FASHION

WHAT IS CAMP? ANDREW BOLTON SHARES HIS INTERPRETATION

IMAGES 

COURTESY of
THE COSTUME INSTITUTE

PORTRAIT & INTERVIEW

by TATIJANA SHOAN

WEB EDIT

by ROBYN TURK

As Head Curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton has been charming and cultivating New York audiences with spellbinding exhibitions since 2002 when he left London’s prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum and joined the MET. His notable exhibitions include the wildly successful Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty; China: Through the Looking Glass; Manus x Machina: Fashion in the Age of Technology; Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons: The Art of the In-Between; and Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.  

Bolton’s latest endeavor, Camp: Notes on Fashion, promises to hold the many surprises and discoveries we expect from him. Indeed, there is mysteriously remarkable meaning housed in this simple, one syllable word, camp, and Bolton’s exhibit will both define and honor it.

Ahead of the exhibition launch commemorated by the Met Gala, AS IF sat down with Andrew Bolton to talk about camp, about what it means to curate fashion exhibits in the age of information, his relationship with his subjects vs. his audience, fashion as art, and what his new exhibition will reveal about him.

What inspired a show on camp?

The idea was inspired initially when I was working on the Rei Kawakubo exhibition. I was rereading Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation essay because Rei was very against any curatorial narrative for the exhibition. She wanted her clothes and designs to stand alone, and for people to appreciate and interpret them on their own without an overarching curatorial narrative. I was toying with the idea of using Sontag’s Against Interpretation where her voice would, in sorts, act as a ghost narrator of the exhibition, because part of her criticism of cultural critics and curators is that they imbue too much content into a work of art, and as a result there is little room for subjectivity. I think that can be true, but I feel you can be objective and subjective at the same time, and so, I eventually didn’t go down that path. At that same time, I was rereading Sontag’s, Notes On ‘Camp,’ which is so prescient, even though it now reads like a historical document and is outdated. As the word camp becomes more mainstream people have forgotten its impact, forgotten the subversive elements of camp; and with the mainstreaming of gay culture and homosexuality there’s been a coincident mainstreaming of camp. It was once very much a private code among marginal groups and many in the gay community. Sontag spoke about camp in association with an aesthetic or sensibility as a political tool, and as a language for a disempowered group. And, with our current political and social climate and gender-fluidity dialogues, I thought it was an interesting concept to think about. So, during the time I was preparing for the Kawakubo exhibition I decided to save Sontag for later on and go down the path I did for Rei Kawakubo. Oddly enough, a season ago, Rei did a whole show based on Susan Sontag’s camp essay.

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Ensemble by Jun Takahashi for Undercover.  Fall/winter 2017-18.

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Ensemble by Jun Takahashi for Undercover. Fall/winter 2017-18.

Your exhibition sets out to define camp, and in the process of creating this exhibition what did you learn about camp that wasn’t obvious when you first set out to explore it?

We went through so many dead ends, more than any other show I’ve worked on before. Camp is so all-inclusive, and what continues to surprise me is when you begin looking at the world through a camp lens, everything is camp. The largeness of the topic was overwhelming, and I was struggling with how to curate the exhibition in such a short timeframe. Very early on I read the work of an amazing writer named Fabio Cleto, who is actually writing the introduction to the exhibition catalogue. His book, Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: a Reader became my bible. He is a beautiful writer and complex thinker, and what his book does is include all the major writings on camp. It illustrates how everybody has a different opinion about camp, and that’s something I embraced early on. Trying to define it is what I found difficult, because it was easy enough to identify the elements of camp—artifice, irony, parody, generosity, nativity—but to actually define it in a sentence was quite difficult. I remember this one sentence that I really liked. Cleto spoke about how the confusion around camp doesn’t help the fact that it has so many lexical complications: it’s a noun, an adjective, an adverb, and a verb, and I found that really interesting. So, after four months of really chasing my tail I decided to focus on the grammatical and lexical origins of camp. I kept asking myself, what is camp? I thought it was important to try to define it, or at least look at this grammatical aspect around it and when it entered the language. I think one of the issues around Susan Sontag’s essay was that she downplayed the origins of camp and depoliticized it. She spoke of camp’s style without a substance, without politics, and something that is void of tragedy, which I think is incorrect; there is an immense tragedy in camp, think of someone like Judy Garland. At the same time, however, Sontag provided grammar for us to talk about camp when no one else did. I’m a huge fan of Susan Sontag, and I think that she was an incredible cultural critic. She was so perceptive and wrote about camp at the right time, and provided the language and the vocabulary for us to talk about it. Therefore, I did want to fetishize Sontag’s essay in the exhibition. When she talks about camp I think it’s retroactive, people at Versailles didn’t think they were camp. When you think about the wonderful panier dresses, and what was fashionable at the time, it wasn’t about being camp, but to our eyes today it’s totally camp! Time has a great deal to do with camp. Therefore, I thought by focusing on its origins and when it entered the language was a nice way to define it for audiences that weren’t as familiar with the term. It also traces the historical origins because that was the connection between the etymological origins and the phenomenological origins. 

