SOCIAL JUSTICE

THE DANDYISM OF CONTEMPT II

Contrary to what a lot of thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind”

Charles Baudelaire “The Dandy”

Zurburan "Saint Francis in Meditation" National Gallery

“We” are not “All In This Together.”

The original dandies dressed like you – that is to say, like anyone2. They took on the "Buff and the Brown", the uniform of the American Revolutionaries – those slave-owning avatars of egalite. The difference was in the individuality of the cut; an impeccable silhouette might, perhaps, assuage the sting of merely being subsumed into that tedious, newly minted abstraction -“The People”.

In opposition to the blunt bluffness of the democratic Everyman, whose sober attire was a sign of the bearer's public virtue, they disguised themselves as themselves. They displayed – I was about to say “their otherness in public view”, but this not only lacks precision, but is also misleading. Their otherness as the public is closer to the mark, but might imply a collision between private inclination and civic demands. Apparently trivial details on the surface of appearance, the minute stitching of a button hole, a knot on a cravat or the width of a lapel, signalled the otherness of the public, its difference from, and incapability of being reduced to, itself.

This index of withdrawal, invisibility, was a style in the most serious sense of the word *; and style, as the tangible arrangement of elements, is always serious.

*"...Every style embodies an epistemological decision, an interpretation of how and what we perceive...Every style is a means of insisting on something... It will be seen that stylistic decisions, by focusing our attention on some things, are also a narrowing of our attention, a refusal to allow us to see others."

Susan Sontag “On Style”

Contempt, to be elegant – as wholeness or necessity - has to be marked with a totality - that is to say –like any totality – artificial, or symbolic. It has to be raised above its everyday self to become its own sign, stark against its shifting background.

It requires a gesture that inscribes a circle that encloses itself. That which is mixed with, say, compassion or indulgence, belongs too much to the heterogeneous world.

Contempt is sterile. Closed within itself, it expresses only itself - ultimately its own difference from itself. In this world, there are only two qualities, the gesture and its background. To this gesture, all is background, and it indicates this with subtle and weary brevity. It neither genuflects, nor grieves.

Dandyism is a form of address, a subtle inclination forwards, merely enough to display a hint of shirt front and the cut of the sleeve. The immaculate contains itself, gives little more to the world than its scent.

The surface, the gesture that encloses itself, gives a brief farewell - perpetually departing. A sign of legitimacy external to all other forms can do no other; it cannot explain itself. It barely acknowledges what it departs from; marks its own difference/indifference to it with the briefest nod - not even something that could be called a glance.

"Whether the Lumpen … present themselves as paupers, dandies, or poets makes little difference. They are, in any case, beings without dignity (if anything, they have majesty). What deprives them of dignity is precisely their contact with something extrasocial and self-sufficient, true nefas: pleasure, the invisible, the gratuitousness of art…as soon as he speaks of l'art pour l'art … his insolent retort, in a cracked falsetto, to the power that has stripped him of authority. Since he no longer has a function and has been banished from Court, he spurns every function".

Roberto Calasso, “The Ruin of Kasch”

“Nefas” here, is the deepest level of offence - adherence to something beyond getting, spending, voting: a subject whose legitimacy (in the sovereign sense) derives from something different to a deeply prosaic and disappointing participation in the role Homo Economicus. That apparently hard-wired “enlightened self-interest” has recently displayed remarkable results.

Zurbaran’s “St Francis in meditation”, which can be seen at the National Gallery, depicts a man (or Saint, if you prefer) wearing a monk’s habit, clutching a skull. He kneels in a starkly lit concavity. The painting is a study in holes. The shadow cast by his cowl dissolves most of his face, except where the strong chiaroscuro reveals the tip of his nose and, beneath that, his mouth, gaping in ecstasy or vacancy- a void within a void. The skull clutched in his praying hands is also illuminated; displaying its hollow sockets filled with the same darkness that has invaded Francis, who gulps at a vacuum. He is nothing more than a rough garment, torn at one elbow (the last detail, in stark illumination, is the stray threads on his torn robe) folded around a void. This space would, in fact, be invisible, if Zurbaran had not clothed it in hessian robes and painted light. This is Zurbaran’s version of St Francis of Assisi. He does not depict the devotee of brotherly love in the usual saccharine manner, not preaching to birds or beggars, but hollowed out, absent – as if the message of a radical equality can only come from, and maybe be addressed to, a place where the subject is no longer itself.

