There are room for all kinds of fish in the sea. This is a page for thoughts which are too quick moving to be tied down in print.
Porcelain Penguin 19.4.10 22.13pm Melanie Venables
To me, a porcelain penguin, apart from being a lovely sounding phrase, represents something bound by artifice. That is not to say that this is a negative thing. A porcelain penguin for example is so ludicrously artificial that it makes me realise the naturelness of a real one. It’s a human thing to make ornaments of objects in nature. A porcelain penguin also reminds us of the human touch – which is another natural thing.
In Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, published in 1964, one of the points she makes is that ‘All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy . . . Rural Camp is still man-made, and most campy objects are urban.’ Most of us would now only see a penguin in the zoo, or on the TV, or on a guided tour. Nature is subject to a kind of camp wherever it is found. We should not be afraid to be artificial in our art, or our writing. It’s only by fulling letting go of the idea of being natural that the true identity can be found.
