Dada, Cyborgs and the New Woman in New York

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3 Dada, Cyborgs and the New Woman in New York

Who is she, where is she, what is she – this ‘modern woman’ that people are always talking about? Is there any such creature? Does she look any different looks or talk any different words or think any different thoughts from the late Cleopatra or Mary Queen of Scots or Mrs Browning? Some people think the women are the cause of modernism whatever that is. But then, some people think woman is to blame for everything they don’t like or don’t understand. Cher- chez la femme is man-made advice, of course. (New York Evening Sun, 13 February 1917)1

New York in 1917, particularly with the first Independents Exhibition and the events surrounding it, was in the grip not just of an American flowering of modernist innovation, but of the specific manifestation of New York Dada. The term New York Dada is a retrospective appellation emerging from Zurich Dada and from 1920s popular press reflections on New York modernism; it suggests a more coherent movement than was understood by those living and working in this arena at the time. The many individuals participating in or on the margins of New York Dada included French expatriates such as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp and Americans such as Alfred Steiglitz and Man Ray. Even Ezra Pound was touched by New York Dada, writing two poems for The Little Review in 1921 that explored the interchange between one of its most visible figures, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and William Carlos Williams.2 It is not incidental that while the First World War in Europe raged, disturbing the boundaries of ‘natural’ identity and enacting a machinic destruction of cultural and human life, artists and writers in New York

85 A. Goody, Modernist Articulations © Alex Goody 2007 86 Modernist Articulations explored the technological encroachments of consumerism and mass- production. Amelia Jones has convincingly argued for the importance of the First World War for New York Dada highlighting the ‘pressures on artistic subjectivity stemming from the war’ that were negotiated in New York at the time (2004: 40). Jones points particularly to the New York Dada articulations of an ‘equivocal masculinity, one compromised by its distance from European ideals of proper, patriotic, heroic male behaviour, hugely inflated by propaganda during the war’ (ibid.). Jones’s argument builds on preceding feminist criticism which has revealed how, despite its iconoclasm and the actual, central role of women writers and artists, Dada ‘embodied the male as a term and a movement’,3 thus serving to codify a repression at the heart of its absolute rebel- lion. Dominant understandings of New York Dada as the first Amer- ican avant-garde, heroically struggling with the encroaching mass of industrial capitalism have now been revised to address the elision of Dada’s fundamental negotiations and presentations of gender equivoc- ality. New York Dada fully confronted the early twentieth-century world as a place of technological innovation, industrial rationalisation, mass consumerism, challenges to individualism, and disturbances of traditional gender identities. The modern world that New York Dada confronted was one which inherited a specific articulation of gender and the masses, an articulation that emerges from a range of late nineteenth-century psychological, philosophical and fictional texts, and which reinforces aesthetic judg- ments that were being made at the time about sentimental and popular literature. In this conjunction women become identified both with and as the mass, and as the consumers of popular art and commodity culture. Thus, as Rita Felski argues, ‘the idea of the modern becomes aligned with a pessimistic vision of an unpredictable yet curiously passive femininity seduced by the glittering phantasmagoria of an emerging consumer culture’ (1995: 62). The impact on modernist forma- tions of anti-bourgeois artistic practice is profound, as Andreas Huyssen points out:

the nightmare of being devoured by mass culture through co-option, commodification, and the ‘wrong’ kind of success is the constant fear of the modernist artist, who tries to stake out his territory by fortifying the boundaries between genuine art and inauthentic mass The problem is the persistent gendering as feminine of that which is devalued. (1986: 53) Dada, Cyborgs, New York 87

