Home Visual Arts The last dandy- Sebastian Horsley.

The last dandy- Sebastian Horsley.

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Apparently reports attest to the fact that Horsley who had been sober for months now was wretchedly besides himself as a result of the death of Michael Wojas, a close friend and confidant and proprietor of Soho’s Colony Room Club.The fact that he held such deep feelings that he himself could not attest to led him to a form of escapism, a form of escapism that to the best of his ability would be displayed in a wide body of work.

He was in essence willing to share and expose his inner core to a certain extent with the public- (witness his memoir ‘Dandy in the Underworld‘) but to some degree he always held onto some degree of intimacy, some degree of intimacy that he kept private and sacred. He could give the world dangerous dives with predatory sharks, excursions to crack dens, liasions with prostitutes, but that part of himself that he could not or would not give save to a few and rare souls was now gone in the form of Michael Wojas and to a certain extent film maker and director Stephen Fry who had recently re adapted Horsely’s memoir into a play. A play that in the end Mr Horssely was loathe to watch, perhaps for the very idea now that he was exposing a kind of  intimacy with the wider world- something he eschewed deliberately in his private world.

The play, which Stephen Fry hoped to turn into a film, was said to have flattered and insulted Horsley in equal measure, who said after seeing it:

 

‘I’d rather be crucified again than sit through that.

I knew I was obnoxious but I never knew how much.’

dailymail.co.uk

By his own virtue he was a first rate dandy and iconoclast, a first rate observer of life and it’s absurdities, never mind the absurdities he pursued and relished in. He was even once denied entry by the US government into the US for ‘moral turpitude,’ a feat very few could achieve, a feat that Horsely  relished in. He had once again let his art, his actions speak louder than anything he could wear or pose or he could adopt. In essence a true dandy, in it’s very essence.

 

In the end the following remarks below has a lot to say about Horsely, his motives and self introspection but one wonders more about the world he observed and the world in the end he could not fathom alone.

 

‘And given that life is absurd, given that it’s pointless, given that it’s meaningless; to mirror it with an absurdist dance is in many ways taking up a real position. Dandyism is a ghost dance in the face of defeat.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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