St Simeon Stylites stood at the top of a column for thirty six years. The column was periodically rebuilt, each time higher. Paradoxically, this incremental withdrawal from the common things of the earth, further into a solitary communion with his God, led to his ever greater visibility. His increasing elevation, index of his vanishing, must have been evident for miles around, like an ornament on its plinth.

“…there is no valid reason why we should not believe that the tribes we call savage are not the remnants of great civilizations of the past. Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy.”

Charles Baudelaire “The Dandy”

THE DANDYISM OF CONTEMPT

I am in this next thursday. Starts 6:00pm. I've recently been messing around with Linux Multimedia Studio (freeware, highly reccomended) and VSTHost, and my contribution will quite possibly include some live digital manipulation.

The title actually comes from an essay that I half-wrote, then lost the original of, then was meant to re-write for the curators of this, then got writer's block/flu/distracted - and they have been enormously patient. It is nearly done, and will, I hope be available on the night as a handout, also, posted here when I finish it.

Meanwhile, the press release for the show (I didn't write this):

"The Dandyism of Contempt is a performance art event curated by Vanessa Mitter and Joshua Y’Barbo with performances by: Mark McGowan, Brian ‘Dawn’ Chalkley, Jack Catling, The Skinjobs, Nicola Ruben Montini, Robin Bale, Douglas Park, Adham Faramawy, Alec Dunnachie, Pauline A. Amos, John Wild, James Gardiner, Kiki Taira, Lennie Lee, Frog Morris, Karl Weill and Edward Cotterill.



Who is the dandy? What is dandyism? He is an ambiguous figure, both insider and outsider. He hides in the shadows, only to come out to play and be admired at his best. Finally, he disappears into oblivion. ‘Cynicism’, claimed the Victorian novelist George Meredith is ‘intellectual dandyism’. According to Giorgio Agamben, Beau Brummell, the great Regency dandy ‘can claim as his own discovery the introduction of chance into the artwork so widely practiced in contemporary art’.



Provocation is his raison d’être. The dandy is dedicated primarily to an image of originality through ‘the abolition of any subjectivity from his own person’ . There is an implicit contradiction in this stance. ‘The dandy, after all, longs to recreate himself as an emblem of complete originality’ (Agamben).



Nevertheless, if the dandy had one genius, it was to be the first true performer of the self. The construction of himself was his greatest work of art. As Balzac wrote in his Treatise on Elegant Living, ‘making himself a dandy, man becomes a piece of boudoir furniture, an extremely ingenuous mannequin’. The dandy requires an audience in order to exist. ‘As the work of art must destroy and alienate itself to become an absolute commodity, so the dandy-artist must become a living corpse, constantly tending toward an other, a creature essentially nonhuman and antihuman’ (Agamben).



The artists in this performance event, although diverse, all share the dandy’s contempt for the prosaic, the mundane, the humdrum. There are elements of chance, although these are as well rehearsed as the elusive but exacting criteria of how to tie a cravat, Beau Brummell style. The figure of the dandy may belong to the past but the traces of his complex disregard and simultaneous adherence to a set of self imposed rules can be found in many of the performances in this show.



The Performance Event is on January 20th 2011 and performances will take place at Camden Town Unlimited starting from 6pm onwards."

IT'S NOT CALLED "WELFARE".

Quite apart from how despicable Duncan-Smith's proposed "reforms" are, the thing that is sticking in my throat most, and has been for a while, is when did the dole start to be called "welfare"? That's what they call it in the U.S.

Over here it was always called Social Security, which is what it is meant to be. As a claimant over many years, i can remember the names for the actual benefit changing - being variously Supplementary Benefit, Unemployment Benefit (maybe these names containing the word "benefit" were considered to sound to positive) Income Support, then Jobseekers' Allowance...The shift from "Benefit" - a right- to "Support" - assistance- to "Allowance" - something grudgingly given; speaks volumes. 

