Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity (review)

Students of New York Dada have long been aware of the colourful Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Shaving her head, painting herself blue, and wearing spoons as jewellery, she perfectly exemplified the flamboyant irrationalism and anti-bourgeois display of the cultural avant-garde. Until recently, however, she was overshadowed by luminaries like Marcel Duchamp, Ezra Pound, and Jane Heap. Only in the last decade has there been a substantial change in this portrayal: her autobiography, correspondence, and other writings were published in 1992, and she was one of the highlights of the exhibition Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York, organized by Francis M. Naumann in 1996. Irene Gammel has made a very important and readable contribution to this growing body of knowledge, extending our understanding of Elsa's life and work both within the frame of New York Dada and without it.

Born Else Plötz in Germany in 1874, Elsa (who became 'the baroness' through an ill-fated marriage) would become equal parts visual artist, performance artist, poet, agent provocateur, sexually liberated New Woman, and impoverished victim of indifferent posterity. Her family home was dysfunctional - her mother was mentally ill and her father attempted to choke her - and Gammel convincingly describes such events as catalysts of Elsa's later impulses towards living art and sexual experimentation. She wrote poetry at the age of twelve and became involved in multiple artistic circles in Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States as both artist and model. Along the way, she appears to have been introduced to early twentieth-century feminist thought in the form of J.J. Bachofen's Mutterecht, still somewhat misleadingly characterized as a wholly pro-matriarchal tract. While Gammel points out the latter, she wisely balances it against the greater likelihood that Elsa's character, not abstruse theoretical speculations, determined Elsa's feminism.

Sympathetically describing Elsa's ups and downs without lionizing on the one hand or becoming maudlin on the other, Gammel pulls together a variety of material, much of it not published elsewhere. She creates a compelling portrait of an artist and character as interesting as Duchamp, with whom Elsa was deeply infatuated and whom she seems to have treated as both mentor and competitor. Alternately argumentative, eccentric, visionary, petty, experimental, pathetic, and tardy, Elsa cut a proto-feminist path across early twentieth century-culture in performances, poems, and objects that fully embodied Dada's anti-bourgeois absurdity. She even anticipated many later surrealist developments in open discussions of her sexuality and in the content, more than the form, of her work.

A very famous Dada object entitled God (1918), a plumbing trap mounted on a mitre box, is a case in point. Prior to Naumann, this work appeared in virtually every textbook of twentieth-century art as the work of Morton Schamberg, now described merely as the photographer. It is usually represented as an example of the Dada object - the marriage of two utilitarian things in such a way as to efface their usefulness, as in Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913), where a bicycle's forks and front wheel were mounted on a stool so as to make both wheel and stool unusable. In God, a plumbing trap is mounted in a mitre box, rendering both useless. Gammel's interpretation of the object begins with Elsa's father's comparison of prayer to night-time visits to the bathroom (in the context of the generally anticlerical spirit of Dada) and ends with the fascinating possibility that the object's urinary subtext links her to Duchamp's Fountain, an overturned urinal signed 'R. Mutt' and exhibited in notorious circumstances. Duchamp himself alleged that an unnamed woman had something to do with it, leading Gammel to run with the idea in a way that stretches credibility. At one point, for example, she spins out a series of plays on words - R. Mutt = Mutter (mother) = Urmutter (original, prototypical or primordial mother) = Armut (poverty). This kind of phonetic tomfoolery once had some limited justification in Duchamp scholarship, but...