Ars et Natura

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.
~ Oscar Wilde

This site is a repository of all things decadent and its obsession with artifice in contrast to the romantic worship of Nature. It takes inspiration from the commonplace book that collects knick-knacks of knowledge from sayings to recipes, which originated from the Renaissance and reached its elevated form during the Enlightenment in John Locke. In A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, Locke admonished the keeper to arrange his material according to common topics, or locus communis, from which the apellation “commonplace” derives. But this is not the Systema Naturæ of Carl Linnaeus, which used such organizational techniques for taxonomy; rather, it is more like an alchemist's Wunderkammer that encases odd curiosities of the eccentric and arcane, or the Dilettanti's amateur connoisseurship of all things Greek and Roman, exotic and Oriental. The method is that of Walter Benjamin's monumental scrap book, Das Passagen-Werk, that meanders through Parisian arcades, and ragpicks the detritus of late 19th century culture. It is a place for obsessive collection and curation, perverse passions, poetry and fiction, glosses, marginalia, and haphazard notes-to-self.

So why decadence?

Decadence follows Romanticism’s passionate reaction to Enlightenment’s enthronement of Reason. Romantic emotionalism, that energetic turn against cold, mechanized Reason, eventually slides into aesthetic excesses and ennui, with a proclivity for the Baroque and Rococo in the Decadent. This decadent slide is a complex phenomena that manifested acutely in the late 19th century: in the street connoisseurship of Charles Baudelaire's flâneur, the flagrant dandyism of Oscar Wilde's amoral Dorian Gray, and the over-sensitivity of Joris-Karl Huysmans' dyspeptic aesthete, Jean des Esseintes, the last issue of a dwindled aristocratic line. There is indeed a sense of exhaustion of an age coming to an end in this period known as the fin de siècle, symptomatic in the world-weary sophistication of the aesthete, the theatrical posture of the dandy, and the refined curatorial eye of the flâneur. I am interested in the elevated styles and strange pathologies engendered by this decadent culture at the close of the Victorian age and the twilight of the British Empire, which turns against Nature to embrace artifice.

(Wiesbaden, November 2020)