NeoCamp is in four parts. NeoCamp is Amateur NeoCamp is Queer NeoCamp is (New) Camp NeoCamp is for Now
These four agendas combine to inform and empower NeoCamp. NeoCamp straddles the gap between subversion of, and assimilation into, new techno-‐social structures1, aiming to place amateurism and Queered ‘otheredness’2 within a culturally empowered duality. NeoCamp acknowledges it’s Queer heritage through utilising narcisstic and Camp sensibilities3 as tools for re-‐contextualising queer tropes within the matrix of the new-‐media saturated postmodern culture. However, NeoCamp uses those same narcisstic and Camp sensibilities to describe the contemporary online and entertainment culture of Generation Y.4 NeoCamp implies that contemporary artwork no longer answers to the critical (or historical) imperatives that postmodernism refers to. As Pierre Bourdieu put it: "In an artistic field which has reached an advanced stage of [its] history...the history is imminent to the functioning of the field, and to meet the objective demands it implies, as a producer but also as a consumer, one has to possess the whole history of the field."5 NeoCamp believes that art, being visual art, should not need to be read – only seen6 – and its sociological bent aims to suggest that artists need no longer feel compelled to meet these “objective demands”of the artistic field. They can now trade self-‐referentiality for referentiality to life. The icons of NeoCamp include: Christopher Isherwood, Anton Robert Krueger, The Knife, Oscar Wilde, Erving Goffman, Shana Moulton, Frederic Jameson, Susan Sonntag, Ryan Trecartin, Leigh Bowery, John Bock, Erwin Wurm, Aids-‐3D, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, The Gay Rights Movement, Copyleft. NeoCamp aims to be a constant amateur gesamtkunstwerk.7 1 New techno-‐social structures being the ever-‐changing landscape of media-‐audience interface, including television, the Internet etc. 2 “Otheredness” being the culture of anyone in contemporary culture who has been marginalized, thus Queered otheredness is representative of the Queer experience. 3 Camp sensibilities being explained in NeoCamp is (New) Camp. 4 Generation Y represents those born since the early 1980s. Coined as a combination of the continuation of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (which described those born in the 1960s and early 70s) —X, followed by Y—and “Y’s” connotations of the millennium (Y2K). 5 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 60-‐61. 6 As in visual art work should be experienced. 7 Gesamtkunstwerk (translated as synthesis of the arts, comprehensive artwork, all-‐embracing art form, or total artwork) is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so.
NEOCAMP IS AMATEUR NeoCamp is concerned with amateurism and individual experience in the media saturated age of advanced mechanical reproduction. NeoCamp revels in it’s own amateurity. NeoCamp sees the professionalisation of the arts as leading to the packaging of art as a means and not an end, managing to empty the artistic gesture itself of all inherent value. NeoCamp believes when art becomes work, it stops being playful, and play is an essential ingredient of artistic enterprise. NeoCamp believes the crime of specialisation is that it inhibits and prevents people from acting, because if only some can be masters, then the rest must become audience. NeoCamp believes that since the reproduction of sound, domestic music making has been on the decline, until, more recent, the de-‐idealisation of professionalised musical celebrity. NeoCamp believes professionalism thrives on expanding passive audiences which can inhibit personal creative expression by threatening the would-‐be amateurist’s confidence and enthusiasm. NeoCamp believes that until recently, the domination of a music industry which fed the market it had created for itself with carefully packaged stars, could easily terrorise the casual musician into a mood of inadequacy. However playing music, and hearing it, are two different experiences. NeoCamp is amateurism above spectatorship. Amateurism=Action NeoCamp sees YouTube as a call to arms. NeoCamp is Copyleft. NeoCamp is DIY.
NEOCAMP IS QUEER NeoCamp is post-‐stonewall8 Queerness. NeoCamp rejects hierarchical sociality, in the lineage of the cultural movements of the late 1960s (most notably, the queer community). NeoCamp posits Queer tropes within the matrix of New Media so as to reconfigure the Queer Agenda into a non-‐seperatist discourse of Queer issues. NeoCamp is inherently Queer. NeoCamp is Queer DIY. NeoCamp understands ‘Drag’ as postmodern pragmatism, deconstructing identity from within so as not to sacrifice desire to an outmoded purist and puritan essentialism. NeoCamp confronts culture and it’s inconsistincies, to highlight how cultural norms are socially constructed. NeoCamp “Drags” the mundane through amateur emulation. NeoCamp is borne from the oppressive, straight, tastelessness of dominant western mainstream culture. NeoCamp has solidarity with the othered. NeoCamp is interested in breaking the gap between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural.’
