Poética do gesto: do dandismo à arte contemporânea

Abstract

In this article, we aim to show how the ethics of the sign outlined by Jean Galard in “The Beauty of the Gesture” fits into an ethico-aesthetic tradition that challenges some of the foundations of modernity, tracing back to nineteenth-century English dandyism and culminating in some of the most important twentieth-century artistic proposals that seek to eliminate the distance between art and life. Our analysis will focus on Galard's reading of gesture as a poetic act deeply cultivated by dandies, which can serve as the starting point for a "renewed ethics" that breaks with the traditional ethico-aesthetic pattern of semiotic referentiality. Thus, our analysis seeks the intersection between aesthetics and ethics through the gesture, considered at the convergence of three fronts: a historically dated way of life, a philosophical work, and some modern artistic movements.