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Ensembles by Marc Jacobs. Spring/summer 2016.

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Ensembles by Marc Jacobs. Spring/summer 2016.

The Wikipedia definition of camp says, camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value, and the definition continues from there. What are your thoughts?

I find those terms very reductive, they reduce an extraordinary, difficult, and complex concept. That definition is an element of camp, but cannot summarize it. The first known mention of the word camp was by Moliere, King Louis XIV’s great playwright, when he wrote about camping on one foot. In the exhibition we have a wonderful figurine where a guy is camping on one foot. I began to understand camp around the idea of theatricality, exaggeration and artifice. It was very much associated with theater actually, and there is that painting of Louis XIV showcased in that typical narrative tea pot stance, with one hand on the hip and one leg out. The idea of standing contrapposto with arms akimbo was borrowed from classical statuary, and we see that with a sculpture of Antoninus, perhaps the first camp icon. He was Roman Emperor Hadrian’s lover, was very beautiful, died young, and was lionized and fetishized. There are wonderful sculptures of him in that typical camp pose which aristocrats later adopted. The painting of Louis XIV with his leg outstretched and his arm up was really mirroring classical statuary, but it was adopted by the gay community and became known as the archetypal stand of this sort. 

The next mention of the word was as an adjective, and it was very much located within the gay community. It was between two cross-dressing men named Fanny and Stella in Victorian England, and there was a letter from Fanny to his/her benefactor where he writes, my campish undertakings are not being met with the success they deserve. So, the exhibition starts off with camp as se camper, camp as a verb, where we take you to Versailles; then you go into camp as an adjective, which we begin with my campish undertakings and Fanny and Stella. I’ve chosen heroes for each gallery. In Versailles, it’s Monsieur, the Duke of Orléans, and Chevalier d’Éon, who was a well-known for cross-dressing and lived his later years as a woman. 

Then we have camp as a noun where it entered the dictionary of Victorian Slang in 1909, where it was referring to “people of wanton character.” And this was post-Oscar Wilde, who is very much seen in camp history as figure of great tragedy, but also somebody who used epigrams and plays as a tool of camp.  

We then have the writer Christopher Isherwood who talked about camp as more of a style, which then is taken on by Sontag in 1964, when she writes less about the origins of camp and more about artifice and exaggeration, and camp as an aesthetic phenomenon and sensibility. This is the trajectory and origin of the story we share in the show. 

We then have the writer Christopher Isherwood who talked about camp as more of a style, which then is taken on by Sontag in 1964, when she writes less about the origins of camp and more about artifice and exaggeration, and camp as an aesthetic phenomenon and sensibility. This is the trajectory and origin of the story we share in the show. 

Portrait of Andrew Bolton, by Tatijana Shoan

“Camp is so all-inclusive, and what continues to surprise me is when you begin looking at the world through a camp lens, everything is camp”

–Andrew Bolton–

I like how you mention the tea pot stance, and the socio-political importance of it. Today we can see this stance in many of Kehinde Wiley’s paintings where he portrays black men in their own street dress while taking on in these classic camp statuary poses, many of them in tea pot stance.

