In the present work we consider a frictional contact model with normal compliance. Firstly, we discuss the weak solvability of the model by means of two variational approaches. In a first approach the weak solution is a solution of a quasivariational inequality. In a second approach the weak solution is a solution of a mixed variational problem with solution-dependent set of Lagrange multipliers. Nextly, the paper focuses on the boundary optimal control of the model. Existence results, an optimality condition and some convergence results are presented.