Blog Post #2 — “On Camp” Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag’s piece, “On Camp” was a less intellectual approach to art. “On Camp” launched Sontag’s career as it was never sexually specific, and in fact it was embraced by the LGBTQ community. For Susan Sontag’s “Camp” she talks of camp art not only being less decorative art, emphasizing texture, and surface, but Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style. “Taste has no system and no proofs, but there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almond, but not quite, ineffable.” Camp is an aesthetic, its everything that crosses the line. Her writing of camp, her imagery, her metaphors, her careful depictions of what camp were made it a powerful piece.
A modern-day camp brings me back to the 2019 Met Gala where the theme was “Camp.” Celebrities dressed to the tens in gowns and outfits that are exaggerated and unusual, all of Susan Sontag’s writings.
“The essence of Camp, is it love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp, being such an extraordinary topic, was difficult to read. It seemed all over the place, it seemed complex, but Sontag did include a structure. Her writing “On Camp” was broken into pieces, it had an organization to it that at times didn’t feel like a flowing literary novel, but it was her journalistic approach to creating a narrative that took a difficult topic and broke it down to make it easier to read.
Literary devices or journalistic approaches that Sontag used that I would consider to for my own work are her use of strong imagery, her metaphors, her sense of ethos and pathos. She appeals to the readers emotions and takes a topic on exaggeration of art and clothing and tangible things and creates a strong sense of imaginative effect.
Sontag speaks that nothing in nature can be campy. Her writing is poetic and moving and at times, isn’t written in the best of forms, but her poetic nature keeps the topic of “Camp” riveting and exaggerated, as it should be.
