Compulsive Surface: Social Disillusion and Manifest Decadence

The term decadence originally emerged to impose a moral code in an era of increased middle-class wealth, describing “a civilization grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or in conduct…”1  It reflected style over substance and a “general social and cultural atomism”2  where the individual was lost in a decadent obsession with himself. Although detail-laden practices were identified as transgressive when the ‘Decadent movement’ emerged throughout Europe during the fin de siècle, ‘decadence’ became refashioned into an aesthetic itself – a kind of defiant gesture adopted as an intentional marker of difference and proud deviation from the norm. In popular culture, physical ‘detail’ (in fashion and design) became further synonymous with the corrupt in part to twentieth century design theorists like Adolf Loos, who believed “the evolution of culture [to be] synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use” seeing plain and undecorated simplicity as an achievement of modernity, Loos felt that ornament was primitive and regressive, slowing down cultural development and draining (Austria’s) economy.3

In turn, both artists and non-artists have employed detail and ornament as a means to critique societal conditions and modernist orthodoxy, calling on these hallmarks of impropriety to act as subversive statement. Embellishment, detail and ornament all have an element of compulsion to them and because historically framed as effeminate and anti-modern, they have been seen as synonymous with the regressive. Feminist artists have long mined traditional ornament and decoration –for the most part those ‘effeminate details’ that arise from fashion and home decorating –from the delicate to the exaggerated, for political objectives, and often in combination with the particulars of personal narrative as a strategy to counter empiricism. All of these strategies have become recently reinvented, with many visual artists accessing the vernacular of craft, particularly embellishment, for subversive ends.  Naomi Schor called the influx of detail in art (writing and visual art) a victory for the feminine: “if today the detail and the wider semantic field it commands enjoys an undisputed legitimacy it is because the dominant paradigms of patriarchy have been largely eroded”4.

 Today, in contrast to the initial concept of the term, “decadent” and “decadence” tend to be used favorably in reference to rich desserts and gaudy, decorative fashion, and in turn, purchasing power, rather than implying immorality or for that matter, a subversive aesthetic. Decadence drips with bling, is coated in confectioners’ sugar, and topped with a $800.00 Manolo Blahnik slipper filled with Cristal. Pleasure is equated with the acquisition of consumer goods and acquisition is what keeps America going. More interesting and important, however, is that decadent flourishes make conspicuous consumption – once the exclusive bailiwick of the leisure class – available to everyone in a no-brow culture. Whereas diamond encrusted cocktail rings had been previously found only on the little finger of either oil heiresses or Liberace, they can now be seen on the left-hand of every yuppie bride. Even the department-store glass variety can get by until the real thing comes along, so long as the pretension of wealth is projected in the details. Recently (December 24, 2005), The Economist called the strategy of accumulating visible wealth (choosing the cocktail ring in combination with Payless shoes) as “trading up, trading down shopping,” one employed by mid-market shoppers in order to enjoy “selective extravagance.”5

In The Concept of Decadence José Luis Bermúdez searched for the hallmarks of the genre, contending that decadence might involve a kind of imbalance: “an obsession with style and surface” 6 that trumps content and fails to keep its means in harmony with its ends. The definitive feature of a decadent work of art is it having been “designed for an audience, but is not intended to engage, or to engage with, its audience” 7. Applied to contemporary art practices, if the decadent artwork is narcissistic, than this definitive failure to engage is a quality not unfounded in the contemporary  ‘personal dream-world narrative’ artwork which is by definition dissociated. Rich wonderlands; luscious, overly decorative artworks that drip with baubles, sparkles and beads; highly detailed erotica or artful soft porn; and obsessive, abstract practices that ascribe value to compulsion and repetition, ooze from trendy young galleries and contemporary art museums. Although on one hand, these works might flaunt an obsession with surface, perhaps this perceived “imbalance” might be reflexive of culture in general, highlighting a cultural imbalance between projected images of prosperity, individual liberty and the reality of a shrinking middle-class, economic crisis and increased conservatism. A culture that was shaped by a previous generation of atomic individuals, the ‘me’ generation extraordinaire: the boomers.

