Modernist Wastes

Recovery, Re-Use and the Autobiographic in Elsa von-Freytag-Lorighoven and Djuna Barnes

Caroline Knighton

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350129047
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Littérature
• Categoria: Critique littéraire moderne

Modernist Wastes is a profound new critical reflection on the ways in which women writers and artists have been discarded and recovered in established definitions of modernism. Exploring the collaborative auto/biographical writings of Djuna Barnes and the artist, poetic and Dada performer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Caroline Knighton reveals how these very processes of discarding, recovery and re-use can open up new ways of understanding a distinctively female modernist artistic practice.
Illustrated throughout with artworks, original letters and manuscript facsimiles, the book draws on new archival discoveries to place the feminist recovery of neglected female voices at the heart of our understanding of modernist and avant-garde literary culture.

1

Stunning subjects and disruptive body practices

I hear New York has gone mad about “Dada”, […] 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 the keystone for it, – then I think I can possible know when it is coming and avoid it.

Hart Crane, c. 1920

Writing in the New Republic in 1928 the sociologist and literary critic Lewis Mumford called for an incorporation of modernism into interior and urban design as a means of satisfying the ‘desire to have our feet firmly planted in our own age’.¹ Analysing and defining these ‘modern forms’ as ‘the emphasis of function and structure […] simplicity and directness’,² Mumford directly links modernism, in design and elsewhere, to the modernization of industrial production, placing the machine (and the material commodities it is able to reproduce) as central to both modernist aesthetics and modern life. This utopian symbiosis of modes of production and modes of representation is, perhaps, most strongly asserted in the subtle invocation of the re-imagined body as the formative principle beneath shifts in contemporary tastes towards the unequivocally ‘modern’. Citing contemporary trends in fashion and architecture, Mumford locates the modern body as central in overcoming what he terms the ‘period model’ of design:

Whereas the designs of women’s clothing and skyscrapers had long been sloughing off ornamental excrescences, had reduced themselves steadily to the essential line and mass, in one case, the human body and its contours, and in the other, the steel skeleton and it planes, we clung to style and ornament of the past in every other department.³

Reciprocally mapped on to one another the body and the designs that it inspires are reconstructed here according to a logic of reduction, simplification and functionality. In a subtle but striking move, it is not only modern design which is reformulated and redefined per the rational logic of industrial production, but conceptions and representations of the body itself. With an emphasis on function and structure, the modernist canon of simplicity and directness identified by Mumford relies on the construction of a coherent ‘modern’ body ‘re-energized, re-formed, subject to new modes of production, representation, and commodification’.⁴

Such a re-imagining of corporeal form founded on the principles of structure and simplicity is particularly prevalent to a discussion of the visual thematics of New York Dada. Looking through the shiny and seductive pages of the various exhibition catalogues, art history books and academic studies that traditionally centred the retrospectively identified New York Dada movement around the tripartite pivot of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Man Ray, ‘bodies’ do not seem to figure. Indeed, the organic, fleshy mess of bodies would be something of an incongruous embarrassment within the visual field of glass, mechanical arms, chocolate grinders and egg beaters that we might bring to mind. Endlessly reproducible and reduced to their most basic functioning, the Readymade objects and erotically charged mechanical fantasies typically associated with the movement offer a more ambivalent visual antecedent for Mumford’s rational modernism, redrawing the lines between man and god, nature and machine, man and woman in their modes of machine-age representation.

In the specific contexts of New York Dada however, one defiantly messy body has persistently haunted the edges of this man-made world, disrupting the emphasis on reduction, simplicity and functionality prioritized as a sign of the modern in Mumford’s account. As an artist’s model, experimental poet, performer, autobiographer, Dada Queen and iconocalstic visual artist, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven pioneered a diverse and challenging art practice. And yet, in their letters and memoirs, her contemporaries seem more preoccupied with reconstructing her as a stunning subject of their own narratives than developing serious discussions of her explosive Dada poetry or intriguing found-object constructions. Impossible to ignore and often unsettling to encounter, confrontations with the Baroness ‘dressed in rags picked up here and there, decked out with impossible objects suspended from chains, swishing long trains, like an empress from another planet’ galvanized the attempts of her contemporaries to identify, categorize and fix this recalcitrant body within their own accounts.⁵

