16. Non-Proprietary Camp: An editorial by Michael Porter.
Aside from certain paranoid stand-up comics, who would claim to “own” a joke? You can say that an individual has “made” a joke. You can say that a certain joke was or was not intentional. You can identify something as a joke. But since an effective joke has to be shared – at least with one other person, real or imagined – no one would seriously claim sole ownership.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has now mounted a fashion show that claims to have cornered the camp line, past and present. (There was even a gala.) A museum item on exhibit is usually identified by provenance, vintage, and ownership. Such proud description can indeed suggest a catalog, even a proprietary spirit. But since true camp is a form of achieved wit, open critique, oblique humor, and perhaps the most evanescent of epiphanies, it usually involves a shared delight, free of charge.
Camp functions best as an unexpected gift, not a specimen or best-of-show prize. The enjoyment of something camp might even cause one to speculate after the fact what a “joke” involves: what is humor, whence comedy? No one can purchase camp hilarity as one can own an evening gown, a baseball cap, or a pair of expensive sneakers. (A true camp object must be the most guilt-free of fetishes.) In my experience, the camp moment or item usually arrives in a possibly fraught context that exploits, confirms, or allows a shared realization. Like many another example of friable humor, no matter how artificial or exaggerated in its machinery, camp’s reality-effect goes beyond the solitary and implicates those around us. The camp event is always one of joint commission, if you will. I am often reminded of a New York heiress who once claimed to “own” a dance company, like a stable of stallions. A close colleague of that wealthy lady now “runs” the Rambert company in England.
At my preview of the new Met show, I thought its compressed and moithered visitors looked unsure of themselves and of the exhibits. Many attendees made for the exit right away to control the sensory onslaught. Would they buy something in the museum’s “gift shop”? If they had felt left out as they decamped, maybe only a purchase could assuage their disappointment? That’s ownership for you. Someone somewhere may be enjoying his or her little thing, but how shaming not to “get” the joke. Purchase a compensatory knock-off at the Met and you’re in.
It is possible that the attempt to historicize or label the camp phenomena is beyond realization through a “fashion show”. (Just as a new dim dance may not be redeemed by fashionable costumes at New York City Ballet.) If much humor is topical, a background commentary or footnote is likely to kill the jest in the telling. J. Garland helpfully sings her song about the rainbow as you enter the first room of the exhibit. It concludes in a two-tiered Big Room packed with fashions from today’s designers who contribute presumptive illustrations of neo-camp. There is little attempt to indicate to the museum-goer what current pressures – societal, aesthetic, economic, political, etc. – govern immediate invention or reception. Perhaps such conditions are assumed to be self-evident and curatorial intentions to be transparent. It might help to be an aging club-kid to get all the references. One can always go home and watch Beatrice Lillie in On Approval via a DVD. Or listen to a Ruth Draper monologue on a Compact Disc.
Some of us have vivid memories of post-1960s camp here in New York over the decades. For years, Bette Midler had a lock on the satire of its cheap nightclub variety. The Met show is strangely light on references to local stage examples of camp, especially recent theatrical designs. At this moment, the curtain goes up on Broadway’s Gary and you see Ann Roth’s witty costumes and Santo Loquasto’s sensational set: jaw-dropping camp. The audience applauds immediately. When Warren Carlyle attempts to choreograph the arch wine-press number in Kiss Me, Kate, the conceit falls flat. The audience nods during the dance: not vintage camp, this. Glenda Jackson has outdone herself as Charlotte Corday in Marat-Sade, as Antonina Milukova in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers, and now as King Lear on stage at the age of 83. She’s a camp careerist. Her long-term fans are happy-camper indulgent. Soon to arrive from London will be The Inheritance, a two-part camp modernization of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, possibly featuring the veteran Vanessa Redgrave in a very small role. Will there be a New York audience? Live theater is one of the enduring sources of metamorphic spectacle in our time. Camp says: “Change is all. Deal with it!”
The Met’s version of camp is a museum-goer’s impermanent distraction, another theme park for the tourists. It is probably offered as something fun. But an institutional take on camp would have to come off as meta-fashion almost by definition, wouldn’t it? It becomes a Big Topic, almost beyond definition, a kind of pseudo-camp in its pretensions. (Like Wayne McGregor and Thomas Ades taking on Dante for the Royal Ballet?) Whereas authentic camp has usually been born from the personal and the intimate, constituted out of the little things that make up art and life.
Among recent films, the posthumous release of The Other Side of the Wind revealed yet another camp side of film director Orson Welles. Welles has Wind’s fictional auteur (played by John Houston) show signs of closeted homosexuality and an envy-revulsion before the pretensions of European art cinema of the 1960s. References to camp are found throughout Welles work. Wind just makes the connection unmistakable. Think of the backstage opera scenes in Citizen Kane and the artifice-upon-artifice of F for Fake. Kane is an especially informative source, since in it Welles was confessedly learning about the medium from John Ford (Stagecoach, principally) and directly from a great cinematographer, Greg Toland. And in Fake, we find Welles discovering what can be identified as an Henri Michaux-like enfolding of one narrative strand upon another, echoing the five subjective testimonials in Kane. Isn’t Welles’ take on portraiture always a camp forgery before the final mystery of the self? A hallmark of camp is often a rigorous and quite public self-education among its practitioners.