Unlike 19th century Decadents, 21st century work is less of a manifestation of gothic horror and moral decay. Rather they are contemporary disasters, distanced from the Romantic era that predated the 19th century Decadents, depicting instead the dark underside of culture, or the fall-out after the summer of love. Turning towards ‘tradition’ in order to critique the post-modern, contemporary methodologies of decadence utilize a narrative, solipsistic vernacular in opposition to conceptualism (kill the father) and are celebratory of skill-sets and imagery rejected by second-wave feminists (kill the mother). In response to the death of authorship, young artists create clearly ‘authored’ worlds of personal narrative. In response to minimalism and cool intellectualism, young artists create messy, unstable artworks that refute theory. In response to largesse of 80s painting and sculpture, artists stitch. And in response to an over-indulgent and super branded America, where idealist baby-boomers sold-out to Reaganomics, Generation X retreats into a wretched kind of pop-art that depicts fin de siècle, or perhaps fin de globe, decadence (as outlined by Daniel Vojtech for the In Morbid Colours catalog) as: extravagance, ugliness, degeneracy, perversion, Narcissism and melancholic illusionism.8

Assuming the concept of decadence in the arts to be a professed subversive strategy, a reflection of the conditions of culture rather than literal flamboyance and extravagance, several young female artists have been working with detail in a manner that mirrors decline and the detritus of consumer culture, fashion and sexuality, similar to their 19th century counterparts. Whereas 19th Century decadence portended the inevitable collapse of a civilization shattered by the effects of industrial temporality, today’s artists contend with even grander challenge to their sense of time, the digital. In response to a culture of instant gratification, many artists turn back to processes that demand slow-time. Their response to the disintegration of time is a stubborn and pedantic practice.

Orly Cogan, for example, stitches her drawings onto found linens. The playful and explicit sexual imagery seems to mirror the sexual politics of free-love, but the at the same time openly presents dichotomous female roles and archetypes with a matter-of-fact eroticism. Rather than addressing these roles through clearly articulated political statement, Cogan’s work is subtle and less divisive. Her embroidered Lolitas sit on the toilet, urinate, masturbate and assess one another comfortably and uncompromised. In her stitchings on printed fabric, couples fornicate in weeds, like in Bamboo Experience, or, as in Jungle Boogie, sometimes with the animals. Rather than challenge the stereotypes of women as sex object, as addressed by a previous generation of artists, Cogan’s work admits to a fascination with pornography and sexual deviance. Her work illustrates a fantasy world of sexual behavior that doubles the decadence by turning ornamental embroideries and printed cloth into the canvas for a veritable orgy of cavorting men and women. Although her work is likely more fun, and funny, than it is offensive, part of the charm is in her depicting a hard-core Garden of Eden during an era of increased fundamentalism and an espousal of traditional values. In a period where morality has resurfaced as an acute issue in the domestic and global sphere, it is easy to see that tension expressed, or tested, through narratives in the arts.

Loos, also a stern critic of women’s fashion, believed women were forced to fetishize themselves in order to attract strong, successful males. He had envisioned a “newer, greater age” when women’s status would be equal to men’s because of their (impending) economic independence. No longer having to attract a man with “silks and satins, ribbons and bows, frills and furblows,” “a womean’s value [would] not rise and fall with fluctuations in sensuality” and therefore ornamentation would lack an objective and become obsolete.9  In Shary Boyle’s porcelain figurines, ornamentation lacks an objective, but it is far from obsolete. Rather, ruffles and lace become a monstrous growth, her figurines covered by embellishments that suggest malignancy, the female body consumed by details until obliteration.

Recalling Royal Daulton, the Franklin-mint or any other middle-class-kitsch fascination with the Romantic, Boyle’s figures have gone slightly awry – with two heads, numerous arms, or cradling their severed head in their hands, they have a neurotic sensibility. But unlike decadence for the sake of decadence, these figures portend a kind of monstrous superfluity where fantasy worlds are in beautiful, horrific decline and the whims of fashion and the human lust for conspicuous luxury start to consume the consumer. Ensconced in decoration, Boyle’s maidens are neurotically over-luxurious, and Boyle’s headless maiden a potential allegory for carnal indulgence over using one’s noggin.

