Museum of popular
& subcultures
Dandy and macaroni
Susan Sontag described mannerism as "a love of the unnatural: the artificial and the exaggerated ."
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Four Seasons on One Head , circa 1590
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Permanent Exhibition
As it is about aesthetics and style, it is primarily manifested through visuals, image and fashion, and in that sense the representatives of one of the earliest exaggerated styles were macaroni, people who in the middle of the 18th century in England dressed unusually, fed, spoke and in general. led an eccentric lifestyle. The name macaroni comes from macaronism or macaroni verse - a mixture of English and Latin for the sake of comic effect, which is why macaroni was often exposed to satire: Indeed, recently (1770) there is a species of animal, neither female nor male, but of the neutral sex. It's called macaroni. A story without meaning, laughs without pleasure, eats without appetite, drives without exercise, without passion hangs out with women (The Oxford Magazine, 1770, quoted by Joseph Twadell Shipley, The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (JHU Press) 1984: 143). Macaroni was the forerunner of dandy.
Philip Dave, Macaroni. A real character at a late masquerade, 1773, a mezzanine
Unlike macaroni, dandy initially appeared as a more masculine opposite, but at the end of the 19th century, having turned into extravagance, from today's perspective it is also associated with feminization. Dandy is a character who originated in England in the early 19th century and first wore clothes of a relatively simple shape, but the key was that it was made of the best materials and had a cut that testifies to sophisticated and individual taste, which was initially the basis for the development of middle class fashion, without exaggeration, but after its acceptance by the middle class, dendism became explicitly extravagant at the end of the 19th century (Svenson, FHL Philosophy of Fashion). The ancestor of dendism is considered to be Bo Brumel, and its most famous representatives are Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, Count Robert de Montesquieu and others.
Gallery: Richard Dayton, caricature by Bo Brumela, 1805; Giovanni Boldini, Portrait of Robert de Montesquieu, 1897; Oscar Wilde 1882
As dendism developed in the Victorian era, known for its moral principles, its proponents in the second half, and especially at the end of the 19th century, re-examined morality by playing with it, in which a parallel with the camp can be seen. However, while some dandy criticized Victorian society with their ironic gestures and satirical verses, they themselves were the subject of satire because of their eccentricity. Although originally associated with English society, the lavish and extravagant life of the aristocracy was also criticized in the time of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI at the French court just before the Great French Revolution of 1789, primarily for political reasons. However, the caricatures of Louis XVI were not so common during the first years of the revolution, but he began to be ridiculed after his attempt to escape to Paris and start a counter-revolution in 1791. He and Marie Antoinette became a frequent target of French cartoonists who mostly presented them as animals with human heads. In the caricature called Two are Nothing to One, which is kept in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the royal couple is presented as a two-headed creature that pulls in opposite directions. The king is depicted with a pig's body and horns as an allusion to the cuckold due to many alleged affairs of his wife, while the queen is presented with a hyena's body and an ornate headdress in the form of snakes and ostrich feathers, with which she was often depicted through play. words (French: autruche - ostrich and Autriche - Austria). , tape, gauze or some other props that was a reflection of personal, popular-cultural or political events.2 Due to dissatisfaction in a society in which the fashion of exaggeration was seen as a drop in the bucket, criticism increasingly appeared in the form of caricatures, not not only ruling families, but also the aristocracy as a whole.
Unknown author , Two are nothing to one (Les deux ne font qu'un), late 18th century, France, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
The painting by the English satirical artist John Colette Tight lacing or Fashion before ease was reproduced in the form of numerous graphics with minor or major changes, primarily in color, after the original oil on canvas during the 1970s, but it is iconographic. the theme remained unchanged: the husband, the maid, and the page joined forces to help the woman tie a corset and put on an evening macaroni costume while she clung to the bed.
