No Dandy No Fun traces the transformations of this model from the nineteenth century to the present, showing different facets of its multiple biography. This developmental history of a conceptual character is told through a series of snapshots that make no claim to being comprehensive. And how could they, given that the complex figure of the dandy spreads before us like a vast ocean, whose horizon our confounded eyes strain to see. Many of those who appear in the exhibition were not considered dandies up until now. They are examples of how the manifestations of a certain ‘type’ might be further conceptually developed through other bodies. Special attention is paid here to those figures who appear only on the margins of the familiar narratives that surround this character: the woman as dandy, the black dandy, the attempts by dandies to become more like machines, and the dandy as the subliminal blueprint for contemporary art.
For more information, please visit the Kunsthalle Bern website.
Above: Lutz Bacher, It’s Golden, 2013. Courtesy the Estate of Lutz Bacher and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.
Photo: Stefan Burger.