The malignant body is further evident in Luanne Martineau’s felted sculptures and pictures, worked in wool fleece, found garments and other fabric miscellany. Martineau seems to take perverse please in degeneration, constructing needle-felted sculptures that appear a veritable explosion of body parts: either the organism has gone horribly awry or we’re witness to a total culture meltdown.  In Figure, a tangle of knitwear and hanks of black fleece recall Philip Guston’s fragmented bodies in a seemingly flattened corpse. Works like Portrait and Painter command the wall like a smash up between a comic strip and circa 1970s fiber art, turning the fiber work of previous generations into a powerful exploration of decay, disease and detritus as Martineau’s sculptures and wall work become metastasizing art-objects. Certainly making any objection to contemporary decadence might seem an appeal for a classical ideal, or at least some regressive rendering of minimalism, Martineau heads that objection off by depicting figurative sculpture and the square, abstract canvas as detritus, fragmented and overgrown like a fetid garbage patch.

Rooted in a dream-world that throbs between being a terrifying and a medicated paradise, Amy Mayfield’s paintings provide some of the most tantalizing examples of contemporary decadence. Employing personal-world symbolism to inform her fantastic landscapes, Mayfield’s work is the destruction and escape from the establishment, her paintings both decidedly and boldly feminine and ornate and her landscapes chaotic and seemingly mad. Reminiscent of 19th Century Decadent, Aubrey Beardsley, Mayfield employs decorative black patterning, her bold figures part ironwork and part filigree.  Lacking any traditional perspective, the scenery appears to just slide off the canvas, a roiling surface that throws the flora and fauna off balance. The poured puddles of color, that are at once figure and ground come from a Pepto-Bismol color palette, neatly off-setting the finicky nature of the black line work. Mayfield’s paintings are pleasing to look at, but they don’t strike as pretty, nor are they particularly funny. Instead paintings like Daydreaming and Oh My God conjure up beautiful and horrific decline, like aerial photos of oil slicks or waste ponds, they are a compelling disturbance.

     The conflict between conflating decadence with waste or heralding it as a counter-conservative triumph may continue to confound. Assuming a connection exists between art and a cultural ethos, what does decadence in the visual arts say about the conditions of our society today? If, as Bermúdez writes, decadent works of art display a “moral vocabulary of self-indulgence, self-absorption and lack of communication”10, should the works themselves be seen as such, or the climate that inspires them? Are artists mirroring or making arch commentary on the conditions of contemporary culture?

In the case of Cogan, Boyle, Mayfield and Martineau, the work could easily be seen as decadent: Cogan’s meticulous embroidered exploits, Boyle’s porcelain dipped and lacey perversions, Mayfield’s patterned surfaces and fantasy worlds and Martineau’s stylized degeneracy all engage a vocabulary of surface which easily appeals to the sensual. But in making that appeal, decomposition creeps in and on closer inspection, slides along the Pepto-Bismol, getting caught in the matted sweaters. These artists are both decadent and its antithesis: just as 19th Century artists reclaimed the idea of Decadence as an expression of their own disillusion, the current generation can reclaim a vocabulary of decadence to comment on a current cultural, economic and political climate shaped by the previous generation’s decades of indulgence. A climate that portends a dark future for the generations left to pick up the check.

1.    Bermúdez, José Luis. “The Concept of Decadence,” Art and Morality. ed. José Luis Bermúdez and Sebastian Gardner. London: Routledge, 2003. pg. 118
2.    ibid. 117
3.    Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1998. Pg. 167
4.    Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen Inc., 1987. pg. 4
5.    “Inconspicuous consumption” The Economist Volume 377 Number 8458, December 24- 2005-January 6th 2006: 66-67
6.    Bermúdez, 126.
7.    ibid. 129
8.    Vojtech, Daniel. “On the Radical Wing of Modenity: The Concept of Decadence as the Horizon in Art and Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century” In Morbid Colors. Prague: Municipal House Publications, 2006. pg. 21
9.    Loos, 111.
10.    Bermúdez, pg. 129


Shannon Stratton
January 2006, 2007 Chicago.