Cinematic portraits of an enigmatic fictional character: Valérie Knoll and Hans-Christian Dany have curated a Dandy series for REX. The starting point was her Kunsthalle exhibition “No Dandy, No Fun”, which went almost unseen after its opening in October 2020 due to the pandemic and is now being revived on film, so to speak. The two have a program of eleven feature films with legendary and controversial titles designed that is eccentric, sophisticated, self-reflective and elusive like the character of the dandy. In their introductory text, Knoll and Dany follow the traces of a character who always eludes.
Hans-Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll
Ninety years after the death of George Bryan Brummell (1778–1840), Virginia Woolf asked the question: “Why are women so much more interesting to men than men to women?” The writer recognized an exception in the dandy of the first hour and dedicated a miniature biography to him, which the BBC broadcast on November 20, 1929.
That was five weeks after the New York Stock Exchange plummeted on Black Friday. The point in time was characteristic of the figure of the dandy. The big crash ushered in the most momentous economic crisis of modern times. With her began the end of an epoch. It was the beginning of a period of transition, in which developments pointed towards a future that was not yet in sight. In precisely such phases of decadence as times without prospects, dandies like zombies crawl out of their graves. The gap between the passing and the coming, with its moments of despair, is her stage. While fear reigns around them about what is to come, they move untouched and slightly floating through the events of decay, just as Brummell once strolled ghostly through the decline of the English nobility.
In her radio feature, Woolf asked why this creepy fool of a dying society, left only in debt and rumor, could leave such a stubborn impression. That Brummell never bowed or licked his saliva seemed respectable to her. She also paid tribute to his philosophy of life, which included taking what his origins didn’t allow. But soon she got to talking about the second half of his life, those years after which the bankrupt dandy had fled London into exile in France. Until this break in his biography, he had promised a better future in which people no longer had to be born rich to participate in the good life. But, she asks, what became of him? He ended up in the workhouse, dying squalid and ill-dressed, stepping down like those around him who were forgotten before being buried.
Brummell ended miserably, but then things turned out very differently. He became history. But why actually?
The fact that he took so many liberties impressed me. But the fact that he remained a phantom had an even stronger effect. He magically drew everyone’s attention, but no one knew who was hiding behind his masks. However, the inscrutable remained related to others, reacted as they reacted to him, entered into an exchange, even if he did not show himself.
By remaining a formed fictional character, rather than indulging in the flow of his self, he designed a model character, the dandy. He stays at a distance. He doesn’t get involved individually and doesn’t come around the corner with an identity as an argument. Dandies refuse to deal with the world in a subjectified way. They don’t tweet opinions or break the political down to getting to grips with their personal footprint in the stratosphere. They refuse to privatize the political.
But back to the original figure of the 19th century, which appears relevant again in a present that is increasingly abandoning politics as a form of self-disciplined negotiation of common problems.
The numerous rumors stirred up by the phantom Brummell lost none of their effectiveness even after his death and were always passed on. The representations were not necessarily favorable, but it was precisely the ambivalence that kept the conversations flaring up. The legends surrounding the legendary form the maquette to this day, with which all later forms of dandyism have since been compared.
The fact that Virginia Woolf added failure as a special feature hardly diminished the fascination for the dandy, as it enriched the ambivalent figure with the moment of the dramatic departure. And they are popular, such stories of failure, as they reflect our own fears that we delegate to others. In it, the dynamic of the dandy anticipated something from the cinema, that place where fleeting figures of light fall, love and kill for me.
However, Woolf did not reduce Brummell to his failure. Rather, she emphasized that the dandy is a person who only becomes an image through the others. The actual and observed figure, the actions and the view of them mutually influence each other. This turns dandies into stories that can never be told to the end. But what does this never-ending story tell?
Last but not least, she tells us that there is no such thing as a dandy. Those who tried to approximate the idealized person never got close to the projected image. It’s impossible to become a dandy. But in their failure, those who tried kept changing the picture of what a dandy might be by adding another variation. Quite a few dandies even wanted to destroy the image that existed of them. Dandys urged iconoclasm, especially on their own behalf. To put it less heroically, they tended towards self-destruction.