8 Before the Stonewall Riots of 1969, camp served the Queer community by emphasizing or demystifying the artificiality that passed for natural. In gay subculture, Camp queered straightness, and as such necessitated an external perception that travestied the object of perception and debunked its seriousness. Stonewall and the development of the gay rights movement (along with other civil rights movements of the late 1960s) hastened new social patterns. The Camp sensibility has since become less exclusively a Queer initiative (as more straight-‐forwardly confrontational methods of socio-‐political intervention have been employed by the gay rights movement). This coupled with the simultaneous development of postmodernism in the last 40 years, has developed the NeoCamp sensibility to become more representative of the intangled relationship between the contemporary prosumer and culture and entertainment whilst acknowledging its Queer heritage.
NEOCAMP IS (NEW) CAMP NeoCamp works similarly to pre-‐stonewall Camp by emphasizing or demystifying the artificiality that passes for natural. Historically, Camp queered straightness, and as such necessitates an external perception that travesties the object of perception and debunks its seriousness. NeoCamp is totally for serious, babes. NeoCamp, is ‘Camp’ for current audiences. NeoCamp believes Camp was a noble anti-‐establishment sensibility that was bastardised by mainstream culture throughout the late 20th century. NeoCamp uses frivolity and seriousness to discuss the serious and the frivilous. NeoCamp is a connoiseur of the “arts of the masses.” NeoCamp reflects the exchange system of Camp sensibilities and signifiers within an affluent narcisstic youth culture. NeoCamp pretends to naive classism. NeoCamp is Hyperbole. NeoCamp doesn’t have guilty pleasures. NeoCamp is understanding changing dominant aesthetics. NeoCamp undermines, sympathetically (sympathy being close to both empathy and condescension), the credibility of social preconceptions. NeoCamp is sincerely passionate about the seeming emotional detached. NeoCamp is nostalgic about defunct cultural modes, vehicles and outputs. NeoCamp is the contemporary destruction of barriers between cold irony and sentimental sincerity. NeoCamp blurs life and art, aiming to glorify the mundane or vulgar, to draw attention to complacent social preconceptions. NeoCamp provokes tension between the kitsch and historical.
NEOCAMP IS FOR NOW NeoCamp believes ideas about culture, ethnography, anthropology, and sociology, YouTube and Facebook, and science and documentary film have all become more important than October magazine postmodernism. NeoCamp believes technology has been our friend in the democratisation of creative output. NeoCamp believes Sociology is the new black. NeoCamp creates Art in as many forms as possible. NeoCamp likes mirrors. NeoCamp is interested in the parasocial relationships people have with celebrities and media personalities. NeoCamp sees these relationships as both damaging (comparing your insides with someone else’s outsides), and self-‐ esteem boosting.9 NeoCamp sees the internet as both a culturally liberated community, and cesspit of anonymous hostility. NeoCamp attempts mainstream understanding but has to fail, because its most singular concern is individual freedom. NeoCamp is borne out of, and relishes in, the inescapable referentiality of being a contemporary creative producer. NeoCamp doesnt know whether there is nobility in all creative pursuits, or no nobility in any creative pursuits, but it knows it’s one or the other. NeoCamp is intuitively intuitive yet, referentially referential. NeoCamp uses the blurred signifiers of contemporary irony and sincerity. NeoCamp represents new levels of Narcissism. NeoCamp destabilises expected archetypes, calling for less passive engagement and Camping the contemporary concerns of the generation it is depicting (contemporary youth culture). NeoCamp is nostalgic for 2011. NeoCamp ist einen NeoKampf. 9 it has been argued by W.D. Wetherall recently, that the other–experienced solely through medium–has the potential to help us feel closer to our ‘ideal’ selves.