I’m glad you made that connection because it’s very true. It was very much about masculinity when we look back at its origins from Classical Greece and in portraits of the aristocracy. That pose wasn’t just about power, it was about masculinity. It’s interesting how it’s been subverted in the gay community as something effeminate. What’s also interesting about camp is that it’s so contradictory, even in the gay community where people either embrace it as a way of creating visibility, particularly pre-Sontag when it was used by marginal groups as a way of having a language of visibility, and at the same time it’s dismissed as something derogatory, frivolous, and silly. It’s a deeply contradictory and complex term.

How much of camp is a reflection of the times, and how much of it is influenced by the times?

I think camp responds to and reacts to the times. Sontag made a distinction between naïve camp and deliberate camp. Naïve camp relates to failed seriousness—the intention was to be serious, but it failed miserably. A pannier is failed seriousness. Balenciaga’s baby doll dress—a dress designed for a baby doll to be worn by grown women— is failed seriousness. Deliberate camp is more conscious and intentional. When Sontag outed camp in 1964, camp became much more deliberate. You still got many instances of naïve camp, but there was an awareness, an association in people’s minds and vocabulary about camp. After the Stonewall riots, camp became much more politicized. Prior to that it was—as Sontag calls it—a secret code, a badge of identity, and I think that’s true on the whole. The 80s were an apotheosis of camp, and I wonder if that was a reaction to Thatcher and Reagan -- they were two very camp figures. Now we have Trump who is a very camp figure. When you have a society that’s so polarized with a strong conservative right wing, and a strong liberal left wing, camp has something to feed off of. It does react and respond very much to politics and the times.

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Ensemble by Bertrand Guyon for House of Schiaparelli.  Fall/winter 2018-19 haute couture.

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Ensemble by Bertrand Guyon for House of Schiaparelli. Fall/winter 2018-19 haute couture.

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Ensembles by Walter van Beirendonck (left) and Vivienne Westwood (right).  Spring/summer 2009 (left) and fall/winter 1989-90 (right).

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Ensembles by Walter van Beirendonck (left) and Vivienne Westwood (right). Spring/summer 2009 (left) and fall/winter 1989-90 (right).

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Dress by Jeremy Scott  for House of Moschino.  Spring/summer 2017.

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Dress by Jeremy Scott for House of Moschino. Spring/summer 2017.

What are the fundamental differences between kitsch and camp?

This is such a great question, and I struggle with this. I think that all of kitsch is camp, but not all of camp is kitsch. Kitsch is more related to objects than to people. To me kitsch is more of an art historical term used to describe objects, not behavior, while camp is very much about behavior and performance. One of my favorite definitions of kitsch is that it’s a camp fad and fancy; it’s related to camp, but it’s not camp. Camp is much more magnanimous as a term. 

You’ve once said that every show you do is personal. What will the camp exhibition reveal about you?

I need to connect with the objects and fall in love with the subject. Growing up gay in a small village with small minds has never left me. Speaking differently and wearing different clothes makes you a target for comments. One of my favorite quotes for camp is, camp is people who weren’t intended to be heroes, which is so poetic and I love that idea. I do think that there’s an immense bravery around people who have embraced camp and their differences and use camp as a way of being proud of their difference. I was too scared as a kid of being different, I wanted to fit in and not seem different from others, but there was this one kid at school who was very camp and I always admired him. Part of my work in this exhibition is a thank you to him for his bravery, and all people who’ve been bullied, who’ve been subjected to criticism for being different.

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Ensemble by Jeremy Scott for House of Moschino.  Spring/summer 2018.

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Ensemble by Jeremy Scott for House of Moschino. Spring/summer 2018.

“What’s also interesting about camp is that it’s so contradictory, even in the gay community where people either embrace it as a way of creating visibility… It’s a deeply contradictory and complex term.”

–Andrew Bolton–

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Shirt by Franco Moschino for House of Moschino.  Spring/summer 1991.

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Shirt by Franco Moschino for House of Moschino. Spring/summer 1991.

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Ensemble by Alessandro Michele for Gucci. Fall/winter 2016-17.

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