Huyssen’s diagnosis of mass-culture as modernism’s gendered other has had a great influence on subsequent remappings and rewritings of modernism and has informed many revisions of the hegemonic idea of High Modernist practice. However, what Huyssen has also highlighted is a corollary connection between women and fears of technology in the face of industrialisation and the ‘increasing tech- nologization of human nature’ (ibid.: 70). The diagnosis he offers of this articulation is a classically psychoanalytic one: ‘[t]he fears and perceptual anxieties emanating from ever more powerful machines are recast and reconstructed in terms of the male fear of female sexuality, reflecting, in the Freudian account, the male’s castration anxiety’ (70). But there might be a different reading of the mass, popular culture,4 the feminine and technology, one that develops but does not psycho- analyse the ambivalence of machines. Machines are not neutral objects, or simply and easily recuperable into a rational industrial-technical teleology. As Rosi Braidotti writes, ‘Machines fulfil a fundamental libidinal structure, which mimes the workings of sexual energy’, crucially ‘they question the boundary between the functional and the gratuitous, productivity and waste, moderation and excess’ (2002: 217). The articulation of technology with productivity, organisation and advance- ment, not gratuitous ‘theatricality’ or ‘play and pleasure’ (ibid.) is one that dominates in early twentieth-century America. This is metonym- ically enacted in the technological achievements of the New York skyline,5 but it is also explored and reworked in the playful ironies of New York Dada. This chapter focuses on the productions and practices of a selection of New York writers and artists in the mid-1910s and, in so doing, explores the articulations of modernism, woman, mass-culture and technology in this time and place. As the opening quotation of this chapter highlights, ‘women’ and ‘modernism’ were brought together at the time: the following discussion (as does this study as a whole) seeks to actually understand the configuration of practices that really produced such statements as ‘women are the cause of modernism’ and thus to consider how they are articulated to and through certain texts, and to explore the sets of relations and effects they determine. This chapter focuses specifically on the connections between mass and spectacular culture and the avant-garde that Barnes’s work produces, on Loy’s role in the Dada moment, and on how the conjunction of women and technology is forged, reworked and radically reimagined through the practices of New York Dada. 88 Modernist Articulations

Spectacular, spectacular: Barnes writes New York

Among the variety of journalistic pieces that Djuna Barnes wrote in the 1910s, four pieces explore the experiences to be had at Coney Island, the resort just outside New York on the southern coast of Brooklyn. This writing does not stand distinct from the concerns of Barnes’s fellow New York avant-gardists though, and her pieces explore the economic and political stratifications, as well as the import, of the mass-cultural and technological milieu that constitutes the core of the Coney Island experience. Existing already as a favourite seashore resort, with the estab- lishment of huge amusement parks – Steeplechase Park (opened 1897, destroyed by fire in 1911), Luna Park (opened 1903) and Dreamland (opened 1904) – Coney Island attracted tens of thousands of visitors daily. The resort became the ‘Electric Eden’ where sideshows, beer gardens, cycloramas, dancing pavilions and spectacular rides competed for custom, encapsulating the changing technological episteme of the early twentieth century. Many of Coney Island’s attractions were the direct result of technological innovation, including the ‘Titanic Disaster Show’ in which an electric model of the Titanic sank hourly, the ‘Trip to Mars’, the Ajeeb chess-playing automaton,6 and the Baby Incub- ator exhibit (premature babies on display in an early version of the incubator). This was technology as amusement and diversion, play and pleasure, rather than efficient function and production and, crucially, it was also liberating for a specific class of woman. As Ellen Wiley Todd describes, in distinction from ‘middle-class new women’ who ‘bypassed marriage for careers and women-centered social and political activities’, young immigrant women found in ‘new forms of commercialised leisure’ ways of expanding ‘the traditional boundaries of permissible heterosexual interaction’:

Brightly lit dance halls, amusement parks, nickelodeons and later movie houses opened them up to a stimulating, often erotic, world of pleasure. New dances demanded sensuous bodily movement or physical closeness. Darkened theaters encouraged kissing and petting. Mechanized rides at Coney Island flung couples together or exposed women’s bodies to eager male bystanders. (1993: 3)7

