A
type invented by George “Beau” Brummell in the final years
of the eighteenth century that was turned into a literary character
by such writers as Honoré de Balzac, Jules Barbey d’Aurévilly,
and Charles Baudelaire, did the dandy still have a place in the twentieth
century ? And if so, what changes did mass society make it undergo ?
To these recurrent questions, Giovanna Zapperi offers a number of answers
with the help of the figure of Marcel Duchamp.
As Alexandre Kojève
wrote in 1969, “Brummell knew that, after Napoleon, one could
no longer be a soldier.” Lord Byron, also comparing Brummell to
Napoleon, stated that he would have preferred to be Brummell. In alluding
to Duchamp’s celebrity with the help of testimony from Henri-Pierre
Roché, who compared Duchamp’s celebrity to that of Napoleon
and of Sarah Bernhardt, Zapperi is therefore situating herself straightaway,
and is situating Duchamp, within the constellation of these stars, each
of which dominated its own sky and fascinated people by their force
of attraction. Pierre Cabane attributed to Roché the following
words said to be spoken to Duchamp: “Your best work has been the
employment of your time.” (1)
Duchamp is therefore
a dandy on two different levels. If dandyism is to be described by the
invention of one’s character, if its defining characteristic is
to make of one’s person a work of art while extolling laziness
and displaying a contempt for work, Duchamp really has that dandy impassivity,
elegance, and inscrutability. Moreover, nonchalance does not exclude
rigor; and Breton would underscore the systematic “method”
of his inventions. (2) Yet Duchamp also created an œuvre—a
paradoxical one certainly, though innovative nonetheless. This trait
indeed reinforces his dandyism, while at the same time distancing him
from it. For, with the invention of the readymade, what triumphs is
indifference to taste, along with the production of the already seen,
impersonality and contempt for one’s “hand,” which
is deemed to be overcharged with emotion. Duchamp carried out the dandy’s
program, but he carried it out also through his work, his œuvre;
and while this œuvre radicalizes the subject’s coldness
and impersonality, it ceases to present them on the level of one’s
character alone. Pursuing on this score the Baudelairean program, Duchamp
transferred dandyism from one’s character to the work. This gesture,
which had already been broached by Romanticism, constituted at one and
the same time a loss and a sort of betrayal of Brummell’s radicality,
which bet everything on his person but also guaranteed the generalization
and permanency of the phenomenon. Dandyism could endure only if it were
to be transformed, achieving at once its own loss as pure exhibition
of the individual and its transition over to the work, its becoming
something. That is why the readymade and Le Grand Verre, which
Breton named an “anti-chef d’œuvre,”
are his loveliest triumphs.
With Duchamp, it is
no longer a question “of the burning need to make oneself into
an original,” of “the pleasure of surprising others and
the prideful satisfaction of never being surprised” as Baudelaire
would have it, (3) but of introducing reproduction and repetition into
the work. As Zapperi recalls, the readymade embodies the dandy’s
dehumanization as well as the dehumanization of the capitalist mode
of production. He carries out the program of the commonplace [poncif]
and makes the commonplace his own. “Creating something commonplace
is genius,” noted Baudelaire in Fusées. Benjamin
offers the following comment:
“But to impress a trademark
upon his work was Baudelaire's avowed intention. . . . And perhaps,
for Baudelaire, there is no higher honor than to have imitated, to have
reproduced, with his work this state of affairs, one of the most profane
of all in the commodity economy. Perhaps this is Baudelaire's greatest
achievement, and certainly it is one of which he is conscious: to have
aged so quickly while remaining so durable.” (4)
The commonplace—the trademark of modernity that testifies to the
work’s inscription within time, to its solidity and its ageing—is
even more characteristic of the readymade, Duchamp’s stroke of
genius by which objects created entirely through the singular whim and
arbitrariness of one’s choice are given distinction.
Yet it must be added, along with Zapperi, that Duchamp was able, as
well, to embody dandyism in his character not only through his coldness,
his nonchalance, and the originality of his clothing, but also through
the exhibition of his person, the transformations he embodied, the transvestism
he adopted, and the “spectacular femininity” he staged in
the photos done by Man Ray, as well as through the play of sexual identity
to which Rrose Sélavy bears witness.
In the nineteenth century,
fashion [la mode] constituted, as Georg Simmel has written,
all at once the imitation of a model, the need for a social support
as well as a need for difference, and the tendency toward variation
and distinction. (5) Women’s lack of social freedom drove them
to take over this realm, so as to affirm their membership in a group
as well as their individuality. It was the dandy who picked up on this
strategy and diverted it for his own ends; it was he who then turned
it into an essentially masculine path, thereby clouding the traditional
social issues and confusing the division of genders.