Reflecting the common feeling of those who encountered the Baroness that she had ‘all along been, unconsciously, a Dadaist’, Hart Crane’s dismissal of New York Dada reveals more than his fraught ambivalence towards the broader movement’s absurdist tendencies, but highlights one of the ways in which the Baroness’s body was readily appropriated, reconstructed and put to work in formulating contemporary definitions of modernist and avant-garde activity. What he describes elsewhere as the frustrating ‘flamdoodle’ of Dada might be hard to pin down, but once its energies have been contained in the figure of the Baroness, it is considerably easier to identify and to avoid. Given that Crane was also fond of burlesquing the Baroness with a confused blend of admiration and disgust, such attempts to ‘contain’ her unruly production and disruptive energy also pose pressing questions regarding the sublimation of her work within modernist production.⁶

In considering the treatment of this body as modernist anecdote and artist’s model, I want to probe the tension between the critical erasure of the Baroness as a poet, artist and performer from modernist histories, and the indelible trace that her body has left on the footnotes of those histories. Delineating certain historical and cultural contexts informing the critical marginalization of the Baroness’s body-work (i.e. both her body of work and her embodied art-labour), it is nevertheless possible to trace the ways in which the Baroness’s (grotesque) body was anxiously appropriated and reconstructed by her contemporaries.

With her head shaved and lacquered in a high vermillion, her face sometimes daubed with yellow powder and cancelled postage stamps, her near-naked body rustling with an assortment of salvaged or stolen tin cans, toy soldiers and teaspoons, such accounts of the disturbing and sensational power of the Baroness’s body are not hard to come by. Recording his first meeting with the Baroness, the memoirs of American artist George Biddle present a particularly striking example:

I met her in my Philadelphia studio […] in the spring of 1917, a few weeks before I enlisted in the officer’s Training Camp. Having asked me, in her harsh, high-pitched German stridency, whether I required a model, I told her that I should like to see her in the nude. With a royal gesture she swept apart the folds of a scarlet raincoat. She stood before me quite naked – or nearly so. Over the nipples of her breasts were two tin tomato cans, fastened with a green string behind her back. Between the tomato cans hung a very small bird-cage and within it a crestfallen canary. One arm was covered from wrist to shoulder with celluloid curtain rings, which later she admitted to have pilfered from a furniture display in Wanamaker’s. She removed her hat, which had been tastefully but inconspicuously trimmed with gilded carrots, beets and other vegetables. Her hair was close cropped and dyed vermillion.⁷

Biddle’s account here brings together recurrent themes in discussions of the Baroness by her contemporaries: a fascination with her ‘boyish’ body, a tension between her nudity and her visually sensational couture d’ordures, her foreignness and her dramatic, indomitable disregard for gendered and aesthetic convention. More pressingly for my purposes in this chapter, Biddle’s account also records the need to record itself, to make sense of a sensorially dissembling encounter

The disorderly practices of the Baroness’s body-work recorded here provoke confusion and the collapse of seemingly well-defined boundaries. While Elsa’s appearance here as a female nude model in a male artist’s studio should signal her conformity to a well-rehearsed gender script, Biddle’s employment of masculine signifiers in his descriptions of her body which he describes elsewhere as that of a ‘Greek ephebe, with small firm breasts, narrow hips, and long smooth shanks’ speaks to the cognitive dissonance activated between Elsa’s provocative displays and traditional constructions of femininity.⁸ As later chapters will examine more comprehensively, the Baroness’s body-work interferes with the gendered and voyeuristic gaze, dismantling the encoded practices of ‘looking’ which have reinforced notions of the model’s passivity in relation to the artist’s activity. Far from allowing the (male) artist unmediated access to the nude (female) body, any possible representation of the model here must first negotiate the active body of the model-artist as a work of art in its own right.