That technological advances did not just function in the clean efficiency promised by Americanism, but were also fully implicated in mass- cultural pleasures is something that Coney Island exemplifies, offering Dada, Cyborgs, New York 89 as it does both a literal other space for New Yorkers and a figurative other New York, which might serve to expose forces that New York ‘proper’ attempts to capture in a narrative of rationality and progress. In ‘The People and the Sea’ (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 1913), ‘The Tingling, Tangling Tango as ’Tis Tripped at Coney Isle’ (Daily Eagle, August 1913), ‘If Noise Were Forbidden at Coney Island a Lot of People Would Lose Their Jobs’ (New York Press, June 1914) and ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl; On the Restless Surf at Coney’ (New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine, July 1917), Barnes explores different aspects of Coney Island. In ‘The People and the Sea’ the Coney Island shore is a place where humanity unburdens itself of its ‘individuality’ along with its ‘clothes’ and where the transcendent power of the patriarch is re-embodied and engaged with his family: ‘a man lies down on his back and feels at last unembarrassed, when, a leg on either side of him, his two hands above his breast, his “kiddie” utilizes his chest for all the springing power that it is worth’ (NY: 34, 35). ‘The Tingling, Tangling Tango’ presents the bourgeoisification of modern dances as the Tango is tamed for a family audience under the ‘glare of the electric lights’ (NY: 43), while ‘If Noise Were Forbidden at Coney Island’ foregrounds the presence of women from the ‘corset-hampered wail of sensation that a women lets loose as the dip of death is taken’ on a ride, to the girls who are ‘usually alone or with another girl’ rather than in a safe heterosexual pair (NY: 144). What ultimately emerges from Barnes’s accounts of Coney Island is the sense of a space apart, it produces ‘a kind, glad feeling which is not a vacation; it is an awakening those few hours that we don’t count’ (NY: 35). Coney Island is both a liminal space, and a space that has a levelling effect on social and cultural hierarchy: ‘[t]here are things here that hide the obvious – the sun that touches cheap linen lightly, the wind that shares its caresses equally, the waters that engulf the awkward tyro’ (NY: 149). But the space/place of Coney Island is not outside capitalist modernity, as Barnes repeatedly emphasises: the labouring classes must join endless queues for the ‘municipal bathhouse’ (‘The People and the Sea’), the professional male dancer must amuse ‘[t]he middle-aged women who have motors and painted cheeks’ (‘The Tingling, Tangling Tango’), and a homeless ‘thin little girl like an old woman’ copies the hawkers cries around her (‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’). The amusements, novelties and spectacles of Coney Island are thus fully implicated in an economy of exploitation and exchange, whatever liberation and disruption they also produce. 90 Modernist Articulations

In ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ Barnes offers the full spectrum of Coney Island amusements, from the sideshow freaks – ‘THE FATTEST FAT LADY, THE OSSIFIED MAN, THE SNAKE CHARMER THE CIGAR- ETTE FIEND’ (NY: 279) – to a ‘less pretentious’, ‘not afraid to be natural’ Irish beer hall (NY: 281), to the Steeplechase ‘Pavilion of Fun’ and a ‘Ferris Wheel’. Barnes’s sketch of Coney Island here emphasises a facet of the resort that is only implicit in her other pieces: the abnormal or animal (the freaks), the ‘natural’ (the beer hall or indeed the beach) and the mechanical (the rides and amusements) coexist in this space, a space where such distinctions (between freak, natural and mechanical) are profoundly unsettled. Indeed, Barnes comments that ‘at Coney one feels that the inanimate objects are the only things that are animate and that people are there merely to exclaim: “At last it is as it should be – characteristic with the rest of America’s hurry and whirl” ’ (NY: 280). Thus, the ‘hurry and whirl’, encapsulated by the technological efficiency and speed of Fordist principles becomes, in the Coney Island space of amusement, an intensive state of blurred boundaries where abnormal, natural and mechanical are transitive and uncertain terms. The ‘incubator babies’ that Barnes passes on her way out of Luna Park in ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ exemplify this well: are they ‘freaks’ to stare at, techno-scientific advances, or babies that could be mothered? ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ was published in 1917 and demonstrates the development of Barnes’s journalistic style. This piece is not ‘yellow’ journalism and has little of the cub-reporter or stunt-girl journ- alist to it, demonstrating a much more arch and self-conscious tone and attitude towards its subject material. Opening in Europe with a vign- ette of a Jewish-Norwegian woman, a failed revolutionary who balances ‘sanity and insanity’ and declares ‘that people were not people, they were “dolls” ’ (NY: 275), ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ both celeb- rates and resists the attractions of Coney Island and implicitly debates the meaning and worth of this alternate space. In it Barnes meets up with ‘Allen Norton, Bob Carlton Brown and Rose Watson’ (NY: 281), key figures and activists in Greenwich Village Bohemia. ‘Bob’ (writer and editor for the Masses) shows a ‘copy of the Coney Island Splash,a little magazine for Coney Islanders and those enjoying a French flavor with their sodas and sandwiches’ (NY: 281–2). Barnes speculates on the contents of this spoof magazine but doesn’t get to read a copy. However, after a ride on a Ferris wheel ‘Bob and Rose have another idea to submit to Allen for the Splash’ (NY: 283), inspired perhaps by the strange perspective the technology of the ride provides (‘how strange the sky is in this wheel that might never come down at all’ NY: 283). The Dada, Cyborgs, New York 91 little magazine, bohemianism and popular culture thus meet in Barnes’s piece. As can be seen in her journalism directly on Greenwich Village, ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ is indicative of Barnes’s double positioning. She is a journalistic commentator on (mass)culture who brings her irony to bear on it, but also a compatriot of bohemian radicals and author of avant-garde stories and plays who, in her ironic textual stance and position as published writer, reveals the extent to which New York Bohemia negotiated itself through and with the mass-market. Her work presents a ‘campy sort of pop decadence’ to use Michael Murphy’s term for Vanity Fair’s style (1996: 64), a ‘cultural savvy’ (ibid.) which is most in evidence when she deals with Greenwich Village Bohemia in some of her 1916 reflections on the New York avant-garde and its radicals (one in Bruno’s Weekly, one in Pearson’s Magazine and two in the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine). Barnes’s tone and attitude varies in these pieces from the arch, mock-portraits of ‘Vermouth, Absinthe and Yvette’ and their decadent affectations in ‘The Last Petit Souper (Greenwich Village in the Air – Ahem!)’,8 to the ironic presentation of Greenwich Village tourists in ‘Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians’.9 In ‘Greenwich Village As It Is’, Barnes writes from a position of identi- fying with the ‘bohemians’, writing a plea that ‘you of the outer world, be not so hard on us, and above all forbear to pity us’ (NY: 232). In an apparent rejection of mainstream, commercial culture, she presents the ‘impossible people living here’ (NY: 227)’, their activities and convic- tions as the necessary ‘contrast’ to the ‘greater part of New York [which] is as soulless as a department store’ (NY: 225). In the light of her other pieces on the Village, though, it is impossible not to read the terms of Barnes’s plea as, in some sense, an excessive parody of the very bohemian stance she is supporting. Barnes is much less idealistic and anti-capitalist in her New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine articles which, in complex manoeuvres of tone and position, publicise the bohemian life while also bemoaning its denigration into a tourist spectacle; ironically, she simultaneously satirises the tourist public (‘Madame Bronx’ and her daughters) that this very publicity would elicit, and wryly trivialises the stance and principles that set bohemians apart from the ‘public’. Barnes was not the first or only mediator between Greenwich Village and mainstream New York culture, but her four articles appear right across the period that saw the emergence and commodification of bohemia: a ‘Who’s Who in New York’s Bohemia’ featured in the New York Tribune on 4 November 1915 and by 1917 a mainstream Guide to Greenwich Village had been published for tourists. Across this period of 92 Modernist Articulations about a year, while the Provincetown Players installed themselves for their first New York season and individuals such as Hart Crane and Edna St Vincent Millay arrived in the Village, ‘rents for studio apartments more than tripled’ and uptown visitors could smoke ‘Greenwich Village Cigarettes’ and sport ‘Fashions to be worn in the Village’ (Watson, 1991: 233, 231).10 Barnes’s articles demonstrate an awareness of the marketing of Bohemian New York that is also a recognition that such marketing, and indeed mass-culture in general, is not alien to that modernism – the cultural savvy that her articles articulate demonstrate the reliance of the avant-garde on a knowingness about mass-cultural forms and trends which, in turn, inform their own positions and activities in a variety of ways. This is not to deny that an ‘anxiety of contamination’ does exist, or to cast modernism as simply a response to mass-culture. What is revealed is that the modernist avant-garde cannot be defined, cannot even exist without mass-culture. This ‘mass’ may ultimately be projected by High Modernism as a (feminised) other, but in its very contemporaneity and negotiation of emergent forms of communica- tion and culture the mass-market is inextricable from the avant-garde. As Barnes writes ‘Real things that are beautifully mixed in dreadfully with that which is sham; a wonderful, terrible hash on the table of life’ (NY: 243). The oxymorons in this statement undermine the ostensible nostalgia and desire for cultural purity and what emerges is a sense of the impossibility of distinguishing the ‘real’ (bohemia, modernism, avant- garde culture) from the ‘sham’ (marketed bohemia and/or modernism, mass-culture). For Barnes this constitutes an optimistic, not a pessimistic, fuzziness. Just as a part of modernism’s knowingness is a consciousness of its own symbiotic relationship with the spectators who mark its novelty, so Barnes’s modern(ist) market savvy is overtly focused on the spectacular aspects of Greenwich Village, that which attracts the sightseer. In so doing her articles often mark the visible presence of avant-garde women. ‘Madame Bronx’ herself, in her pursuit of the real ‘Greenwich Village’, attempts to locate this in different women, one ‘a mere woman in a gingham gown with a portfolio under her arm’ and another, ‘a red- haired woman who had somehow forgotten to cut her hair’ (NY: 238). That the tourist and her sights are both feminine does reflect the fact that Barnes feminises the forces of mass-culture and the spectacle, but this is not an unequivocal articulation. By bringing them together, Barnes questions rather than reinforces the natural visibility of women and presents subjects for scrutiny that confound the easy capture of Woman into a visual economy. Dada, Cyborgs, New York 93