Modernism in visual art was dedicated to its proud version of public re-education, whether in its abandonment of all device (Duchamps) or the baring of the device (Cezanne, Picasso, Braque). There is a sense in which the emphasis on painterly surface and abstraction in the criticism of Clement Greenberg was a career-long self-schooling that now resembles a camp sacrifice before aesthetic fetish. In her quasi-didactic “Notes on Camp” Susan Sontag found yet another, “sensuous” use for surface. To display your artistic machineries – to parade styles and forms – could be camp, whether in Action, Color Field, Pop, Conceptual or Minimal schools.
Both Duchamps and Warhol understood the importance of the contextual frame – the immediate and focused reception of the aborning artwork – in the camp sense. The Postmodern version joined the style parade a little late. Those end-of-century shifts in mode – fashion statement after fashion statement among very self-conscious arts – can be seen as an attempt at metamorphosis through an almost nauseous group virtuosity: the forced march of failed camp, like Billy Wilder’s attempted re-fashioning in Fedora. Stravinsky was good at switching styles, but he had an excuse. If you have no colleagues on your level of expertise, you may eventually depend on an extended dialogue with the distant, if currently unfashionable, past. The presence of Fashion Galas at New York City Ballet may be an institutional comment on its own inherited dilemma.
A fashion show on camp would have to feature works that comment specifically in each case on fashion itself, art on art (like Welles’ F for Fake or Godard’s late-period film essays), with results that achieve a semi-Deleuzean intensity, the inevitable risk being a too-circumscribed product. Masters of camp learn to exploit such dangers for a curdled humor: Fellini’s harem-worlds provide examples. The Met’s choice of camp objects may favor fashions that do not go quite far enough in promiscuous allusion or solipsistic reference. Perhaps the Met choices are too undetailed, too nervous, and too serious.
Then, too, many models of successful camp have been denied us through the ravages of the AIDs epidemic. What would Harry Kondoleon be giving us today had he not ceased writing plays at age thirty-nine? Kondoleon was always specific about his characters’ creative skepticisms. His creatures never have just one identifying “motivation”. Their agendas are manifold, their powers of self-invention uber-liberal. What fun and fury Kondoleon would have wrested from “social media” and Nikes.
Charles Ludlam was entrepreneur, playwright, and actor, so virtuosic that he leaves us with only mild imitators and written texts as guides to the unique, ridiculous original. There is always Irma Vep available for revival. But I remember that kiss his courtesan intercepted in a climactic scene of Camille, the heroine’s eye wandering from her Armand to some more private vision of tribute beyond all earthly approximation. In addition to melodramatic intensities and bawdy excess, Ludlam drew from that late embrace a metaphysical insight, topping even Garbo’s optical spasm in the Cukor death scene: “I must suffer this, too!”
In the early years of the Ballets Trocadero de Monte-Carlo, the art of camp was expanded by Antony Bassae (known en travestie as the brilliant ballerina Karpova), especially this artist’s Odette. Remember how she would use downcast eyes to indicate how insulated she always was from the clamors of her persistent Prince Siegfried? Karpova’s musicality was the most refined of all Swan Queens of the 1970s, her lyricism the most delicate, her hauteur the most “righteous” (as the young say today). I am not sure that her performance has been surpassed in the Swan Lakes that now clutter the repertories of so many international “straight” ballet companies. I remember standing backstage following a matinee, marveling at this fresh incarnation. Karpova would not relinquish characterization before or behind the curtain. When her audience was appeased at last, the ballerina’s eyes briefly honored my presence. “What new role remains?” I gasped. “What triumph is left?” Karpova surveyed the floor, her eyes avoiding importunity. Options must be left open, all potentialities maintained for a lyric medium. I was merely another backstage Prince.
Today, in the long corridor before the Met’s Big Room, with items illustrative of innocent and deliberate camp, you will find the 1951 black evening dress of Christobal Balenciaga in the sinister position. As in Wölfflin’s description of primary Baroque forms, this master-creation’s length is visually weighted beneath and below with exposed taffeta ruffles, a modified reference to a flamenco-train. The feminine form then fountains up in full silk curvature around the pronounced pin-up hips, then jets along the tight, curving waist, to the lifted bosom – more ample curves – to reach its delicately spumed margin in the accented breast-line with a single crystalline row of miniscule scallop-eyes, a visual accent so graphite and logical it manages to complete the Master’s design ineffably. Is this camp? If so, the great couturier has managed a further definition, combining both an Aubrey Beardsley scrotal silhouette with an hourglass fit predictive of M. Monroe’s stem of a waist. If fabric can embody the very act of feminine investiture, top to bottom, this is it. And it has been perfected for the dance floor, primed for rhythmic motion. Unconscious camp? I’m not so sure. Such cut-and-dried discriminations are characteristic throughout of Andrew Bolton’s safe curation. Balenciaga has much to teach, would Bolton learn.
In her “Notes on Camp” Sontag tried to indicate that she mostly “got” the encoded joke, but she marshaled generalized models. Especially missing from her jottings are examples of that “sharp” spirit of camp that Lincoln Kirstein found absent from Christopher Isherwood’s 1954 novel, The World in the Evening. (Kirstein was a main model for one of the characters in that fiction. Some of Kirstein’s own ideas are rampant there.). Anodyne art won’t do. The perpetrator must own up to camp’s sting. Its poisons must be injected, sometimes with pain, beneath the livid surface. Bolton’s show misses the vein to gain a gala.
M.P.
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