Importantly, as we shall see, the objects appropriated and re-contextualized in this provocative display – bird cages, discarded tin cans, stolen curtain rings – are also revealing as to the modes and functions of what I want to broadly term the Baroness’s waste-based aesthetics. Recovering these devalued and discarded objects, and incorporating them into her performative self-display, the Baroness collapses anxiously negotiated distinctions between clean and unclean, inside and outside, dynamically reconfiguring her body through and as her art, and flatly refusing passive, specular models of detached contemplation of art from life. While this goes some way to delineating the methods through which the Baroness’s body-work can be recuperated from the obsessive focus on her body which typically dominates representations of her in the memoirs and fictionalized accounts of her contemporaries, such a discussion must be grounded in an initial analysis of the strategies of containment activated in these textual reconstructions. As in Mumford’s account of a rational modernism, the body and the designs built over it reinforce one another here. However, while Mumford’s notions of modern design as functional and reduced to the essential elements of line and mass depended on a notably classical conception of the body as strictly delineated, contained and simplified, the dazzling body beneath the raincoat performs a perverse return of the ornamental excesses systematically discarded in accounts of the modern(ist) and the stripped down machinic modes of the Picabian mechanomorph or the Duchampian Readymade.

Far from recalibrating stabilizing ideals of the classical body (embodying aesthetic traditions of impenetrability, separateness and proportionality) for the modern, machine age, the body presented in this textual reconstruction is unambiguously grotesque – one that protrudes, extends itself and continually transgresses its own limits. Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s reconfiguration of the category of the grotesque as ‘a semiotics of the human body’ we can clearly trace its contours in Biddle’s account:⁹

Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. […] The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body.¹⁰

Taken as a whole, Biddle’s testimony certainly foregrounds the Baroness’s infamously voracious sexuality and in the creative adaptation and application of used, rejected and stolen objects foregrounded here her body is rendered ‘unfinished’ and excessively (re)productive.¹¹ Giving special attention to that which protrudes from the Baroness’s ‘nearly’ naked body as she dramatically sweeps aside the folds of her raincoat, Biddle’s narrative situates the Baroness’s body within the category of the grotesque as one that ‘ignores the impenetrable surface that closes and limits the body as a separate and completed phenomenon’.¹² Transgressing and extending its boundaries, the body reconstructed here is instead one that connects itself to the world through the objects consumed and discarded by that world in an open system of perpetual renewal.

Reading across the memoirs of her contemporaries, the composite portrait of the Baroness that emerges is always already grotesque, built up as it is through multiple, fragmentary and intersecting readings. Furthermore, all employ the contradictory representational structures of the grotesque in making sense of the Baroness’s corporeal performances. Rendering her through a language of ambivalent fascination and repulsion, such narratives employ the grotesque as a means of evoking ‘the nonrational dimension of life as such, a dimension that, in principle, is both alluring and sinister, benign and devouring, and that defines itself against ideas of pattern and order’.¹³ As this definition suggests, categories of the grotesque are intimately linked to structural systems of order and disorder. In rendering the Baroness’s body through these already established categories, these narrative reconstructions attempt to buttress the binary logic of such structural systems, paradoxically re-inscribing her body as neatly disorderly to negatively reinforce more ‘orderly’ aesthetic and cultural modes, bodies and practices. In re-writing her performance of gender, sexuality and the everyday in sensationally visual terms, such accounts function as a strategy of ‘calculated containment’, a way of both rationalizing the unsettling encounter and shoring up the boundaries between artist subject and art object.

Looking across other contemporary chronicles, it is clear that these abject dynamics are formative in reproducing (and containing) the body of the Baroness. While Mary Butts and Ben Hecht rendered her body as a destructive, devouring and demonic force in their short stories, William Carlos Williams memorably evoked these abject dynamics in his attempt to work through the assault on his masculinity and identity as a modern American poet presented by her aggressive sexual advances and destabilizing corporeality.¹⁴ Fictionalized as the avant-garde poet the ‘Countess Sillivitch’ connected to the hypermodern journal The Shriek (The Little Review) in Charles Brook’s Hints to Pilgrims (1921), the stench of death, filth and decay clings to the literary reincarnation of this exotically European and visually sensational Dada poet.¹⁵ From the bemused fascination expressed by painters, writers and editors for both her androgynous physique and her ornamental junk costumes, to the repulsive, smelly and sexually voracious figure that stalks the shadowy edges of modernist memory, this grotesque body never disappeared entirely from modernist mythology and memoir – albeit in the materially marginal form of unpublished manuscripts, letters, memoirs and footnotes.

This is an important point to emphasize. As Irene Gammel has eloquently suggested, the documentation of the Baroness’s performances in the paintings, photography and narrative accounts of her contemporaries reads like a miscellany of ‘exotic artifacts’.¹⁶ However, if we consider...