp, which helped define and explain this cultural phenomenon. Kawakubo echoed Sontag’s claim that camp is not simply clumsy over-exaggeration or bad taste. “On the contrary,” the designer said, “camp is really and truly something deep and new and represents a value we need.”
Kawakubo had a point. When vulgarity has become not just a matter of bad taste in curtains but a political strategy that can put you in the White House, camp is an aesthetic tool that needs re-evaluating and refreshing. For Sontag, camp was ineffable. Notes on Camp was structured as a series of jottings rather than a formal essay because camp is a sensibility – a way of seeing – rather than a tightly definable idea. Still, she drew out a whole bouquet of its possible characteristics.
Above all else, she said, camp is about artifice. Even when it takes nature as its source, it revels in stylising it – like the art nouveau lamps of the Paris Metro which are absurd renditions of orchids, or the ceiling of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, a vaulting arrangement of serrated stone leaves. Camp also blurs high and low culture. The same extravagant artifice of Gaudí’s campy forest canopy can be found in the reality TV show franchises The Real Housewives or Made in Chelsea, where authenticity is rejected in favour of fabricated drama, all big hair and outsized personalities. Sontag sees nuance of character and the development of emotional complexity as anathema to camp. “What camp taste responds to is ‘instant character,’” she wrote. “Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence – a person being one, very intense thing.”
This is what makes camp so slippery. It requires a constant switching of aesthetic and emotional registers, of finding an ironic joy in ridiculous drama while still, somehow, sincerely loving and identifying with it. Strictly Come Dancing could not have survived 15 seasons on knowing irony alone: to read camp, one must recognise how artificial so much in our lives is, and then revel in its glittering falseness.
It’s this puffed-up love of artifice that Kawakubo celebrates. For Sontag, however, the best camp has no idea that it is camp. Fifty years on from her essay, our own arch icon must surely be Vladimir Putin: the frequent photoshoots portraying the Russian premier riding horseback topless, or scuba-diving for Greek urns, are performances of masculinity so overblown they become comic. Putin isn’t playing camp, but we can’t help but read him that way. As Sontag stresses, “in naive, or pure, camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails.”
Putin now finds his mirror in the White House. It’s not just his love of parades and big hair that renders Trump camp. His very language is full of camp affect and hyperbolic overstatement, as comedian Peter Serafinowicz reveals in Sassy Trump, his dubbed reworkings of Trump’s speeches.
For years, gay people have played withthe concept of “butch”, making it silly, sexy and subversive, so it’s no wonder there is confusion between camp masculinity and homosexuality. Camp regards gender as something you can perform. As Sontag said: “To perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” She highlights the “corny flamboyant female-ness” of such actresses as Gina Lollobrigida. These days we might see a ripped Channing Tatum, or an eyelash-fluttering Cardi B, as consciously playing up a camp shtick of gender norms.
Sontag remarked that camp’s obsession with style at the expense of content rendered it “depoliticised … or at least apolitical” – an idea that history has since overturned. Camp’s obsession with playing up, and subverting, the performance of gender and sexuality has clearly had a significant effect on our society, and the queer audience has become a powerful force in the face of discrimination and oppression. A sensibility is a way of seeing, consuming and enjoying culture; sharing a sensibility in the social media age creates a community that can see and talk to itself.
Put another way, how some queer people consume culture is an art form in itself. Take RuPaul’s Drag Race, the cult reality show where queens pitch themselves in fierce competition for the title of America’s Next Drag Superstar. The show is pasted thick with irony (it models itself as a take-off of America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway). Drag Race has become a cultural lodestone in gay communities with obsessive championing of favourite queens and endless rumination on tactics making ready-made topics of conversation among strangers. In other words, it’s football for gay people. Social media has amplified and made global this queer fan culture.
This audience is far from apolitical, as RuPaul discovered. After telling the Guardian earlier this month that he would “probably not” let a trans woman compete on the show, large sections of its fanbase, as well as former queens, spoke out against him. Despite RuPaul being the titular figurehead, the fans know that what produces the show’s richness is the shared culture created by those who bond over it – and that culture increasingly recognises the role played both in the show, and in wider LGBT culture, by trans and non-binary people.
This is what has changed since Sontag wrote her notes: the idea of culture being something produced in one sector and passively consumed in another is over. In the social media age, the audience makes the culture through the sensibility it displays. It makes new connections, remixing and recontextualising cultural objects as it goes. The role of self-defined “creative” in the modern aesthetic economy is not so much one of creating new trends, but spotting them as they arise from the general population, amplifying them and appropriating them. Artists themselves are largely at the mercy of their fans’ creativity, and when that creativity is camp, it brings into play powerful forces that allow the audience to produce new meanings, and celebrate unlikely and dangerous protagonists.
Perhaps Kawakubo is right – camp is a value we need. When absolutism is becoming the order of the day, camp insists upon nuance. It knows that what makes something serious and heavy for one viewer makes it hilariously silly for another. And it knows that to fully appreciate culture, all these meanings must sit together in the object, to be wrestled and played with. It empowers the audience to undermine authority, to destabilise meaning, to change art. Camp regards nuance, enjoyment and brocade ruffles as virtues in their own right – although it would never be so vulgar or boring as to say so.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion