Decadent scenography: Angel Rose Denman, Hollywood Goth

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Alston, Adam. 2025. Decadent scenography: Angel Rose Denman, Hollywood Goth. Afterimage, ISSN 0300-7472 [Article] (Forthcoming)

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Abstract or Description

This article considers how decadence manifests and takes on meaning and significance in artistic practice today by focusing on the scenographic work of the Anglo-American artist Angel Rose Denman. Denman’s scenographies are informed by decadent style as it emerged in Europe during the fin de siècle, when decadence was associated with decay, obsolescence, and the refinement of that which others might find distasteful. However, she also draws inspiration from a broader range of genres and personalities from the twentieth century including disco, divas, goth subculture, and kitsch. Where decadence at the dawn of modernity was a reaction to instrumentalism in capitalist industry and the bourgeois tastes that emerged from its ascendancy, it is stagnating economic growth and productivity in postindustrial societies that contextualize decadence today, alongside changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality and the progress that these attitudes are understood to represent. This demands a shift in how we identify decadence if it is to be at all legible in a twenty-first-century context. The politics of Denman’s “decadent scenography” in two of her films – The Green Carnation (2012) and The Rose (2014) – is rooted not in the unconventional bodies and things found in the environments she crafts, but their arrangement. Her practice disturbs binaries that underpin hierarchies of taste and value including function and filigree, productivity and lethargy, essence and pose, and newness and antiquation. Ultimately, I find value in its lack of fit in a twenty-first century context, both “of” its time and a time long past, and in how Denman’s decadent scenographies disorient the regulation of gender, sexuality, and taste.

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Article

Keywords:

Angel Rose Denman, decadence, scenography, design, dandy, Oscar Wilde

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