Queering Identity: Luigi Ontani’s Camp Tableaux

Abstract

This article contributes to a queer historiography of 1970s Italian art by taking an unprecedented approach to the study of Luigi Ontani’s artistic practice: it investigates the camp qualities and queer subtexts of a group of tableaux vivants that he performed in the early 1970s, either in front of a live audience or for the camera impersonating various iconic male and female characters drawn from high and popular culture. Situating the works in the context of the emergent Italian gay liberation movement, FUORI, this study builds on discussions of camp and kitsch by Susan Sontag and Gillo Dorfles in the mid- to late 1960s, as well as later articulations of gender performativity and queer theory by Judith Butler and others, to show how Ontani’s enactments at once embrace camp – in its citational, ironic, theatrical, incongruous, non-hierarchical character – and posit identity as performative, queer, that is, as unstable, fluid, plural, thus undermining the patriarchal, essentialist, bourgeois model of identity predicated on binary oppositions and postulated as fixed, coherent, and natural.

Keywords

• tableau vivant
• self-portrait
• performance art
• gender performativity
• kitsch, camp, and queer aesthetics and politics
• Italian gay liberation movement