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

Literary Review, Wntr, 2005 by Irene Gammel

To contextualize Amelia Jones's approach, it is worthy of note that other recent artists, writers and performers have been inspired to reenact the Baroness: Hollywood actress Brittany Murphy modeled the Baroness in designer clothes for the New York Times Magazine, the most commercial form of recuperating the avant-gardist; San Francisco producer-actress Christina Augello has performed her on the stage at fringe theatres in North America and Europe; New York performance artist Christina Gast has enacted her in a performance piece; Francis Naumann has recreated her in a mannequin as the center piece of his Baroness Elsa Retrospective; and New York author Rene Steinke has written a novel based on the Baroness's life and titled Holy Skirts after one of her poems (forthcoming in 2005). In a serendipitous coincidence that seems to characterize the subject of the Baroness, I can add a personal anecdote: As I was writing this review, I received a letter from Seattle, Washington, with hand drawn decorations in yellow and purple color. When I opened the letter, I found a zinc that was obviously inspired by' the Baroness: the first pate showing her in a 1920 photo by Man Ray, with large hat and choker, and incredibly sad eyes. The handwritten caption reads: La Baronne Elsa yon Freytag-Loringhoven. The bubble coming out of her mouth says: "Schlendern, spazieren"--German for walking, flaner. A note from an inspired Elsa fan.

With its focus on the volcanic eruptions of the Baroness, Jones's book begins to answer the question why the Baroness has become such a compelling figure 75 years after her death. In fact, Jones provides two answers, the first mirroring the Baroness's idealism, the second her bitter skepticism. First the idealistic answer: The Baroness always maintained a certain purity that had to do with her uncompromising spirit vis-a-vis America's commercial culture. While Greenwich Village became increasingly commodified in the late teens and early twenties and catered to tourist dollars, the Baroness remained fiercely anti-commercial and anti-bourgeois: "through her excesses-and the fact that she lived a truly peripatetic, impoverished existence (rather than, as with many bohemians, being supported by family money or by the solicitation of tourist dollars)--she seemed to resist such incorporations".

Yet for Jones, as for the Baroness, skepticism prevails. In the end, even the Baroness cannot function as a perfect heroine for the postmodern feminist academic, given the artist's anti-Semitic prejudices and her contradictions. Even today, she continues to figure as an icon for war trauma. In fact, the Baroness's trauma is a way of negotiating today's urban traumas, for New York, scarred by the specter of airplanes flying into skyscrapers, is once again in the throes of a war trauma. For the author the neurasthenic Baroness is a foil to project our own postmodern neurasthenia.

By way of conclusion, let us return to Hart Crane. In 1919, as Crane's biographer John Unterecker writes, Crane, "roaring with laughter, would pantomime in extravagant detail all the Baroness's gestures and imitate broadly her heavy, strong, insistent speech". Such laughter, in Amelia Jones's reading of the tragic underside of the woman and the era, is but the music in the dance of death. The Baroness died of gas asphyxiation at age 53 in 1927 in Paris, her death possibly a suicide; Hart Crane too committed suicide in 1932. As W. Butler Years famously said of the modernist era, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Jones's book gives voice to this crumbling center in a way that resonates with 21st century preoccupations. A meticulously researched and rigorously argued book, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada is deliberately open ended, refusing to present the coherence and closure of the traditional historical narrative. Yet in and through this book, the Baroness once again lives--fearlessly "staring death in the face."