Giovanna
Zapperi’s lecture, which offers a new and evocative examination
of the heritage of the dandy in Marcel Duchamp’s work, allows
one to mull over the signification and consider the future of this key
figure from the nineteenth century. Within the context of the advent
of democratic society, the dandy crystallized changes in the regime
of images and in the status of the artist. The disappearance of the
foundations of the social and religious order that governed the Ancien
régime brought with it the gradual abandonment of a system and
field of fine arts that rested on the well-ordered distribution of values
accorded to rank. (1) This disappearance opened art to the imaginary
locales of the city, as well as to the invention of a new “spectator”
whose captivation thenceforth took place almost exclusively on the level
of the affects. These transformations were accompanied by a desire that,
though experiencing different forms since the French Revolution and
the Romantic Era, appeared as a reconciliation of art and life. The
dandy participated therein in that he is more than he produces in the
way of objects. His dazzling appearance in the public space stemmed
from an “artialization” of his own person. One and the same
desire led simultaneously to a reinvestment of the power of images,
as much in artistic, social, and political projects (which were often
quickly qualified as “utopian”) as in capitalism. As regards
these projects, one need only turn to the thought of the Saint-Simonians,
recently reexamined by Neil McWilliam within the present seminar. Such
thinking made of art a way of access into truth, inwardness, and the
harmony of a community to come. As for capitalism, by the start of the
twentieth century it was already verging on the emergence of a mass
culture to be characterized by the reign of the commodity. Faced with
these various ways of filling in the modern void that was threatening
to the men of the nineteenth century, the dandy offered, by contrast,
another emptiness that seems to us to make of him a figure of resistance.
Françoise Coblence thus writes that “the dandy is not to
be confused with the Romantic positions on subjectivity. But he comes
out of the same crisis and constitutes in fact a parallel attempt.”
(2) Moreover, this attempt is, in a striking way, part of the renewal
of the age’s aesthetic methods, those jointly worked out by Romanticism
and artistic “utopias” as well as by the market economy.
This kinship is, indeed, brilliantly hinted at by Thomas Carlyle when,
in Sartor Resartus, he reproaches the dandy for being
only “a visual object, or a thing that will reflect rays of light,”
before adding, “your silver or your gold . . . he solicits not;
simply the glance of your eyes.” (3)
“But to impress a trademark
upon his work was Baudelaire's avowed intention.
There exist few artistic
representations of the dandy in the nineteenth century. His deeds and
gestures were most often related, instead, in literary accounts. His
absence of inwardness, which he paraded around, was manifested there
in his almost abstract manner of appearance. The dandy was above all
his carriage and his silhouette, which already possessed an unreal character.
He was a succession of labored poses that could be said to resemble
a form of choreographic notation. He was a color: in the obituary of
Robert de Montesquiou, his choice of tones for his clothing was described
as “pre-Bergsonian.”(4) He was, finally, a phrasing, even
a timbre. From this standpoint, we can say that the dandy subjugated
his public by drawing upon the wellsprings of the sublime. Yet he assigned
no goal to this conquest of the spectator, just as he associated it
with no prior or higher truth. The “originality” and the
distinctiveness in “fashion and behavior” picked up on by
Zapperi refer back to no definite social order. While his detachment
may be qualified as “aristocratic,” as she proposes to do
in taking up Baudelaire’s description, the dandy was undoing the
codes of the aristocracy just as much as those of the bourgeoisie. An
object of people’s glances, and nonexistent without them, the
dandy-simulacrum offered to his observer no determinate content.
With no past and no future, he situated himself on the fringes of any
certain meaning of History, were it that of the abolition of its march.
