Articles

Typescript of two early poems by Barbara Guest

'Escape' and 'The Inhabitants'

Barbara Guest

For transcriptions of these poems, please visit “Three Poems by Barbara Guest.”


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June 15, 2011

Readymade Baroness

The gendered language of Dadaist dress

Kimberly Lamm
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Forgotten Like This Parapluie Am I by You, 1923–24, gouache on foil, 5 1/8 x 4 3/4 inches. Courtesy Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York.

In 1922, Jean Heap characterized Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in the pages of The Little Review as “the first American dada … the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada.”[1] This heraldic description, in which dressing, loving, and living Dada interlace, calls attention to the risks the Baroness took as an artist and highlights her radical sartorial imagination. Both manifested in her quotidian performances, which muddled the lines separating art and fashion; clothes and skin; bodies, images, and commodities.

June 2, 2011

The German Baroness

Else Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven's German poetry

Gaby Divay
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Wheels Are Growing on Rose Bushes, 1921–22, ink on paper, 5 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches. Courtesy Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York.

In her “Autobiography,” written in the 1920s in Europe, Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) reminisces in an associative and expressive style about the first thirty-five years of her life.[1] Her account provides an exact mirror image of the events described in the 1905 novel Fanny Essler by Felix Paul Greve (1879–1948), but with additional details and observations that benefit from hindsight. Greve’s novel ends with the heroine’s death at the precise moment when she would have been rudely awakened by some terrible revelation about her lover. The real-life event was Greve’s arrest for fraud in Bonn in May 1903. The novel’s transparent intertextual references to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary are confirmed in the Baroness’s autobiography: Greve admired the French author to a point that he wanted to be like him.

June 2, 2011

Sentimental spaces

On Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's 'Nest'

Natalia Cecire

“And what a quantity of animal beings there are in the being of a man!” — Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space[1] 

In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre takes a moment to castigate Gaston Bachelard for an embarrassing failure: Bachelard has a soft spot for the home, sentimentally taking it out of the realm of social space and identifying it with the natural dwelling of animals, the nest. Space, Lefebvre famously argues, is produced. Far from being a neutral and preexisting medium or natural resource available for use, it is both a product and a means of production, fashioned dialectically through a confluence of historical, material, and cultural factors.[2] Yet the home  is all too often made out to be the exception, the space outside production, the space outside space, even.

May 23, 2011

Robert Duncan's notes on Ron Silliman's 'Opening'

Robert Duncan

In 1974, John Taggart asked Ron Silliman to write an essay for an issue of Maps (#6 - “special Robert Duncan issue”) on the work of Duncan.

May 16, 2011