1. Luke Paisley, Decadent Bodies, print from digital image, 2022.

This digital illustration was specially created for the Decadent Bodies conference by Luke Paisley of Sorry Design. It is designed to evoke a decadent mass of fleshy body parts suggestively entwined. The abstract image can be displayed portrait or landscape; there is no set top or bottom.

2. Alex Lyons, Alienating Identity: Mutating, Probing and Unfolding Gender and Sexuality, short film (04:23 minutes), 2022.

Alienating Identity is a performative video that explores how bodies became obscene, monstrous, and categorised through multiple fractured identities. The work responds to a series of figures, myths and folklores whose traits have been used in the promotion of particular facets of misogyny. Lyons uses performance as a rereading of myths and a subversion of the norm, considering the absurd lengths the patriarchy has gone to, to put identities that move beyond constructed binaries in a catastrophic state of fragility. This performance is a call to arms, a fostering of shifting politics, a provocation to reside in those fractures. Decadence derives from taking pleasure within the cracks; for structures of authority and permeance imposed by patriarchal and heteronormative culture have nothing to offer us. This performance seeks to disidentify with institutionalised forms of identity and other contemporary narratives that are linear and stringent.

3. VAUG (Virginie Augustyniak), Decadent Bodies: A Tryptic, digital image (from originals: oil on paper, 15,7’x15,7’), 2022.

This triptych is a variation on the same image. It presents the head of a recumbent figure. The sex is undetermined. It is also uncertain whether the figure is in acute pain or ecstasy, agonizing or climaxing, or even whether they are alive or dead. VAUG used sickly tints, but also geomorphic atmospheres in order to convey the paradox of possibly mens insana in corpore sano, of the body as revitalizing force, through thick and thin. The head only is shown, the rest of the body has been ignored. The head appears to be floating on its own, perhaps in water or amidst a sea of hair or smoke, thus alluding to such mythical figures as Ophelia, St John the Baptist, or again St Theresa, and their ambiguous representations in art, while also referring to contemporary images blurring the frontier between eroticism and pornography, now omnipresent in our everyday environments. Repetition questions modern industrial endeavours to create mass-produced identical bodies, at laminating differences and distinguishing marks. Repetition in art is not repetition. This work enables the exploration of the ambiguity of all images and the fact that images further accentuate the love-hate relationship modern societies have with their bodies. The more advertising or films, for example, call attention to the body, the more the body gets removed from reality. The colours VAUG uses and the handling of the body, that could either be drowning or burning, is a comment on the elemental nature of all bodies. Even when inclined to become oneiric.

4. Daniel Oliver, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Rick Pushinsky, and Katy Baird, Decadence, dyspraxia and deflation in the collaborative work of Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau and Daniel Oliver. Photographs by Rick Pushinsky and recorded conversation between Daniel Oliver, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, and Katy Baird (26:28 minutes), 2022. 

At the end of Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau’s performance work Resentment, presented at Lafayette Foundation, Paris, 2018, performance artist Daniel Oliver stands wrapped haphazardly in yoga mats. He is exposed from his belly down to his knees, his body awkwardly framed by blue rubbery PVC and the parcel tape that keeps it precariously held up. He smiles gleefully with his arms wrapped around two audience members who have enthusiastically taken up the offer of having their photo taken with him. Later that evening at a nearby bar an audience member confesses that whilst, at first, they were a bit worried when they realised Daniel would be getting naked, it was actually ‘just fine’. 

This installation includes reconstructions and re-imaginings of this image and a selection of other performance-photos created in collaboration with photographer Rick Pushinsky. It is accompanied by audio recordings of Daniel and Matthew’s part scripted, part improvised, part real and part fantasised discussions of nudity, dyspraxic bodies, performer/artist/director hierarchies, and perceived audience response. The conversation centres on the sense of deflated decadence that emerges through the overlap of Daniel’s joyful exhibition of a clumsily postured and unkempt body and Matthew’s insistent pursuit of ugliness and cultural abjection – populating the performances with Tangy Cheese Doritos, cheap Yoga mats, Crocs, and participatory songs.

This discussion around deflated decadence builds on Matthew’s PhD research into status relationships and negative emotions and Daniel’s current development of a practice and theory of ‘neurotransgressive’ performance, which focuses on the pleasures of embracing a haphazard approach towards what Erin Manning calls the ‘volition-intentionality-agency’ triad.

5. Jenny Hval, Blood Bitch, vinyl, Sacred Bones Records (2016). First pressing.
Private Collection

Blood Bitch, the sixth studio album by Norwegian musician Jenny Hval, explores the themes of vampirism and menstruation - as she puts it ‘blood that is shed naturally [...] the purest and most powerful, yet most trivial, and most terrifying blood’. This concept album is influenced by ’70s horror and exploitation films, as well as the goth pop and metal music and the album cover is a reference to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966).

