Exhibition views CAMPY VAMPY TACKY, La criée contemporary art center, Rennes
Courtesy La Criée contemporary art center
Photo credit: Benoît Mauras

Curated by Alain Buffard and Larys Frogier, CAMPY VAMPY TACKY grew out of a studio residency that the Centre Chorégraphique National of Rennes and Brittany (CCNRB) hosted for Alain Buffard in January 2001, around his latest choreographic work Dispositifs 3.1 — a piece for three dancers and one male dancer that critically interrogated the possibilities and processes of transformation of the body and the subject. Buffard's work was already moving from choreography toward performance and visual arts, exploring a "stratified, multiple body" and a "play on dis-identity." La Criée, under the direction of Larys Frogier, seized on this and proposed a partnership with the CCNRB to build an original event around what they called "the subversive confusion of genders."

The exhibition's curatorial text offers a careful definition, distinguishing Camp from simple cross-dressing:
"It would be erroneous to reduce Camp to the simple cross-dressing of a man as a woman or vice versa. Cross-dressing only becomes Camp when it acquires a subversive dimension in its capacity to exacerbate and divert the clothing, gestural, cosmetic and erotic signs that determine the feminine and the masculine. Camp deliberately pushes gendered signs to the absurd and the grotesque, resisting to the ideals of femininity or masculinity. Camp denaturalizes everything that affirms itself as natural in a subject's personality, corporality, and sexuality. By operating on the surface of the body through the displacement of socialization codes, Camp turns normative procedures of sexuality against themselves, "deterritorializing the sexual from sexuality, the genre from the hetero or homo orientation."

This framing is indebted to Susan Sontag's 1964 essay Notes on "Camp" and situates the exhibition within the broader lineage of queer aesthetics that runs from John Waters and Divine through Leigh Bowery to contemporary artists like Francesco Vezzoli and Sarah Lucas.

Alain Buffard was born in 1960 in Morez, Jura, and he died in 2013 in Les Rousses. Alain Buffard was not only a choreographer but he had worked as assistant director at the gallery Anne de Villepoix in the 1990s, which gave him experience in curating visual art exhibitions. Campy, Vampy, Tacky was his first major curatorial project. He followed it in 2005 with Umstellung / Umwandlung at Tanzquartier in Vienna. The exhibition is often cited as a landmark moment in the French contemporary art scene for bringing queer and camp aesthetics into a public institution, and for the unusual choreography–visual arts crossover it enabled.