Gallery of aesthetic images with camp elements
When camp as a style began to be studied during the 1960s, popular culture had already begun to evoke certain styles and phenomena from the long 19th century. In the eighties, dendism reappeared, this time among the musicians of New Romanticism, a genre that flourished in the United Kingdom. Fashion of exaggeration, sumptuous historical costumes, eclecticism, andorrogenicity, traditionally uncharacteristic make-up for men and femininity have become part of contemporary pop culture. In music, the new romantics next to her wave, to whom they partly belonged, were influenced by glam rock with their androgenic figures like David Bowie, and in musical terms, they then had a great influence on synth-pop, which will mark the next decade. Representatives of the New Romanticism in music who flirted with the camp were Visage, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, A Flock of Seagulls, Culture Club, Ultravox ) and Adam and the Ants, although some of them were not considered representatives, and especially not camp figures, the press defined them in this way on a daily basis. The 1981 song Charming Prince could be interpreted as a mini camp manifesto based on Suzana Sontag's Notes: Prince Charming Prince Charming / Ridicule is nothing to be scared of / Don't you ever, don't you ever / Stop being dandy, showing me you're handsome, while Adam's costume from this video is now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.5 The 1980s have been intensely evoked in popular culture since the beginning of the 21st century, primarily through music and film, and in films are often a parodied epoch. Based on fashion, especially for men, a parallel can be made between the trends of the past and modern popular culture on the relation macaroni-dandy-hipster-metrosexual. Hipster culture is based on retro trends, especially on styles from the 1980s, while excessive tidiness is characteristic of metrosexuals. Another evocation of the long 19th century, more precisely the French Revolution and excessive fashion, was made in the film by Marie Antoinette from Sofia Coppola in 2006 in the form of an anachronism, in which in one scene of trying on luxurious dresses and cakes and drinks in shifts, accompanied by the song And Want Candy from 1982 by the band Bow Wow Wow, Starke sneakers notice.
Men's fashion trends: macaroni (18th century), dandy (19th century), metrosexuals and hipsters (20th and 21st century)
According to Sontang, the traditional forms of overcoming seriousness - irony, satire, today seem weak and inadequate for culturally saturated media in which modern sensibility is formed, and the camp introduced a new standard - artificially as an ideal, theatricality; the camp suggests a comic version of the world and represents modern dandyism. She believes the camp is the answer to the problem of how to be a dandy in an age of mass culture. Dendism in the age of mass culture makes no distinction between a single object and an object of mass production, whereby camp taste transcends the nausea of replica. Almost half a century later, a new visual form appears - an internet mime that primarily expresses criticism of society or conveys political messages in a humorous and satirical way. Each mime is a visual replica of the previous one with a new message. The leisure of the aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries was replaced by the leisure of Celebrity culture, whose members give their fashion answers at global ceremonies such as the Met Gala themed, which is then broadcast by the official media as a key fashion event, while popular internet culture they again present a critique of society through satire.
The text is an excerpt from the work of researcher Ana Samardžić , which will be presented in the final publication of the project "Camping the trash out "
Text prepared by: Uroš Đurović
Starting from Susan Sontag and her view that camping is an art that takes itself seriously, but which cannot be taken completely seriously because it is exaggerated, the question of camping as self-parody on the one hand and camping parodying because of its exaggeration on the other . According to Sontag, Kemp is a sensibility of failed seriousness and is completely aesthetic. It represents the victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality and irony over tragedy. The point of the camp is to overthrow seriousness from the throne, it is naughty, anti-serious, or more precisely, it contains new more complex relations towards the serious - it can be serious about something frivolous, and frivolous about serious things (Sontag, S. Notes on the camp). Excessive style or over the top is a reflection of the absurdity and parody of the lives of those who do not take life seriously. As a reaction to this way and view of life, there was a parody of exaggeration, whose roots in visual culture can be found in fashion cartoons of the 18th and 19th centuries, although Sontag finds the roots of the camp in the art of mannerism, but especially emphasizes the late 17th and early 18th century when created by British satirical writers and poets such as Alexander Pope, William Congreve and Horad Walpole.