Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: a Neaurasthenic History of New York Dada

Literary Review, Wntr, 2005 by Irene Gammel

Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neaurasthenic History of New York Dada. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004.

"I hear 'New York' has gone mad about 'Dada'," the young American poet Hart Crane wrote to his friend Matthew Josephson on January 14, 1921, "and that a most exotic and worthless review is being concocted by Man Ray and Duchamp, billets in a bag printed backwards, on rubber deluxe, etc. What next! This is worse than The Baroness. By the way', I like the way the discovery has suddenly been made that she has all along been, unconsciously, a Dadaist. I cannot figure out just what Dadaism is beyond an insane jumble of the four winds, the six senses, and plum pudding. But if the Baroness is to be a keystone for it,--then I think I can possibly know when it is coming and avoid it."

The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), a German-born poet, sculptor, and performance artist, was by leaps and bounds the most risque of all the Dadaists. Picture the artist in 1915, promenading on New York's Park Avenue or visiting George Biddle in his Philadelphia studio: teaspoons as earrings, a cancelled American stamp on her check, a bra made of tomato cans, and a battery tail light on the bustle of her dress. "Cars and bicycles have taillights, why not I," she responded when she was asked about her bizarre costume, "also nobody will bump into me in the dark." Her photographs, taken by Man Ray, appeared in New York Dada, "the review being concocted by Man Ray and Duchamp" in 1921. In the same year she starred in Man Ray's first movie with the notorious title, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Shaving her Pubic Hair. She was quite literally "living Dada" by wearing her Dada art on her body and thus became the embodiment of the movement from 1913-1923: New York Dada in the flesh.

The controversial Baroness is the star of Amelia Jones's book, a provocative and iconoclastic reconfiguring of not only Dada, but the historical avant-garde. The Baroness's sculpture, God, which graces the cover of this beautifully designed and illustrated book, sets the tone. The sculpture is made of bathroom plumbing fixtures mounted on a miter box, its title sacrilegiously debasing the highest religious authority. Excremental humor was de rigeur for the Baroness, who famously quipped in her defense of James Joyce's Ulysses, a work that boasts excremental jokes and was forbidden by the censor, John Sumner, in 1920: "If I can eat I can eliminate--it is logic--it is why I eat! My machinery is built that way. Yours also--though you do not like to think of-mention it ... Why should I--proud engineer--be ashamed of my machinery?" These scatological aesthetics are not gratuitous but central to New York Dada, as Amelia Jones documents in engrossing readings that encompass an impressive array of media including poetry fiction, film, photography, paintings, and sculpture. As the title Irrational Modernism suggests, the excessive, marginal and irrational are the focal point, for the grotesque and mad in art are but logical expressions of World War I.

The book's premise is this: even though New York was far away from the battlefield, the exiled Europeans who sought refuge here--among them the visual artists and poets Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Crotti, Mina Loy, Arthur Cravan, and Henri Pierre Roche--brought with them the haunting memory of war. Neurasthenia, a key term in this book, describes a condition afflicting the Dada artists who frequently numbed their trauma with the help of drugs and alcohol. Neurasthenia was also the condition of the European soldiers who fought in the trenches and found themselves unmanned by the experiences of shellshock, a condition documented by World War I-era psychologist W. H. R. Rivers. The men who refused to do their patriotic duty--Duchamp, Picabia, and Cravan--did not escape the unsettling unmanning process, for their trauma resulted from being publicly condenmed as unmanly. "Personally" Duchamp quipped, "I must say I admire the attitude of combating invasion with folded arms," but, as Jones documents, his art objects present powerful testimony of a masculinity under siege. Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even presents the bachelors in an impotent state, unable to consummate the sexual act with the bride. Art, functioning as a self-portrait of sorts, became a way of negotiating these unsettled identities.

The mannish Baroness, who flaunted her sexual desire on the streets of New York, presents the female counter-image: "While her male colleagues endlessly' churn out images of their own impotence in the face of the rationalizing logic of modernity, the Baroness performs her irrationality openly". But even the Baroness was thwarted in her sexual exuberance. The avant-garde men she courted with energy and vigor preferred younger, less threatening, and more traditionally feminine women. It is in such instances that Jones reveals the borders of the male avant-garde and contrasts these limits with the lived experiments of the Baroness who sin> ply moves beyond them.

Earlier books devoted to New York Dada and the Baroness including Francis Naumann's pioneering New York Dada (1994) and my own biography, Baroness Else (2002), have established the Baroness's importance as a crucial catalyst for New York's event-garde in particular and for Modernism in general. Robert Reiss and the contributors to Naomi Sawelson-Gorse's Women in Dada have also discussed her as a misunderstood woman artist in a male dominated art world. Eliza Jane Riley has questioned whether the Baroness can be seen as a Dadaist at all in light of the fact that she lacks the nihilistic focus represented, for instance, by Tristan Tzara, the leader of the Paris Dada movement and for many the Pope of Dada. These studies have also documented the artistic sanity behind ]nor seemingly wild gestures.