camp

Susan Sontag “Notes on Camp” (1964)

• “Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” (Sontag, 1)
• “To talk about Camp is to therefore betray it.” (Sontag, 1)
• “Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic in taste: the consistent sensibility that underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.” (Sontag, 1)
• TASTE: a concept that “governs every free… human response.” (Sontag, 1) Based on one’s identity and natural responses.
• CAMP: “a certain mode of aestheticism,” (Sontag, 2) that leans less on beauty, and more on exaggerated stylization and attitude. Both a way of making something and a way of looking at something. A celebration of the “off.”
• Sontag argues camp is “apolitical” which I disagree with.
• “The camp eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. It is not all in the eye of the beholder.” (Sontag, 2)
• Examples of Camp from Sontag: King Kong, old Flash Gordan comics, women’s clothing in the 20s (feather boas, beaded headdresses), the atmosphere is Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” Oscar Wilde’s quotations
• “The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility… Camp sees everything in quotations… a lamp is not a lamp it is a ‘lamp.’” (Sontag, 4)
• Camp that is intentionally performed as camp is deemed as “less satisfying.” (Sontag, 5) Sontag argues that true, successful Camp takes itself seriously and fails to do so. (Sontag, 6-7)
• “One is drawn to Camp when one realizes ‘sincerity’ is not enough… the traditional means of going beyond seriousness [and sincerity]- irony, satire- seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled.” (Sontag 10-11)
• “Camp is solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness,” (Sontag 13)
• “Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; there exists a good taste of bad taste.” (Sontag 14)
• “Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation- not judgement,” (Sontag 14)
• “Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature… [it] nourishes itself on the love that goes into certain objects and personal styles,” (Sontag 14)

Queering the Camp by Fabio Cleto 1999

• “[Camp is] tentatively approached as sensibility, taste, or style, reconceptualized as as aesthetic or cultural economy, and later asserted/reclaimed as (queer) discourse, camp hasn’t lost its relentless power to frustrate all efforts to pinpoint down stability…” (Cleto 2)
• Quotes a French translation from Mauries identifying Camp as an impossible conversation of discourse.

status: 2. sapling