The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was a German-born poet, artist, model and performance artist who played a central role in New York Dada and in disturbing its convenient conclusions. In ‘How the Villagers Amuse Themselves’, Barnes presents this unorthodox woman:

Or one sees the baroness leap lightly from one of those new white taxis with seventy black and purple anklets clanking about her secular feet, a foreign postage stamp – cancelled – perched upon her cheek; a wig of purple and gold caught roguishly up with strands from a cable once used to moor importations from far Cathay; red trousers – and catch the subtle, dusty perfume blown back from her – an ancient human notebook on which has been written all the follies of a past generation. (NY: 249)

The Baroness Elsa, as demonstrated in many other accounts of New York in this period, presents a lived Dada appropriation of mass-produced objects in her visual display and an extreme challenge to gender conven- tions. Louis Bouché described Elsa as ‘the Original Dada’ who wore ‘a black dress with a bustle on which rested an electric battery tail light’.11 George Biddle remembers Elsa standing ‘before me quite naked – or nearly so. Over the nipples of her breast were two tin tomato cans, fastened with green string around 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, pilfered from a furniture display in Wannamaker’s. She removed her hat, trimmed with gilded carrots, beets, and other vegetables. Her hair was close-cropped and dyed vermillion’ (1939: 138). Barnes describes how ‘She made a great plaster cast of a penis once, & showed it to all the “old maids” she came in contact with.’12 In Barnes’s account in ‘How the Villagers Amuse Themselves’, Baroness Elsa marks a merging of ancient female embodiment and cutting-edge technology in her arrested moment of leaping from the recently introduced ‘new white taxis’, presenting an unsettling ‘machinic’ subjectivity that crosses distinctions and binaries. As well as the spectacularity of Greenwich Village Bohemia, Barnes’s journalism also demonstrates a profound interest in the spectacle of other features of New York. Indeed, the visual appeal of yellow journalism and her frequent assignments on ‘entertaining events and sights around New York’ meant that, as Katherine Biers describes, Barnes’s ‘aesthetic signature became irrevocably bound up with the 94 Modernist Articulations paradoxical logic of the spectacle’ (2003: 243).13 Biers suggests that Barnes’s journalism explores the ‘violent exchange of spectatorship’ and ‘violent reduction to the bodily’ that the spectacle produces in the ‘crowd’ as well as the ‘victim’. Barnes interrogates both the arrested object in view and the arrested gaping crowd, even presenting herself as a spectacle in ‘My Adventures Being Rescued’, where she describes how she jumped from a building and ‘swung against the sky some hundred feet or so above the city pavement’, while a butcher ‘with a screaming white apron tied about a conscienceless girth grinned in the glare of light shining and dancing upon his cleaver’ (NY: 186–7). Like ‘How It Feels to Be Forcible Fed’, ‘My Adventures Being Rescued’ is accompanied by photographs of Barnes which emphasise the visual display and indeed objectification of her embodied self. The violence of spectacularity seems paramount, but the unnatural nature of the spectacle is also emphasised (no more so than in the fact of its presentation only through technological mediation). In addition, Barnes’s photographic presentation in these articles can certainly be articulated with her interest in women’s place in culture and society and their representation by (and subjection to) a classifying male gaze. Barnes is not interested in simply reproducing the power relations of women’s objectification, but in exploring the political nuances of women’s visible presence, positioning and construction by and in culture – whether this is ‘The Wild Aguglia and Her Monkeys’, the Sicilian-American Actress famous for her performance in Oscar Wilde’s Salome; ‘Yvette Guilbert’, the comic singer that Toulouse Lautrec often drew; or the girls that Florenz Ziegfeld puts in his chorus.14 But, as with her presentation of Greenwich Village, men do not escape the reduction to the bodily that the spectacle produces, both as audience (in ‘ “Twingeless Twitchell” and His Tantalizing Tweezers’ and ‘My Sisters and I at a New York Prize- fight’) and on display themselves, as in her interviews with Diamond Jim Brady, Billy Sunday and John Bunny. Thus, what Barnes’s writing of the city produces is an articulation of New York, women, popular culture and bohemia in a visual field of spectacular display in which a tension and violence inheres and which, in the arrested moment of the spectacle, foregrounds the constructed, self-conscious and ‘savvy’ nature of the display. Thus, the smooth functioning of the display of femininity is disturbed, the gendering of the spectacular object as female and the gaze as male is disrupted, and, as is the case of figures such as the Baroness Elsa, there is the ever-present danger that the modern(ist) woman on display will not conform to expectations at all. Dada, Cyborgs, New York 95