6. Anna von Hausswolff, Dead Magic, vinyl, City Slang (2018). First pressing, signed copy.
Private Collection

Dead Magic is the fourth studio album by Swedish musician Anna von Hausswolff. With Copenhagen’s Marmorkirken church organ as its centrepiece, the album consists of five tracks focused on black magick, beauty, and death. Hausswolff’s sound has been described by The Guardian as ‘a thrilling weave of drone and metal-inspired “funeral pop”’.

7. Maria Torres Subirá, The Witches, from Sabat II: The Mother Issue (Autumn Winter 2016). Also exhibited are Sabat I: The Maiden Issue (Spring Summer 2016), & Sabat III: The Crone Issue (Spring Summer 2017).
Private Collection

Sabat Magazine, in its own words, ‘fuses Witchcraft and feminism, ancient archetypes and instant art’. It is a highly-crafted independent magazine that draws on modern occultism and paganism, such as #Witches on Instagram, and depicts the darker, rawer, and sexualised side of femininity embodied in contemporary witchcraft. The Sabat series is made up of a self-contained series of three volumes (The Maiden Issue, The Mother Issue and The Crone) and an ongoing collection of related print projects such as tarot and posters. This pull-out illustration, titled ‘The Witches’, explores the architypes of the divine feminine in a fleshy, symbolic landscape.

8. Jim Leon, illustrations for Oz Magazine, no 31, November 1970 & no 33, February 1971. 
Simon Wilson, Private Collection 

OZ Magazine, published in London from 1967 to 1973, was one of the most important of the underground journals of the 1960s counterculture, and the most visually interesting of them all, together with the US West Coast underground comic Zap. In fact it was a cartoon by Zap founder Robert Crumb that caused the prosecution of OZ in 1970-71 for obscenity and the brief imprisonment of the three editors after a long show trial that pitted the establishment against the rebellious new generation. The publicity increased the circulation of the magazine and it continued publication until late 1973. In that last phase the British Pop artist Jim Leon (1938-2002) contributed many startling illustrations to OZ beginning with an apocalyptic response to the arrest of the editors titled End of an Era - OZ, that updates the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and of Lot and his daughters to create a Decadent comment on the modern world. A few issues later appeared four drawings by him in tondo format. Untitled, they are delirious, paradoxically beautiful fantasies of transgressive sexuality. The Black figure in one of them may be the race campaigner Malcolm X who had been assassinated in 1965. 

9. Clark Ashton Smith, The Hashish Eater: or, The Apocalypse of Evil, illustrated by Robert H. Knox (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1989).
David Weir Collection, Goldsmiths Decadence Research Centre 

The epic poem in graphic novel form is a phantasmagoric trip through jewelled fantasy realms, lavishly illustrated by Robert H. Knox, who is known for illustrating the works of classic horror writers, such as H.P. Lovecraft.

10. Souvenir card from Cabaret du néant [Cabaret of the Void], Paris, from the 1890s. 
Sam Kunkel, Private Collection

This is a souvenir card from the Cabaret du Néant [The Cabaret of the Void], featuring a jovial skeleton in repose. The Cabaret du Néant was opened in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris in 1892 and inspired several other similarly-themed cabarets to open, such as Le Cabaret de l’Enfer [The Cabaret of Hell] and Le Cabaret du Ciel [The Cabaret of Heaven].

11. Lithograph reproduction of Carlos Schwabe’s poster for the first Salon de la Rose+Croix organised by Péladan (1892). 
Sam Kunkel, Private Collection 

This is a lithograph reproducing a poster made by the Swiss Symbolist artist, Carlos Schwabe (1866-1926), for the publication, Les Maîtres de l’affiche in 1897. The original poster was made for Joséphin Péladan’s first mystical art show, Le Salon de la Rose+Croix, which took was inaugurated at the Galérie Durant-Ruel in Paris on March 10, 1892. The Salon featured 250 different works by 60 different artists, and drew 22,600 visitors in one month; it was the first of six to occur between 1892 and 1897.

12. Special insert from Le Figaro, September 1914.
Sam Kunkel, Private Collection 

This special insert from Le Figaro reproduces a text written by Péladan interpreting an apocalyptic prophecy made by Frère Johannès in 1600, in light of the events of World War I.