Quite a few dandies took their own lives. There were many ways to get rid of yourself.
In search of self-dissolution, they tinkered with their cases. They masked who they were by becoming different on the outside, hiding the signs of their innate identity or drowning in alcohol. And when all else failed, they went to extremes and laid hands on themselves. It was the will: to be nothing and to want nothing. But what can that be, nothing?
The dandyesque effort to disappear often begins with understanding oneself as an object that can be manipulated and played, almost as if it were a puppet. It’s the fantasy: being in control. But this escape from oneself by doubling into a puppet comes up against a limit, since each puppet also plays itself.
As a performer on the run from himself, the dandy distrusts what is supposed to be given, but also himself. What he considers wrong is countered by his artificiality, which pretends to be grouped around an inner emptiness. Many are aware all the time that their escape attempt is doomed to fail. The impending fall becomes a constant companion, but they see no other way out.
But dandies also cultivate an attitude out of the frequently broken escape from themselves. They come across as players and at the same time as desperate people trying to make a virtue out of necessity. They don’t see the blind spot in who they are supposed to be as a lack, but as an opportunity to become who they are not. In all of this, however, their self-transformations stand in sharp contrast to contemporary demands for self-improvement. The efforts of a dandy remain unambitious for success and are free from ambition towards what is socially accepted as right. Even Brummell was lazy as the night. While he embodied the idea of being a blacksmith, he was a blacksmith who had never picked up a hammer.
What’s more, they elude. Instead of trying to catch up with their time, dandies prefer to drive like wrong-way drivers on the freeways of their time. Although they are fascinated by the here and now and follow exactly what is happening, they move anachronously. You drive out or off time. This is not to be equated with a rejection of progress. But dandies ask themselves: does it need something new or an unbroken yes to the zeitgeist? Some even go a step further with the assumption that the new prevents progress. Saying that was taboo for a long time and was considered cultural pessimism. In the meantime, however, it can hardly be overlooked that 999 out of 1000 things on which “New!” stands, do not entail the slightest progress. Economically, the new creates added value, but ecologically it has long been a disaster.
Dandies, on the other hand, were pioneers of sustainability because they did as little as possible and reused old things. Your attitude seems worth considering again today, at a time when it would be better to organize and renovate what is there instead of putting out something new that will soon be old again and consume a lot of resources. Even Walter Benjamin came to the conclusion with the montage principle of his Arcades work, which uses old texts: “I have nothing to say. Just to show.” And then he pointed to the thinking of a deceased dandy: “It is very important that the ‘new’ in Baudelaire does not make any contribution to progress.” There’s a lot there, we just don’t use it. And occasionally there is progress when walking on the big rubbish dump.
The film program gathers special cinematographic experiences on our way to penetrate the complex figure of the dandy. The main characters of the films are dandies in a broader sense. What almost all films have in common is the wandering about of loners and a loner who cannot find their place in the present. A king who refuses to accept the thinking of his time. An extraterrestrial who doesn’t want to acknowledge the story of the earth’s inhabitants oppressing him. A speculator who dreams of destroying the fake world in which he works successfully. A melancholic who no longer wants to be the merrily unaffected person that others expect of him. A woman who doesn’t fit into reality and invents a different one through alcohol. They are films about remaining strangers and the desire to go your own way instead of just keeping going.
Valérie Knoll and Hans-Christian Dany have been dealing with the dandy and its future for many years. Most recently, they jointly curated the exhibition “No Dandy, No Fun” (2020) at the Kunsthalle Bern. Her book, which takes the exhibition further, will soon be published under the same title by Sternberg Press/The MIT Press.
Valérie Knoll was director of the Kunsthalle Bern from April 2015 to March 2022. Hans-Christian Dany lives in Hamburg and writes books about drugs, cybernetics, art and fashion.
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