The dandy, and Brummell
first and foremost, in effect became the arbiter of masculine elegance,
the genius of fashion, innovative, original, inimitable, and yet imitated,
copied, and aped at every possible opportunity. Was Brummell for all
that a star ? A diva, rather, a capricious and despotic one whose judgments,
which were beyond appeal, were feared by everyone, the Regent of England
above all others. From the diva, the dandy took the power of making
a salon fashionable simply by his appearing there for a few minutes;
he had the power to launch some unlikely fashion, like that of the tie
so stiff that it prevented all movement, or, according to Barbey d’Aurévilly,
that of the worn-out outfit. Yet with the star, Brummell shared the
capacity to be in a position to create a myth. A star, wrote Malraux,
“is a person capable of a minimum of theatrical talent whose face
expresses, symbolizes, and embodies a collective moment.” And
he mentioned in this respect the mythic Marlene Dietrich under the same
heading as Phryne. The star is, according to Malraux, feminine, and,
in the twentieth century, linked with the movies. She is the great actress
who is capable of embodying different roles and capable of bringing
scenarios to life and bringing them together. But as queens, courtesans,
or spies, Garbo and Marlene fit into the tradition of the heros of pantomime:
Pierrot as thief, drunkard, or lover. A man, too, can embody a myth,
the perfect example of which was, for Malraux, Charlie Chaplin. For,
as Malraux adds, “movies are aimed at the masses, and the masses
love myth, for better or for worse.” (6)
While it is true that
Brummell was a star, it was not his face, but the whole of his person,
that embodied this quality. Yet the star is supposed to please the public,
to be seductive, to figure as an object of desire. Now, the dandy, and
no doubt Duchamp more than Brummell, did not seek to please people.
He upset them; he loved bad taste and indulged in the aristocratic pleasure
of not being liked. His sense of humor was purposefully caustic, and
his spirit, unlike that of most stars, was blistering. When Baudelaire
demanded that the dandy live and sleep in front of a mirror, that he
be forever sublime, (7) he was laying out an ideal of sainthood, an
ascetic rule he assigned to the dandy through which the latter would,
for him, “border on Spiritualism and Stoicism.” (8) We are
therefore far from the idea of a media image. As for Marcel Duchamp—who,
according to Breton, had arrived “at the end of the whole historical
process of the development of dandyism”—he was “surely
the most intelligent and (for many) the most annoying man of this first
part of the twentieth century.”(9)
Quite far from himself
being a star, Duchamp was able to play at stardom. He denounced the
stereotypes of the star in mass society—those of the femme
fatale, but also those of the “culture industry” or
of culture: Mona Lisa is a star, but L.H.O.O.Q. (10)
She enters into the circulation of capital; she has to be able to be
given a mustache, sold, and exchanged. In this sense, like the dandy
of the nineteenth century, Duchamp questioned the art and culture of
his time by presenting figures that radicalized the questions about
them. Like the dandy, Duchamp poked fun at the Romantic genius and his
pseudo-inspiration. He extolled artificiality, indifference, impassiveness,
the reign of an ironic causality that prevents any recognition of identity.
When originality is “adapted to the market,”(11) genius
can give itself out only as commonplace. Baudelaire was the first to
have this idea. Duchamp made it into a reality. Thus would Duchamp finish
up as well as finish off dandyism.
Note
1.
Marcel Duchamp, Entretiens avec Pierre Cabane (Paris: Pierre
Belfond, 1967), p. 135.
2. André Breton, Anthologie de l’humour
noir (Paris: J. J. Pauvert, 1966; Le livre de poche), p. 355.
3. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie
moderne,” Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard-Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade, 1976), vol. 2, p. 710.
4. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (from the Tiedemann German edition)
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard, 2004), p. 372 (translation slightly altered).
[Translator: As explained in note 3 on p. 967, le poncif is
“the banal, the trite; a conventional piece of writing, a cliché.
Baudelaire writes in his notebook: ‘To create a new place [poncif]—that
is genius. I must create a new commonplace.’” My thanks
to the historian of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group Stephen Hastings
King for having located these Benjamin references for me in English.]
5. Georg Simmel, “La mode,” Philosophie
de la modernité (Paris: Payot, 1989), p. 168. [Translator:
See the chapter on Fashion in Georg Simmel, On Individuality &
Social Forms; Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).]
6. André Malraux, “Esquisse d’une
psychologie du cinéma” (1946), in Œuvres complètes
(Paris: Gallimard-Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2004), vol.
4, pp. 14-15.
7. Charles Baudelaire, “Mon cœur mis à
nu,” Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 678
8. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie
moderne,” p. 710.
9. André Breton, ibid.
10. Translator’s Note: Apropos of Duchamp’s
assisted readymade with the French title La Jaconde aux Moustaches.
L.H.O.O.Q (Mona Lisa with Mustache and Beard), Kristina Seekamp,
on her website Unmaking the Museum: Marcel Duchamp's Readymades
in Context explains, “The title is essentially a phonetic
game. As Duchamp himself noted in a 1966 interview, ‘I really
like this kind of game, because I find that you can do a lot of them.
By simply reading the letters in French, even in any language, some
astonishing things happen’ (Cabanne 63). When read quickly in
French, the title L.H.O.O.Q. sounds like a sentence translating to ‘She
has a hot bum/ass.’ This is the most commonly [c]ited meaning
of the phrase, but many other ideas also surround this intriguing group
of letters. Duchamp gave a ‘loose’ translation of L.H.O.O.Q.
as ‘there is fire down below’ in a late interview (Schwarz
203). Steefel points out that, when spoken in English, L.H.O.O.Q. sounds
like ‘LOOK’ (50). Thus the piece could have a further function
as a commentary on the relationship between artist and viewer, which
Duchamp was admittedly very interested in.’ (‘Laugh’
111)” <http://arthist.binghamton.edu/duchamp/LHOOQ.html>.
11. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project,
p. 333 (translation altered)..