AN ATTEMPT TO POLITICIZE CAMP

*Written for OSU School of Architecture Publication, AKA SOAP

A few students and I had an idea, what if we created the first student-led publication at the school of architecture? It could be a space for students to collaborate and communicate their passions and interests within architecture with the rest of the school and alumni. We drafted up our proposal, presented it to our school head, and created a brand new student organization. Over the course of 2 semesters, we came up with our concept for the first issue and got to work. I contributed two essays for the publications first edition, one of which was titled "An Attempt to Politicize Camp". 

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In her 1964 article titled “notes on camp”, Susan Sontag writes that the essence of camp is “it’s love of the unnatural; of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp has evolved into a form a stylization erupting from accidental beauty found through the process of creation. Camp is famously unpolitical; it tends to have a disengaged sense of being and most camp artifacts exist in worlds of their own making. That said, in my attempt to organize a small canon of camp, a political scale must be created. Using Sontag’s writing as a basis, there are some discernable characteristics to determine campyness. Breaking the scale into 4 categories, we can see camp as queer, faithful, naïve, and iconic. Queer meaning a celebration of the right not to conform to stereotypical codes of thought, this type of camp engages a non-standard way of being. On the other side of the scale, there is faithful camp. Faithful camp is serious and fueled by an intense desire to achieve a specific outcome, or in other words, it goes hard. Naïve camp tends to be the most beloved by followers of camp. Often tasteless, it’s an innocent and passionate materialization of a childlike or manic dream. It lacks judgement and shows signs of unaffected simplicity. Opposite this is iconic camp, which represents an object by virtue of resemblance. Iconic camp often derives from maturity, achieving camp after it has been put out into the world and aged into its newfound role. These 4 types of camp are by no means the only way to be camp, this is simply an exercise to try and group camp into something easier to understand and grasp. The next pages represent a collection of things I personally find to be campy, with an attached scale of how they fit into the 4 categories details previously. Please keep in mind that the placement of each example on the scale is purely subjective, as is all camp.

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