The Duellist — of which I’ve published two versions: The Duellist (1) and The Duellist (2) — has been hanging around the inside of my head for a few months now, maybe longer.

As I was planning this piece I idly invented a bit of a backstory for this character: a non-binary soldier-for-hire by the name of Corporal Valentine, who has an unfortunate taste for too much red wine and is currently employed as a bodyguard to their lover, through which employment they received the scar to their left cheek.

In these pieces I wanted to repeat the deliberate mix of apparent time periods in my Acid Renaissance series (which I wrote about here), this time through the use of the peruke, shirt, and rapier (an old theatre prop kindly donated to me by another of my regular life models).

The intended feeling behind this — when these two pieces are viewed alongside the others in the series, as well as when considering the model’s modern tattoo — is something along the lines of Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time sequence, where an eclectic cornucopia of styles and times exist in a never-ending party of temporal dissonance.

Part of that fits well with the ideas of collective joy and the re-weirding of both self and society, all of which I tend to think are necessary keys needed in the escape from the constraints of capitalist realism.

But I’m also aware that constant cultural recycling is itself something that Mark Fisher identified as a key feature of capitalist realism.

However in Fisher’s examples it is always a recycling of culture from the 1960s to the 1990s, a four decade block that — if we use the generally accepted definition of the Boomer generation as being those born between 1946 and 1964 — broadly covers the period between the first Boomers becoming teenagers and last Boomers entering middle age (and no, I don’t think that’s a coincidence, but that’s a different tangent).

So I feel confident that my use of non-contemporaneous cultural artefacts falls outside of the cultural recycling time loop that Fisher identified, and instead is used to (or, at least, is intended to) create a temporal dissonance that jars the viewer into a slightly deeper engagement, as I wrote about in the blog post linked above and returned to recently in my post Acid Renaissance and Surrealism.

As a note to self, I do want to increase the inclusion of the theme of collective joy in this series, alongside the more strongly represented themes of the re-weirding of both self and society.