From a young age I was called camp by adults and children alike. I soon realised it was a euphemism for homosexual. It was often said with the same vitriol as “faggot” or “queer” or “bumboy” (some would say a ten-year-old with a penchant for rose pouchong, kimonos and quoting Barbarella was asking for it). The violence and negativity surrounding its use led me on a secondary school quest to “de-camp.” I started wearing black Adidas tracksuits. I ate chicken Kievs and drank Dr Pepper. I even got a popular girlfriend with braces, watched the X-Files and tried to listen to Robbie Williams. More than average, I wanted to be invisible. Worry lead to conformity – it grew a policeman in my brain. Rejecting frivolity turned me into a state operated hetero-robot shell. My camp reclamation started with my English GCSE — I turned up to the exam wearing lemon-yellow trousers and a t-shirt spray-painted in neon pink glitter with “Who takes sex to outer space?” emblazoned on the back in puffy fabric paint. “I know you think its camp,” said Mrs. Pereira the vice headmistress, “but it’s just distracting to other students, so you’re going to have to change.” I sweltered through the exam in an oversized blue hoodie from lost property. I got the last camp giggle, however, writing 90 percent of my essay about Olivia Hussey in Zeferelli’s film version of Romeo and Juliet and from that moment on, like Leonard Whiting’s leggings, I vowed to be distracting.
Since then, I have sought, like all artists, ways to harness camp. That is to say, bypass expectations, ignore social norms and unlearn. Art can be the exercise, a catalyst to create without divisive function or imposed purpose. YouTube #MakeupTutorials — which I started making in 2012 — proved to be the most perfect pathway to salvation. In one take with no rehearsal, a stream of consciousness unravels, using the face as a starting point to seamlessly interweave the fictional and biographical in that moment of simultaneous decoration and stripping bare, a utopian über-real is achieved. The format is unusual too: one of the only artworks in which both viewer and artist are in the same position — normally alone in front of the laptop. A secret diary for the world to see — what could be more camp? The makeup tutorial breaks down hierarchies and expectations of artist and artwork. Observing structures is anathema to camp (galleries, institutions and collectors better watch out if this catches on!). Suddenly, I was a makeup artist, a stand up comedian and a storyteller, a fame hungry idiot, an actor, an artist and a monkey.
Self-adornment and visible expression is the pinnacle of camp. In an era dominated by tropes such as pretense and self-absorption, we should harness them as the powerful tools they are. We owe it to ourselves to distract the other students, shake each other awake, pull our comrades kicking and screaming from their self-imposed cells. A camp call to arms, fighting against suffocating mediocrity.
For me, film has always been the most inescapable and unattainable influence. An art form so glamorous and extreme only the most mystic of god-like auteurs could ever be privy to its secrets. As a teenager, I would go to the cinema once or twice a week, the screen creating a new world just for that moment. I inhaled all the camp classics from Liquid Sky to Daughters of Darkness, from Female Trouble to Don’t tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead, from Medea to Mrs. ‘Arris goes to Paris. To me, all film is camp (unless of course it is boring! – for the sake of argument I will postulate that Crash (2004) is not a camp film while Crash (1996) is). From YouTube I realised that making films is possible, it happens, I could do it – Huzzah! The cat was out of the bag, the childlike realisation that making happens through doing. In 2017, I made my first feature film, influenced by the likes of Hammer Horror but also Dogme 95 (at heart I am still that pretentious teenager). My film Das Spiel Der Hoffnung was made over five days in 2017, improvised with cast of strangers gathered from online. Sontag points out that something fails to be camp if it is “too mediocre in its ambition.” I aimed for a blockbusting feature-length, buoyed along by intensity and excitement, cocktails and costumes and an incredible cast and crew. We were joined in one moment of ecstatic creation.
Camp is infectious. Once I got the bug, I couldn’t stop. My next film was commissioned in 2018 response to Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando — a virtuoso exercise in camp, yet also a deeply affecting and human novel, encompassing what it is to be a living person: confused, extreme and vital. Arch-campiness allowing for multiple readings and multiple bodies and beauty and madness. Crack us open and you will find it all inside. I created The Image with a cast and crew of friends and family, new and old. We lived together, ate together and bonded over the course of the filming — the real artwork was our coming together in the creative process, a performative commune that thrived on make-believe and creativity. A camp utopia.
“The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” Susan Sontag wrote in her famous 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp”. For me, as an artist, it’s precisely through an exploration of artificial exaggerations that we can learn about humanity’s truth. It might sound sensational but I believe storytelling, with all its excess of artifice is a portal to knowledge.
Performance is our most essential way of communicating, allowing us to deal with difficult realities and euphoric moments through recreation, ingenuity and imagination. Camp is embedded in our desire to bring stories alive.
Camp is a reclamation of everything society — our parents, policing, the education system — extracts from us the moment we are born, everything that is confusing, fake, fantastical, irrational, hysterical, curious, excessive, unsure, stupid, spontaneous, non-binary, unfinished and inconclusive. Acting the fool. Being scared. Having FUN. Camp is all these things done with sincerity. Camp is not ironic and it’s never cool. And as Sontag makes clear in her essay, camp is not about good or bad taste but about turning our back on this binary. Camp is doing. Camp is magic. Camp is giving oneself over totally to the moment without deliberation. All art should endeavor to be camp.
