Camp (aesthetics)

Camp comes from the French se camper, meaning "to adopt a pose of excessive manners." The Oxford English Dictionary provides the first definition of a camp in 1909: “ostentatious, exaggerated, made, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; homosexual owned. As a noun, this is a camp as behavior, mannerism, etc .; a person exhibiting such behavior. " The etymology remains nevertheless completely unclear.
Later, the word was used to denote the aesthetic preferences and behavior of homosexual working class men ^[6] . In the end, with the penetration of the phenomena indicated by the word into the cultural mainstream, it became an independent definition, recorded by the American art critic Susan Sontag in "Camp Notes". Postmodernism has turned camp into a kind of general type of sensitivity, not attributed to any narrow group. Initially, the camp was a hallmark of the male gay communities of the era that preceded the Stonewall riots . The basis of this sensitivity is the perception of homosexuality as femininity (social roles in which it is embodied) ^[7] . Two key components of the camp were patterns of female behavior, indicated on the slang swish (smooth feminine gait, soft gestures, falsetto, characteristic vocabulary) and drag (wearing clothes that are stably associated with a certain gender role by a person of a different gender ). These components are characterized by the use of feminine elements in an exaggerated, unnatural, grotesque degree, which paved the way for a broader understanding of the camp - now it also includes images of some Hollywood actresses that clearly have the same features ( Carmen Miranda ). It is in this understanding that the camp becomes part of the conceptual apparatus of art and literary criticism of the 60s.

Camp as a special type of sensitivity is characterized by a certain ratio of aesthetic categories of beauty and ugliness, serious and frivolous, naivety and mannerism, style and content.
The dominance of the camp is frivolity (play), an excess of form, an emphasized conscious orientation on artificiality and aesthetics, pushing back, obscuring the content ^[8] .
The three-part division of Susan Sontag in Camp Notes ^[9] allows us to outline the contours of this sensitivity. If the first, classical sensitivity (high culture: The Iliad , the comedies of Aristophanes , Rembrandt , The Divine Comedy , Socrates , Christ ) subjugates the aesthetic side of morality (its dilemmas, contradictions, etc.), the second, “ avant-garde ” exists in tension between aesthetic passion and morality, singing the ugly, immoral ( Garden , Rimbaud , Kafka , Artaud ), then the third sensitivity - camp - excludes the moral side, any seriousness, tragedy , leaving the aesthetic side, and therefore becomes an entertainer Noah.
The camp is inherent in its artificiality, mannerism, magnificent form. A work fails to become an artifact of Camp aesthetics if it is good, successful, serious, devoid of marginality. “Camp is a consistent aesthetic worldview. He embodies the victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality, irony over tragedy ” ^[10] .
Departing from seriousness, from content, focusing on the aesthetic side, the camp is such a sensitivity that is not a style, but the ability to perceive other styles, to see everything in quotation marks: a thing like “playing a role”. Camp - enjoyment of the aesthetic side, artificiality, reaching the vulgarity, according to the well-known definition of Sontag - " dendism in the age of mass culture " ^[11] . Often the camp’s illustration is represented by images of musical performers and actors, distinguished by exaggerated sexual characteristics, when femininity and masculinity become a set of accented features - the carrier itself is lost behind them, and this makes them meaningless; examples are Gina Lollobrigida , Steve Reeves .

Camp and kitsch are close. As the grounds for the similarity of kitsch and camp, the retreat from a difficult, deep, craving for a more easily digestible, bad taste is indicated ^[12] . However, the latter is not always associated with the latter ^[13] .
Often kitsch is used as a synonym for bad taste. Camp is understood as intentional kitsch, kitsch in quotation marks is the aesthetization of evil, repulsive, and in this form, getting pleasure from it ^[14] . Camp things for a serious look that does not share love for him are essentially kitsch. Therefore, the camp is spoken of as the perception of an aesthetic object or lifestyle, while kitsch refers to the object itself, its execution. Camp cannot be conceived ^[8] or executed - but it is possible with kitsch, and such an object can be perceived as camp.

Camp aesthetics can be discovered in much of what makes up the baggage of today's popular culture. This is primarily the television series: The Addams Family , Star Trek: The Original Series , Batman , The Avengers , Charlie's Angels , Tighten Twists , Gilligan Island, Fantasy Island attract viewers on the 21st century precisely what he interprets as the camp aspects of these products. In the early 60s, the time of transition to color television, television sought to fill with entertaining content that would take advantage of the new medium. So there were television series with distinctive aesthetics: bright colors, a high degree of stylization (soap operas, the Batman show). The “ Cheap Seats ” show is an example of the use of the camp: two representatives of Generation X , brothers, make humorous reviews of 70s sporting events that were interesting in the 2000s with their own Camp features (attempts to combine ballet with skiing, playing the famous basketball team in prison New York State, regional wrestling). David Lynch and Mark Frost in Twin Peaks often deliberately - through the images of heroes and various situations - create a camp atmosphere.
A prominent representative of the camp in the movie is film director John Waters , who popularized it in his films Pink Flamingos , Hairspray , Female Trouble , Polyester and others.
As a reflection of the camp in the design, some courtyard decorations are common in the suburbs of America, for example, plastic pink flamingos , garden gnomes , jockeys , white-tailed deer figurines, as well as Carvel ice cream cake .
In music, the English singer Dusty Springfield is considered the camp icon for her image; PSY , a South Korean rapper, uses Camp aesthetics in his music video clips ^[15] , as well as her popular performers Mika and Kylie Minogue . The style of the music hall and the English pantomime, the decor of the entrances of the Paris metro Hector Guimard belongs to the camp.

• Kitsch
• Drag queen

• Camp style // History of ugliness / ed. Umberto Eco . - M.: Slovo / Slovo, 2007.S. 408-418

• Susan Sontag , Notes On "Camp" Published in 1964.