This present government has gone out of its way to demonise claimants  (contrary to the writer of the linked piece, I would support the workshy and fraudsters myself). They make a conveniently soft target for the ideologically driven cuts. They were never going to get much sympathy from sanctimonious middle-Englanders who seem to see wage slavery as a badge of honor.

But anyway, my issue is also with the word: "Welfare". I do not know when the term became detached from the noun it qualified - "state", in order to denote benefits specifically. The welfare state is (or maybe, more accurately, was) a good thing. I owe my education, my still functioning teeth, my late mother's successful treatment for breast cancer, and other things too numerous to mention, to it. And so do most of those, Lib-Dems, Tories and Labour too, who are now attacking it with such ghoulish relish - but they seem to have forgotten that. An attack on the benefits system is an attack on the welfare state. An attack on universal benefits is an attack on the universalism that was part of the founding of the welfare state. To make benefits that were initially conceived as a right belonging to citizens conditional, is to make citizenship conditional. 

This is typical of the drivel we are subjected to. The approach adopted in Wisconsin that the article lauds sounds repulsive. One has to prove one's bona fides before receiving any assistance. One has to prove oneself worthy. This utterly inverts the idea behind benefits that we had in the UK; a right conferred by citizenship. Citizenship being a universal value and, most importantly, content-neutral. You did not have to prove that you were the right kind of person in order to enjoy your rights.

"One of Wisconsin's biggest successes was diverting people from claiming benefits in the first place. If you try to claim benefits, the first thing they do is offer you a job – rather than start filling in forms to process your application. In fact, you have to demonstrate that you are searching hard for a job for several weeks before you can even start to make a benefits claim. In contrast, our depressing "Job Centres" are really more like benefits offices." (that's because they are benefits offices, you prick.)

The most telling part of the article, which I quote because it illuminates the kind of thinking behind this proposed butchery - it's not just an isolated right wing rant, someone who fancies themselves as a Jeremiah or Ezekiel, howling the unpalatable truth at the desert- are these sentences:

"Perhaps we have come to think that it is normal to have a large part of our population without work, and cut adrift from the rest of society."

People who are in receipt of benefits are somehow not part of society. So membership of society, enjoyment of its benefits, is dependent upon work, and, apparently, work alone.

It is not "Welfare" - they might have that in America (or, rather, they don't), but here it is the benefits system, or the welfare state, and it does what it is meant to do. It seems to me that the use of that word, by politicians and journalists, has imported with it some really unpleasant ideological baggage. It is also sad and pathetic to base a political program and it's rhetoric on the sense of sanctimonious alertness to the idea that someone, somewhere, is having a better time than you, and that you're paying for them to have it!

If this image of the polity as a load of paranoid, grudging curtain-twitchers is the best that we can do, we may as well give up now.

ANTI DESIGN FESTIVAL

Tonight I perform at the Anti-Design Festival with Mark McGowan and Rex Nemo and the Psychic Self-Defenders. As is usual, but perhaps more so than usual, I have no clue what I will be talking about. There will be some sort of reference to football hooliganism - or at least that's what Mark's piece will be. I think that I will be touching on this, largely due to the EDL's chant, borrowed from the terraces: "You're not English any more". The "any more" part is telling; you were English, but now you're not. However, you are still included in the category English, as "Un-English"; an entirely different matter from "You're not English". It is a clear example of the state of exception in spatial practice.

McGowan's recent video plays with a similar disjunction, Irish music accompanying scenes of what one assumes are English (possibly nationalist) hooligans disporting themselves.

The festival itself is a manifestation of a clapped out aesthetic, full of "punk" references and "interactive", if not "relational" elements that needs a design context to look subversive rather than simply tired.

I'm intrigued by the statement on the website that claims that the festival is "a response to 25 years of cultural deep-freeze". I can't work out where the twenty five years comes from - why not 13? Election of New Labour, or 31 - the Tories? Or, in my personal opinion -21 - fall of the Berlin Wall? I suspect that twenty five would be about the average age for someone graduating from an art or design M.A at this time, and roughly half the age of a good few of the participants, but I don't know what this might mean.