13. Presentation copy of Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (Chicago: Covici-McGee, 1922). Shown is the first page of the “Dedication” with hand-coloured border and initial letter by Wallace Smith.
Collection of Alice Condé and Jessica Gossling

Ben Hecht’s (1893-1964) Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, illustrated by Wallace Smith (1888-1937), was a specially commissioned manuscript for the inauguration of the Covici-McGee publishing house launched by the bookstore’s owners Pascal Covici and William McGee. Covici-McGee was eventually handed a lawsuit for selling ‘lewd, lascivious and obscene’ literature and on 4 February 1924 Hecht and Smith were each fined $1,000. Fantazius Mallare brings the decadence of the British fin de siècle to early twentieth-century Chicago. It tells the story of Mallare, a solitary decadent artist at the very apex of ennui. He spouts Wildean epigrams in a red room reminiscent of the embellished and ornamental setting of Salome (1894), and his desire to nullify his senses to assuage the torment of sexual desire is Dowsonian in its extremes. The novel, along with Smith’s grotesque Beardsleyesque illustrations, represents Hecht’s most deliberate attempt to emulate his decadent heroes including Joris-Karl Huysmans, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, and Arthur Machen. While Beardsley favoured the suggestive curved line, Smith once remarked that ‘all strength and beauty lies in the straight line’.

14. Ben Hecht, The Kingdom of Evil (Hecht’s sequel to Fantazius Mallare), illustrated by Anthony Angarola (Chicago: P. Covici, 1924). No. 583 of 2000 limited editions.
Collection of Alice Condé and Jessica Gossling

In this sequel to Fantazius Mallare, fagments of Mallare’s psyche appear as characters in an otherworldly universe that is more akin to the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and M. P. Shiel than decadent fiction. Hecht’s early experimental attempts at decadent and surrealist fiction represented by Fantazius Mallare and its even stranger successor The Kingdom of Evil were short-lived – probably due to their lack of commercial appeal – and the obscene literature scandal around Fantazius Mallare cost Hecht his job at the Chicago Daily News. He went on to achieve significant commercial success as a Hollywood screenwriter, working on an estimated 70-90 screenplays including those for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), and Rope (1948). He was an uncredited screenwriter for Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind (1939), based on the 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell whose title is taken from Ernest Dowson’s decadent poem ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’ (1896). The Kingdom of Evil was illustrated by Anthony Angarola (1893-1929), one of Lovecraft’s favourite artists.

15. Portrait of Joris-Karl Huysmans by Felix Vallotton, signed by Huysmans with an accompanying letter to a friend. 
Sam Kunkel, Private Collection 

This is a small reproduction of a portrait of Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) by the Swiss artist Félix Vallotton for Remy de Gourmont’s Le Livre des Masques (1896). It is signed by Huysmans and accompanied by a letter to a friend offering it to him as a gift. The letter is printed on stationary from the Minister of the Interior where Huysmans worked as a civil servant.

16. Joséphin Péladan, Le Vice supreme, with frontispiece by Félicien Rops (Paris: Librairie des auteurs modernes, 1884).
Sam Kunkel, Private Collection

This is a first edition printing of Joséphin Péladan’s (1858-1918) first major novel, Le Vice suprême, which was also the inaugural volume in his massive literary cycle, La Décadence latine, a 21-novel éthopée (moral portrait) wherein he exposed the symptoms of vice and decadence that he saw in Parisian society. The book is embellished with a frontispiece by the Belgian Symbolist artist, Félicien Rops (1833-1898).

17. Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques (Paris: Lemerre 1882), accompanied by three of Félicien Rops’s illustrations.
Simon Wilson, Private Collection

Originally published in 1872, Les Diaboliques was banned by the Paris authorities a month after publication. Luckily it seems that the entire first printing had already sold out - an indication of its succès de scandale. Not published until ten years later, this is the second edition of D’Aurevilly's volume of short stories that, together with the illustrations then made for it by Rops, is an icon of decadence. The heliogravure illustrations were published separately from the book in a small portfolio.  

The six stories in Les Diaboliques [translatable as The She-Devils or The Possessed] constitute a vicious satire of the corruption of French Second Empire society, told through the medium of women who behave in ways that would get them condemned as the Devil's creatures by that society. Perhaps the key story is ‘Le Bonheur dans le Crime’ [Happiness in Crime]. A beautiful woman murders the wife of an enormously wealthy and handsome artistocrat in order to marry him. In defiance of all normal rules, they live blissfully ever after. Rops's illustration shows symbolically the couple's situation: they are naked, enshrined on a pedestal, locked in a passionate embrace, and from them streams an intense radiance; this energy, derived from the realisation of their desires and their refusal to accept guilt for their crime, kills the serpent of Envy which is stretched dead on the ground and even makes them invulnerable to Death itself which is seen clawing impotently at the foot of the pedestal.