Independent of causes and effects, he promised neither efficiency nor
profit. This militant activism in favor of the equal contained, of course,
certain risks. Far removed from Baudelaire’s theorization of this
figure in Le peintre de la vie moderne (which nevertheless
retains a heuristic value), numerous dandies were, it must be noted,
tempted to fill in this void on an individual basis. Doing so, they
could not but be unfaithful to the initial project, as the career of
Gabriele D’Annunzio, for example, shows. The dandy, having become
tyrant, could thus set himself up as community mediator by claiming
to be the guarantor of true inwardness, even the guarantor of a salvational
masculinity.(5)
One of the interesting
things about Zapperi’s lecture lies, as a matter of fact, in her
analysis of the dandy’s gender ambiguity. The author insists on
“a transgression of the border between the sexes” brought
on by his appearance. Such transgression invites comparisons with the
decadent, the effeminate, and the homosexual. Nevertheless, it would
seem that this ambiguity is also that of his observer and, beyond physiognomy
and clothing, that of the functioning of the image the dandy had worked
out. Beneath the irony of a fictional dialogue, in 1889 Oscar Wilde’s
The Decay of Lying corroborated the process by which the principle
of mimesis and the relation of the “spectator” to the image
were being inverted:
“Paradox though it may seem–and paradoxes are always dangerous
things–it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more
than Art imitates life. . . . A great artist invents a type, and Life
tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising
publisher. . . . The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, understood
this, and set in the bride's chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo,
that she might bear children as lovely as the works of art that she
looked at in her rapture or her pain. They knew that Life gains from
Art not merely spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soulturmoil
or soulpeace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours
of art and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace
of Praxiteles.” (6)
Faced with a phenomenon
that might be described as the “feminization” of an image-influenced
spectator (7) —a phenomenon that, far from being new, nevertheless
found itself reinforced by democracy and the emergence of a mass culture—the
dandy who is Wilde opposed the figure of the aesthete, who escapes by
acknowledging the power of images. As Zapperi notes when comparing the
dandy to the Baudelairean flâneur, the dandy maintained an “ambivalent
relationship to the public space, of which he is a part but also of
which he remains an observer.” Individually, he was the model
of the person who shied away both from the half-hearted attempts of
an art that would transform society and from the charms of the commodity.
For the Wildean partisan of art for art’s sake, the “cultured”
would catch the effect of fashion, whereas the “uncultured”
would conform to it. (8)
This ambivalence of
the spectator’s gender also informs the ambivalence of the dandy-simulacrum.
The latter stems from a tension that lies in the fact that the dandy
possessed his public while at the same time deploying visual strategies
that impel a desire for possession. In order to maintain this tension,
the dandy was led to establish a strict control over his public image.
The portraits of Robert de Montesquiou done by the painters of his time
testify to this in exemplary fashion. He seemed always to have sought
to master the result in these painted portraits. The same goes for his
many self-representations in an album of photographs eloquently entitled
Imago ego. (9) Now, this need to control the uniqueness of
one’s image, as deployed in a variety of versions, remained quite
fragile and, as the century advanced, was harmed by the proliferation,
within the public space, of reproducible images. From this standpoint,
the analysis Zapperi proposes concerning the transition from the dandy
to the feminine and star-like figure of Rrose Sélavy in the evolution
of Duchamp’s artistic career seems to me to shed new light on
the gradual disappearance of the central role played by the dandy during
the era of mass culture. He disappeared in the sense that he was supplanted
by the proliferation of a more easily consumable feminine imagery. He
also disappeared in the sense that, like a number of really existing
dandies, he frequently ended up living the life of recluse in his own
private residence. The example of Robert de Montesquiou, who lived at
the turn from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, allows one to grasp
this limit point. “Is it acceptable,” he wrote apropos of
the Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things
Past, “is it desirable to see a fictional character win out
over his model, to the point that that model is pushed into the background
and almost replaced by it in the memory of men? (10)” Disturbed
by the various literary incarnations that were feeding upon his success,
(11) Montesquiou seems to have been even more disturbed by those representations
that eluded his control. Required to appear, he had first enthralled
those frequenting the salons, then he opened his apartment chambers,
placing himself there at center stage, (12) before organizing the “on
principle egotistical” parties at the Pavillon des Muses. At first,
he visibly delighted in the articles these events had inspired in the
press, but at the height of his celebrity, he began to fear the photographers
and the journalists who could provide a media image of him that slipped
away from him. Jules Graveraux, owner of the Haÿ rose garden who
invited Montesquiou to lecture there in June 1912, wrote to him, “I
shall protect you as best I can from the photographers. It will be rather
easy for me to save you from the moving pictures, but you will have
to be subjected to the amateur photographer; you know how rife the Kodak
is in our time.” (13) Tempted by transvestism—Imago
ego presents photos of Montesquiou as Zanetto from François
Coppée’s Le Passant and as Prince Houssin from
The Thousand and One Nights—and fascinated by
feminine artifice—he owned an almost complete collection of the
photos of the Countess of Castiglione—Montesquiou did not go the
next step and construct a fictional feminine image as Duchamp had done
during the same period. That image, as Zapperi points out, espoused,
more than the dandy, an indictment of the commodity, of techniques of
reproduction, and of the attraction produced by spectacular emotions.
