Beauteous Deca(y)dence

Koen Hauser’s Amethyst prompts extensive meditation on what determines the nature of things, or at least the way the nature of things appears to our eyes. It reminds us of those uncapturable, irretrievable moments when youth wrinkles into old age, freshness shrinks into cynicism, and beauty fades into decay.  

Turning her face side to side, Valentijn de Hingh wears the many faces of pain and precarity. Image available via InRijswijk. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.

On the second floor of the Lakenhal Museum in Leiden there hangs a disturbing but hypnotic moving image called Amethyst. It’s an installation by the Dutch artist Koen Hauser, who created it as a contribution to Amsterdam Fashion Week 2010. It may be over a decade old, but the uncanny encounter between beauty and decay never grows old in the cultural imagination. Especially when the scope and tangibility of beauty and decay are at stake.

The plaque next to Hauser’s Amethyst comments: the video shows “the transience of beauty and the beauty of transience”. It’s an automated slideshow of a series of portraits, and not just any portraits. Hauser’s muse and subject is Valentijn de Hingh – a successful activist, columnist, DJ, and trans model. She first became known through the Dutch documentary Valentijn, which follows her from boyhood to womanhood (ZijaanZij). Winner of the ELLE Personal Style Award 2012 and Amsterdam’s Pride Ambassador since 2016, Valentijn is now reading in philosophy and French literature at the University of Amsterdam (Pride Amsterdam).

Valentijn de Hingh, wearing Viktor & Rolf’s dress from The Wearable Art 2015 collection. Bursting from an angular silhouette with a wide-shoulder collar, Valentijn’s head and limbs break the canvas of conservative classicism. The model’s body is blowing up the box. Image available via Dezeen. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.

Frame by frame, blink by blink, Valentijn’s face begins to sparkle; a drop of lilac amethyst blooms in the corner of her eye, gathering like a precious tear. Frame by frame, blink by blink, with each turn of the head, the ornament slowly outgrows its loveliness. The mineral is corrosive; like time itself, it eats and gnaws at every feature of the model’s visage until her face becomes unrecognisable. Until it becomes nothing more than inorganic matter. 

“Initially the imperfection emphasizes her beauty –” reads the plaque “– when does the balance shift?” The tear emphasizes ‘her beauty’, as though to recall a romantic myth of female delicacy or vanity. Yet the skin which the tear devours had once known the name of man; it still does. Valentijn. The decay of an image is a decay of identity, of one’s “allotted place in the world”, as de Hingh calls it in her 2012 TED Talk. But decay itself is not nothing. It’s an overtaking presence. It’s a replacement that thrives, grows, and triumphs like beauty itself – until it becomes beauty. Luxurious, lucious, decadent. Beauty is decadent. Beauty is deca(y)dent.

I think Hauser’s work touches on many things besides the visible images. In fact, it touches on the very idea of ‘the image’ – I mean, an aesthetic and discursive collage of social, political, sexual truths. Truths? What truths? That’s the catch. No one can answer with any certainty in what true beauty, true self, true man, true woman, true art, true fashion, and true style consist. Valentijn’s TED Talk addresses this very quandary: “what makes a person male or female?” she asks, inviting the audience to think with her. Although her pitch centres on the topic of gender, the notions of maleness and femaleness can be easily substituted by other indefinables. What makes a person beautiful? What makes a person sick? What marks the difference between accessory and blemish? What determines the limit of enhancement, and what crosses the threshold of disease? 

If beauty catches popularity like fire, if it sticks in our throats like smoke, if it shrinks our stomachs to the size of an orange, if it invades our flesh like a tumour, if it obscures our human face like a mask, then… well… who can say if it’s not some kind of disease. Delicious and deadly. Or perhaps rejuvenating, revolutionary. Who knows. Who decides. Who looks.