LUCA presents: Notes on Bimbos and Bodybuilders

Welcome at the Book launch on the occasion of the publication of Stan Van Rompaey’s treatise Notes on Bimbos and Bodybuilders, which was awarded the Dirk Lauwaert Prize in 2021.

Friday November 18th: 20:00

- Isolde Vanhee: Introduction “Notes on Camp Cinema”
- Stan Van Rompaey in conversation with Saskia Smith

“A new canonical text in respect of the eternal virgins, endorsed by the event of the year, coming at you from sophisticated mischief. Look camp right in the eye, twist the 8-count of academic killjoy, and weight the world’s burdens to bulge those biceps.”

Inspired by Susan Sontag’s Notes on “Camp”, Stan Van Rompaey attempts to penetrate the very essence of all things “camp”, the manifestations of camp past and present, and the critical appeal she reads in them. The climax of her research is the Post-Sontagian “Camp” Manifesto. The calls in the manifesto are as sincere as they are contrived, as personal as they are political, soaked in the so-called post-irony that the artist embraces as an inevitable condition of her generation. In her manifesto, she calls for a revolutionising of everyday life, the overturning of conventional categories and language systems associated with heteronormativity, the celebration of excess, the elimination of shame and guilt, for a rebellious hyper-awareness too, prompted by the realisation that no form of aesthetics is innocent, nor is its critique.

On November 18th we LUCA School of Arts will host an evening dedicated to an audience that celebrates and bespeaks reality with excess and hyperboles. This event will be nothing short of spectacle, albeit with offence and disgrace lurking around the corner! After all, as Graham Harman pointed out: “If we identify this event with ‘aesthetics’ in the broadest sense of the term, it becomes clear why first philosophy is aesthetics, not ethics.”