Matthew Tully Dugan

In The Beginning

The Day had drawn from darkness’ form The light beset on meadow’s berm Coalescing in the night A starry shadow’s tempest flight Æther strewn o’r velvet moss Black with golden silks embossed Thoth incanted El-oh-heem From the mount of Ohr-Ree-el Unctuous, ectoplasmic stream Lillith’s incandescence spell The firmament’s harmonic tremble Split the dawn on fissured facets Leaving light on Earth uncharted Where the moon had last departed Truth beholden by this dawn Turned to stone the ringing song Ancient flesh exhumed with thunder All of Reason cast asunder

In this void a carnal lust The Death-dream ever -fiending To taste the Blood defined as trust Reliant on its meaning

Horror cloaked as sanct-u-ary Harbors fate in false aesthetics Time has tortured time with time itself And left a hollow reliquary Lo the legions of this war Must take thy Nature’s queue To turn as softly as the swan When the season is anew

A force of will is futile To the demons of delusion But eat the head of ego’s snake And forget what makes us human It’s then the spawn of grandeur stakes Its claim of godly wonders To be interned by what once was Is to let the Devil plunder

—Matthew Tully Dugan

As the symbolist poets began to unravel the traditional influence that dominated the mid 19th century it was clear that a new dawn had come to rise within the creative circles of young French bohemians with a revolutionary affect of hyper-decadence - this revitalized styling of life described in Baudelaire’s 1857 publication Fleurs du Mal became a fanciful adaptation of modern romanticism. Having acquired a taste for the aestheticized writing techniques of Edgar Allen Poe, Baudelaire brought the gothic adornments of mysticism, the supernatural and ideas surrounding love, passion and beauty to a new generation of writers with his detailed translations of Poe’s works. The rapacious coupling of two of these writers, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, was emblematic of the movement which they came to represent, having dove head first into an affair so toxic that it left Rimbaud shot by the hand of his own lover. While Verlaine paid for his misdeeds behind bars Rimbaud would write the seminal work Une Saison En Enfer (A Season in Hell) igniting an entire artistic movement that favored essence over form, dreams over reality and an intuitive use of symbols that enveloped the audience in sensory based nostalgia that transcended common language.

It was artists like Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon that fully embraced the symbolist principles in their work, creating imagined scenes that resonated with the ideals of the poets that paved the way before them. Although they were still using traditional painting techniques to prepare their canvases and execute the work, the subject matter started to shift into a more fantastical realm that favored a sort of psychological expressionism that was not yet entirely understood. Themes of sex, magic and violence were set awash in blooming hues harkening back to the heroic paintings of the early 1700s but with a darker more sinister undertone. Other contemporaries such as Edouard Manet would further investigate these transgressive taboos from a place of voyeuristic curiosity while simultaneously beginning to deconstruct the methodology by which the paintings were made, veering toward the fast and direct approach of capturing light en plein air that the impressionists would become known for.

The idea of Art for Art’s sake was posited as a cornerstone of the movement as it denounced the necessity for compunctious discourse that was touted as absolute in the Salons of the time. The decadents’ sought enlightenment through excess, emboldening each other with a joie de vivre that permeated the scene so deeply that it become tantamount to religion, sacrificing themselves at the altar of adulterated consciousness. To lose one’s sense was to tap into the divine, thrashing about in the corporeal ether until the fugue state decanted automatic creativity almost psychic -ly possessed as if a medium for the spirit realm. Visions of angels and demons surmounted the categorically undefinable linguistics the symbolists used, taking cues from both paganism and christianity culminating into a patina of rich conceptual foreshadowing for the surrealists that came soon after. To be devoted so unwaveringly to this discipline of opulence seems to have sated the minds of artists beyond the Parisian borders as artists began to travel there just to draw scenes of the bars and cafes frequented by the contemporary thinkers that made up the scene. Gauguin and Matisse hosted Salons in their studios that were some of the most critically engaging forums of the late 19th century and this sense of community garnered even more interest in the work and its role in dismantling the archaic terms by which art was evaluated up until this point. Manet’s dejuner Sur l’here wasn’t necessarily radical in its content, it was a rather ubiquitous scene of Johns and their dates out for an afternoon picnic, but to expose the nature of these debutants caught with their pants down was not how they wished to be observed by society at large. It almost feels as if it could be the first instance of what we would now see as paparazzi. A capturing of the real lives that the uber wealthy lead both as critique and envious admiration. To have such a hedonistically lavish mid day saunter into the woods was exactly what the symbolists envisioned as utopia but the upper class felt so exposed by this brazen act of veracity that they shamed the artist into believing the guilt they experienced was solely perpetuated by his observation of them.

Through this lens we continue to assess the dichotomy of desire, pushing the boundaries of conventional identity and how it relates to our integrated sense of self worth. Hovering between a ravenous compulsion for validating attention of our carefully crafted online personas and the nuanced prescription of over-exposure to curtail the feelings of guilt that is typically associated with vulnerability, there has been an ouroboros of self promotion and self restriction that can leave one in a state of constant self-doubt, quelling autonomy in lieu of wanting to not be cast out for not fitting in. Even the most famous celebrities can’t control the audience they have demanded, let alone a teenager with an awkward disposition. The tightrope is strung between two crumbling buildings and the freefall is a viral moment that despite being the subject of, leaves you forever stripped of ownership. To author our own destitution in public only incenses the nature in which we failed our own fundamental truths, but perhaps the only way out is through. To create art for art’s sake removes the trappings of contemporary critique by dissolving the valuation system that feeds on self-doubt, leaving room for the unimagined to surface without the hindrance of animosity whether it comes from within or without.

—Matthew Tully Dugan

“One doesn’t go. – Let’s take to the roads again, full of my vice, the vice that has thrust its roots of suffering into my side, since the age of reason – that rises to the sky, strikes me, knocks me down, drags me along. The last innocence, and the last timidity. I’ve said it. Not to carry my disgust and betrayals through the world. Let’s go! Marching, burdens, deserts, boredom, anger. Whom shall I hire myself to? What beast must be adored? What saintly image attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lie must I uphold? – Wade through what blood? Rather, protect oneself from justice – a hard life, pure brutalisation – to open the coffin lid with a withered hand; sit down, stop your breath. So no old age, no dangers: to be terrified is un-French. – Ah! I am so forsaken I could offer any divine image no matter what my urges towards perfection. O my self-denial, O my marvellous pity! Even down here! De profundis Domine, what a creature I am!”

—Bad Blood, Arthur Rimbaud c.1870