The series is bookended by a frontispiece showing a naked woman lasciviously embracing a Sphinx, apparently oblivious of the presence of the Devil gloating possessively over her, and a concluding pair of images titled Prostitution and Folly Dominating the World and Prostitution and Crime Dominating the World which might be said to sum up the disillusioned, despairing attitude of the decadents.

18. Félicien Rops, La Tentation (date unknown), soft ground etching, initialled in red crayon by the artist.
Simon Wilson, Private Collection 

Rops has inscribed this version of the subject of the temptation of Eve with the Latin words 'Eritis similes Deo' which refers to the Bible story in which the Devil in the form of a serpent tempts Eve by telling her that if she and Adam taste the forbidden fruit 'ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil' (Genesis 3 v, Authorised Version). Rops's twist to this popular subject is to emphasise the blasphemous nature of the Devil's proposition, and by the treatment of the figures to suggest that the encounter is essentially erotic.

19. Oscar Wilde, The Sphinx, illustrated by Alastair (London: John Lane, 1920).
Simon Wilson, Private Collection

The illustrator Hans Henning Voight (1887-1969), known as Alastair, was one of the most gifted as well as most purely decadent of Beardsley's followers in the field of book illustration in the early years of the twentieth century. His outstanding book is this edition of Wilde's notorious poem. Created just before the First World War but not published until after it, the cover alone makes it an icon of the last phase of fin de siècle decadence.

20. Oscar Wilde, Salomé (London: John Lane, 1894). 
Simon Wilson, Private Collection

This is the first English edition of Wilde’s play, originally written and published in French. For the English edition Wilde got the publisher, John Lane, to commission Beardsley to illustrate it. The resultant set of illustrations, with their innovative blend of abstraction and intense evocation of realities, and their focus on the themes of sex and death in the play, are seen to constitute Beardsley’s key contribution to art at that time. He laced them with sexual references, which Lane attempted to censor. While missing some, he succeeded for example in removing the prominent male genitals from the hermaphroditic figure of the god Pan on the title page.

Beardsley’s original cover designs were also rejected and the one Lane devised, with part of Beardsley’s first cover design plonked onto coarse blue cloth, was hated by both Wilde and Beardsley.

21. Aubrey Beardsley’s censored title page. In Oscar Wilde, Salome (London: John Lane, 1907).
Simon Wilson, Private Collection

Aubrey Beardsley’s uncensored title page. In Oscar Wilde, Salome (London: John Lane, 1920).
David Weir Collection, Goldsmiths Decadence Research Centre

It was not until 1907 that an edition was published with the complete drawings, and with Beardsley's second cover design of peacock feathers. The original has never been used. Another example of the later book here shows the title page with the genitals as Beardsley drew them, together with the arresting frontispiece showing the opening scene of the play with the young Syrian Captain of the Guard and the naked page boy of Herodias contemplating the moon in the form of a caricature of Oscar Wilde.

22. Aubrey Beardsley, illustrations to Lysistrata (1896)
Simon Wilson, Private Collection 

In 1896 Beardsley created a set of eight illustrations for the bawdy ancient Greek comedy Lysistrataby Aristophanes. The theme of the play is a sex strike by the women of Athens, led by Lysistrata, in an attempt to bring to a halt the endless wars between Athens and Sparta. Knowing the edition was to be clandestine, Beardsley gave full rein to his erotic imagination. The results are now considered to be among his greatest works, but until recently have been intensely controversial. Seven of the originals are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, one having been destroyed in a fire in 1929. Luckily it had been photographed before that for a high quality set of collotype reproductions the same size as the originals which were published, again clandestinely, around 1925. Shown here are three of these, including the one of the lost drawings, Two Athenian Women in Distress, which is the best record we now have of it. 

Lysistrata Defending the Acropolis
When Lysistrata and the women occupy the Acropolis the old men attempt to burn them out, but are repelled.

Two Athenian Women in Distress
As the occupation of the Acropolis continues, sexual abstention takes its toll and two women attempt escape, one on a rope, one less conventionally on the back of a sparrow, according to the text. Beardsley shows her also attempting already to relieve her frustration.  

Cinesias Entreating Myrrinha to Coition
Cinesias, husband of Myrrhina, returns from the war. Lysistrata instructs Myrrinha to tease him until he is in such a state that he will agree to anything, even peace with Sparta.

23. Oscar Wilde’s hand, plaster cast, 1893.
Simon Wilson, Private Collection

Both Oscar and Constance Wilde had their hands read by the fashionable palmist Mrs Robinson who took a cast of Oscar's hand in 1893. This is one of about twenty copy casts from the original, made by its present owner and given to friends.