Neurasthenia

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.

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:

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.

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."

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