The strength of this invention of his was also that it allowed the artist
Duchamp to exist both in the image while continuing to erase his subjectivity
and outside of it: the star Rrose Sélavy mimics while borrowing
her physiognomy and her codified pose does not really exist.
Notes
1.
See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics : The Distribution
of the Sensible (2000), trans. with an introduction by Gabriel
Rockhill (London and New York : Continuum, 2004).
2. Françoise Coblence, Le Dandyisme, obligation
d’incertitude (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988),
pp. 25-26.
3. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and
Opinions of Herr Teufeldröckh in Three Books, intro. and notes
Rodger L. Tarr, text established by Mark Engel and Rodger L. Tarr (Los
Angeles, Berkeley, and London: University of California Press, 2000),
p. 201.
4. Paul Souday, “Robert de Montesquiou,”
Le Temps, December 22, 1921, cited in Robert de Montesquiou
ou l’art de paraître (Paris: Musée d’Orsay/Réunion
des musées nationaux, 1999), p. 9.
5. On the back-and-forth between the posture of the
dandy and avant-garde artists, one may read Carter Ratcliff’s
“Dandysme et abstraction dans un universe défini par Newton,”
Les Cahiers du Musée d’art moderne, 33 (Autumn
1990): 7-21.
6. Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, from Intentions
(New York: Brentano's, 1905). Translator’s Note: I have used the
1998 electronic edition by Geoffrey Sauer available at:
http://eserver.org/books/intentions/the-decay-of-lying.html.
7. There is much testimony, from the early years of
the nineteenth century, to the feelings of repulsion at the feminization
of the spectator by those very same people who were calling with all
their might for a new “distribution of the sensible.” Before
the advent of photography, these criticisms bore in particular on those
new techniques of representation, and new ways of catching people’s
eyes: panoramas and dioramas.
8. Wilde, The Decay of Lying. In Wilde’s
text, this opposition concerns more specifically the effect of paintings
of London fogs which, in his terms, “have become the mere mannerism
of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull
people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured
catch cold.”
9. See Montesquiou ou l’art de paraître.
10. Robert de Montesquiou, Les Pas effacés
(Paris: Émile-Paul frères, 1923), vol. 2, p. 62.
11. Montesquiou has been recognized as the model for
the Baron de Charlus in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past,
for the Duke des Esseintes in J. K. Huysmans À rebours
(Against the Grain), for the Count of Muzarett in Jean Lorrain’s
Monsieur de Phocas, as well as Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray.
12. Nearly half of Montesquiou’s autobiography,
Les Pas effacés is devoted to his apartment chambers.
There, the decors replaced people, who were reduced to being bit players,
and he altered these decors, along with his own appearance, as soon
as he felt any competition from the world of literature.
13. Letter of June 1, 1912, cited in Robert de
Montesquiou ou l’art de paraître, p. 18.