Today in Zurick: A last flare-up of heroism before the final decadence - The John Institute

The John Institute presents

A Last Flare-Up of Heroism Before Decadence
An Evening in the Park

Elisabeth Bronfen & Beat Wyss
Christodoulos Panayiotou
Gregory Markoupolos
Silvie Zürcher

Pavillon at Platzspitz-Park, Zurich
15 August 2009, 5-12PM

Within the discussion on male role models in art, our emphasis in the third edition of an exhibition by The John Institute will be theatrical and social roles of dandyism. Does the character of the Dandy still exist today? Swiss art historian Beat Wyss has doubted so for a while. In a society, in which consumption seems to be the only convention, the Dandy, as we know him from the Fin de Siecle period, has lost his grounds: the coquettish game with High Society’s strict codes and the appropriation of those without financial means. While the Dandy, in novels as Joris-Karl Huysmans "A rebours" or Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly "On Dandyism" advanced to become a known role model of an elite male stile mainly in literature of that age, a contemporary interpretation could be found in art. The artist of today often performs an acrobatic walk on the tight rope between under-payed "creative work" and the noble chic of a global art boom. In such a perspective, the figure of the Dandy is a cultural habitus repeatedly created, that re-appears in a new disguise.

After a century of pop-history and emancipation, the relation of the once bourgeois Dandy to the figure of the Diva cannot be disregarded. Is the role of the Diva possibly a successful, extroverted and not least femininely connoted version of the Dandy or vice-versa, or are the sex-specific characteristics constitutive for this type?
The pavilion- a historic venue of the 19. century, is thought to be the ideal place for a interlinking of the Dandy -debate with the confrontation of contemporary artists on
today's role models of a culturally defined figure of style.


Saturday 15 August, 2009

5 PM Public picknick, Music: Johann von Preussen

7 PM Talk with Elisabeth Bronfen and Beat Wyss

9:15 PM Christodoulos Panayiotou: Judy Garland, A Biography

9:30 PM Filmscreening Gregory Markopoulos
Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 15min.
Political Portraits, 1969, 16mm,colour, excerpt with Ulrich Herzog, Rudolph Nureyev, Marcia Haydée und Giorgio de Chirico, 15min.
Courtesy Temenos Archive

10:00 PM Silvie Zürcher, Performance

Thank you: Kultur Stadt Zürich/Präsidialdepartement, migros kulturprozent, Stiftung Erna und Curt Burgauer Zürich
cover by flag

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The John Institute

an initiative by Burkhard Meltzer, Pascal Häusermann and Jean-Claude Freymond-Guth

www.thejohninstitute.org