Download There is a video on YouTube

21st century dandy
Philip Auslander
Dandy
Dandy
Where you gonna go now?
The Kinks, “Dandy” (1966)
There is a video on YouTube.com that combines the T. Rex song Dandy in the Underworld, from
1977, with a famous engraving of Beau Brummel, the late 18th century avatar of British dandyism.i
The song and the portrait have little to do with one another save for the idea of the dandy, yet
there is something in this anachronistic juxtaposition of dandies ancient and modern that speaks
to Nick Fox’s Phantasieblume, a body of work that offers a contemporary twist on dandyism even
as it evokes earlier models. I can easily imagine T. Rex’s main man, Marc Bolan, and Beau
Brummel walking together through Fox’s exhibition, Brummel in his high lace collar and Bolan in
his tall hat. I can see them gazing at the tondi on the wall that provide glimpses of a homoerotic
Arcadia, and I sense their wanting to finger the edges of Fox’s hand-made doilies, sequestered in
a glass case.
Historically, dandyism was a sensibility that developed primarily in England and France in the late
18th and 19th centuries, built on ideals of masculine beauty (though it is not restricted to men),
refinement, elegance, and the aestheticization of everyday life. The dandy substitutes grace for
quotidian coarseness; both he and everything he surrounds himself with are rarefied. Such
rarification is visible in Fox’s use of color: each tondo partakes of a palette so carefully modulated
that the brilliant monochromatic green of the cut-out Incubus and the bright red of This Longing
(both 2008) come as surprises. Fox’s subtle yet cumulatively dramatic gradations of muted color
and atmosphere, along with his delineation of both form and texture with a few, carefully selected
lines, the languor of many of his figures, and the way they simultaneously emerge from and blend
into their surround can be seen as reflecting the refined sensibility of a dandy. Even when the
atmosphere is charged and there is an indication of activity, perhaps bordering on turmoil, as in
Papillon (2009), figures both human and animal blend together into a landscape dominated by its
horizon and tension is sublimated to composition.
Although almost all of the work in Phantasieblume is plainly homoerotic, Fox depicts erotic
encounters with a dandy’s discretion. Nude men pose languidly or touch one another, but crucial
parts are covered over, as in Pieta (2008), and most of the moments depicted seem to precede
other, more salient acts. These are images of desire aroused (or perhaps just contemplated)
rather than indulged or satisfied. Arguably, they address the “oscillation between self-abandon
and control” that defines the dandy.ii Because dandyism is about the presentation of an elegant
front above all else, it necessitates a high degree of self-control and restraint. Because dandyism
is also about luxury and indulgence, however, it inevitably courts excess.
The erotic images of Fox’s paintings imply the possibility of giving in and letting oneself go, but
their formal refinement keeps the impulse in check, as does the facture of his doilies. These are
made by treating dried acrylic paint as a fabric and cutting intricate patterns resembling lace out
of it, as well as overlaying ink-drawn images on it. In Rush (2007) there is tension between the
central image of a young man in what may well be the throes of passion and the precisely and
symmetrically cut out border that frames and contains him. The intricacy of the pattern and our
sense of the exacting effort that must have gone into cutting it are at odds with the spontaneity of
the image, whose wholeness is sacrificed to the frame. Writing on performance art
documentation, Kathy O’Dell suggests that we experience the performer’s original physical
presence literally by touching the photograph of the performance.iii In a related vein, the tactility
and object-ness of Fox’s doilies, as well as the erotic images they frame, evoke a desire for
physical contact with the objects and, through them, the bodies they represent that their fragility
clearly discourages and the glass case in which they are displayed prohibits. They are within
reach, but unavailable to touch. In Fox’s work, the oscillation between self-abandon and control
turns in favor of control without ever negating the erotic potential of his imagery. The possibility of
self-abandonment is always implicit as the dialectical opposite of self-control, and this tension
makes his work seductive.
Fox’s objects are not just discrete works: they also constitute settings. A series of works from
2006 consists of painted cloths draped over bench seats or Edwardian tables, thus aestheticizing
their surfaces and suffusing an interior space with Fox’s imagery. (When the tondi and doilies
were exhibited together at the Centre for Recent Drawing in London, the round forms of the
paintings on the walls were reflected in the glass of the cases housing the doilies, producing a
space both occupied and haunted by Fox’s signature geometry.) Everyday objects become works
of art; the dandy surrounds himself with the things he loves. The acrylic doilies are simulations of
objects that are both decorative and utilitarian but repress the originals’ utility in favor of their
potential as purely aesthetic objects. The table-coverings likewise deprive utilitarian objects of
their function by turning them into beautiful things one can hardly imagine sullying through use.
There is an aporia in this critical narrative, however, that arises from the proposition that one
cannot be both an artist and a dandy. As Peter V. Zima writes,
"Un dandy ne fait rien", says Baudelaire; as a member of the "leisure class" the dandy is
first and foremost a consumer who thrives on "conspicuous consumption" (Veblen) and
avoids any kind of productive work. A "chevalier du néant" [knight of nothingness] who
exists by virtue of the laws of the market, he is quite indifferent to the creation or
production of qualitative (aesthetic, ethical or religious) values. To him the creative work
of the artist appears as unworthy as that of the average man in the street whose thought
is geared to utilitarian criteria.iv
“Un dandy ne fait rien”: “a dandy does nothing,” though “fait” can be translated equally well here
as “makes.” Dandies are opposed to productivity in all its forms. The dandy is a consumer rather
than a producer; a connoisseur rather than an artist. He lives not to paint but to be painted and to
surround himself with paintings.v
In saying, then, that Nick Fox’s work reflects the sensibility of a dandy I cannot be saying that Fox
is himself a dandy. The more exact formulation is that his work represents the sensibility of a
dandy, objectifies it and puts it on display in a way that parallels, but is not exactly equivalent to,
the dandy’s own aestheticization of himself and his surroundings. Fox’s work provides a lens that
refracts the world through the perspective of dandyism, allowing his spectators to experience
themselves temporarily as dandies, especially when his pieces are assembled so as to form an
immersive environment. Although his work clearly alludes to earlier moments in history when
dandyism was a real social possibility, it also raises the question of whether the dandy’s
aestheticizing gaze—or something like it—is viable in the 21st century. The original dandies were
reacting against a world they perceived as being rendered increasingly vulgar by industrialization
and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Where is the dandy to go now, what is he to do, of what value can
his discerning sensibility be to a world that exposes itself so relentlessly and indiscriminately by
means of YouTube.com and the like?
Footnotes
FunkyardDogg, “T-Rex—Dandy in the Underworld.” 9 February 2008. Online video clip.
YouTube. Accessed 17 April 2010. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX24L7toKzY>
ii Christopher Lane, “The Drama of the Impostor: Dandyism and Its Double,” Cultural Critique no.
28 (1994): 38-39.
i
Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 14.
iv Peter V. Zima, "From Dandyism to Art, or Narcissus Bifrons," Neohelicon 12.2 (1985): 221.
v Some artists certainly have been characterized as dandies—Andy Warhol is an example. But it
is important that it is Warhol’s public persona that is understood to have been dandified, and the
portrayal of that persona, especially in the 1960s, involved his distancing himself from his own
work as an artist by trivializing it, depersonalizing it, industrializing it, claiming other people
actually made his pieces, etc.
iii