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

Literary Review, Wntr, 2005 by Irene Gammel

Jones's take on the Baroness is different, even as she builds on this earlier scholarship. In a boldly Foucaultian gesture of reversing traditional western logic, Jones claims irrationality itself as her focal point from which to conceptualize a new history of the movement. In doing so, she carefully avoids the opposite temptation of romanticizing madness as a fountain of wisdom and creativity. In a strategic gesture designed to work against the "rationalizing focus" of traditional art history she collapses the boundaries between the academic and the confessional, and after discussing her main themes of the war, the machine, and the city, she ventures into the most experimental part of her book by merging her own voice with that of her subject. Stripping herself of her armor of academic language, Jones plunges into a stream of consciousness to produce a jouissance of an unusual kind. By mimicking the Baroness's poetic style, obsessions, and invectives, she achieves a fabulous tour de force: a live performance of the Baroness.

In "Street Haunting with/as the Baroness, c. 1919 New York," the penultimate chapter, we listen in on an exuberantly rhapsodic monologue, which takes us into the creative depth of both the Baroness and her analyst:

   I pass out again into gleaming streets after spit rain--what a
   whirlpool I am--they want my corpse to shave and dangle forth as
   DadaMama but not my lifeforce--too hot to touch too living Dada. My
   skin, my heart, my bones, my soul strange with beauty wears itself
   inside out--head shaved-like having a new sex experience-tea ball
   necklace, coal scuttle helmet, postage stamp ornamented sendmeback,
   and my redleashed dogs.

The Baroness's voice is enacted in a funky collage of quotations drawn from letters, memoir and poetry: for instance, "it's like having a new sex-experience," the Baroness had famously proclaimed after shaving her head to mark the end of a frustrating love affair with the poet William Carlos Williams. The creative monologue seamlessly merges the two voices as Jones's critically interprets and creatively shapes the materials, ultimately making the Baroness the mouthpiece of her feminist indictment of the male Dadaists: "they want my corpse to shave and dangle forth as DadaMama but not my lifeforce." Cameos by other fictionalized characters enhance this lively Dada spectacle: The art collector Katherine Dreier, sexually frustrated after being rejected by Duchamp, wanders the streets in search of her lover. Francis Picabia's poem is recited: "Dada smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing / It is like your hopes: nothing. / Like your paradise: nothing ..." And the Baroness "unreels in her heartmind city poems": "City stir on eardrum-/dancewind: herbstained-/flower-stained-silken-rustling-" In this wild performance of poetic voices, Irrational Modernism revivifies the Baroness, but in doing so also reveals the inevitable difficulty in historicizing this colorful figure through conventional means. Baroness Elsa's life emerges in a pile of fragments, in anecdotes, gossip, stories of outlandish behavior told and retold many times in the annals of Modernism, with the stories forever mutating into new forms. The Baroness, therefore, is a construct in which fact and fiction merge.