Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

For the opening of  Dadaglobe Reconstucted last night at the Museum of Modern Art (NY), I performed “Teke Heart” by Else Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (as she bills herself on the holograph ms) (1874–1927). I performed it in the gallery next to the ms of the 1921 poem, sent to Tristan Tzara for his never-published anthology Dadaglobe.

Listen to a brief audio biography of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven. And here is a blurb I wrote for Irene Gammel’s biography:

‘The Baroness cut the most compelling modernist figure. She literally wore New York dada, thus inventing it as a pattern of aesthetic costume to be worn so tight that it was her skin, her self. She was, as Irene Gammel puts it in this remarkable biographical study, an “assemblage of paradoxes embodied in one body.” That the Baroness knew and inspired or inspiringly repelled nearly everyone associated with the rise of modernist practice in New York has been already part of the story, but it has never been so richly detailed. In Gammel's presentation the Baroness emerges as far more than an ingenue. She became a mature, self-conscious dynamic artistic force — and remarkably productive in her own right, not despite but because she exhausted herself up from the inside out.’

This is a long, awaited, much-needed collection of the exuberant and enthralling poetry of the great American Dada poet "Baroness" Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The book is a sumptuous collection of poems and images, as much art catalog and text collection. And Irene Gammel tells me there are still significant uncollected poems, which I hope can be brought together in a web archive.

Here is an audio version of the biographical profile of the Baroness that was published in the sixth issue of Sulphur (1983), read by Shawn Walker: MP3.