The modern woman

There are the evenings in the studios, blue and yellow candles pouring their hot wax over things in ivory and things in jade. Incense curling up from a jar; Japanese prints on the wall. A touch of purple here, a gold screen there, a black carpet, a curtain of silver, a tapestry thrown carelessly down, a copy of Rogue on a low table open at Mina Loy’s poem. A flower in a vase, with three paint brushes; an edition of Oscar Wilde, soiled by socialist thumbs. A box of cigarettes, a few painted fans, choice wines (this here the abode of the more prosperous). (NY: 242)

This stylised picture of a bohemian studio appears in the middle of Barnes’s ‘Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians’ and continues her double-edged presentation of Greenwich Village to a popular audience. She draws on the usual decadent stereotypes to evoke an avant-garde aura simultaneously ironising such stereotypes and questioning the politics of the avant-garde – their decadent aloofness and epater les bourgeoise stance is the privilege of the ‘more prosperous’. The para- graph immediately following the studio scene presents a cheaper, poorly furnished attic room upstairs that houses an ‘underfed’ writer respons- ible for copy for a ‘cheap magazine’ and for ‘free verse’. So, how does Mina Loy figure in the scene that Barnes presents? Ostensibly she is a fashionably bohemian ‘name’ in a radical little magazine, but she is also the author of the type of radical ‘free verse’ that could inspire the struggling writer. Loy’s poetry, and her reputation, had arrived in New York long before her actual arrival from Florence in October 1916. Loy had had a range of work published in small American periodicals, submitting (unsuccessfully) some of her early work to Mabel Dodge for publication in The Masses, and through Carl Van Vechten placing pieces in The Trend and Others. Her poem ‘Parturition’ appeared in The Trend (October 1914), her poems, plays and drawings appear in all but two of the issues of Rogue (Allen and Louise Norton’s New York magazine), and the first of her Love Songs appeared in the inaugural issue of Others.15 Loy’s initial American appearance was, however, the publication of her ‘Aphorisms on Futurism’ in Stieglitz’s Camera Work in January 1914, one of the earliest presentations of Italian Futurism to a New York audience. It was this connection to futurism that brought Loy to notice but, as a potentially spectacular woman, she was also almost immediately opened up to the voyeuristic interest of the American public. So George 96 Modernist Articulations

Cram Cook’s New York gossip column in the Chicago Evening Post in September of that year describes the prominent futurist F. T. Marinetti as a ‘manifesto-writing painter’, his one-time colleague Giovanni Papini as a ‘pragmatist philosopher’ and Loy, who had been involved with both men, as ‘the woman who split the futurist movement’ (1914: 7). He also reports that Loy had wanted to bear Marinetti’s child. ‘The woman who loves Marinetti voiced, albeit a little theatrically, the august desire, so marked in ancient Hebrew literature, to “preserve the seed” of valued men’, Cook wrote, going on to speculate that the child of their union might become ‘an intolerant academician which would be discon- certing to the mother who bore him’ (ibid.) In mythologising his anecdotal material (probably passed on by Loy’s friend Neith Boyce), Cook creates a Mina Loy for the consumption of his American audience. Loy’s Jewishness is emphatically invoked, along with her role as reproductive (and disruptive) woman, producing a character who is fashionably exotic and ‘theatrical’, but ultimately knowable. Loy offers a much more complex, self-analytical, even farcical account of these events in her satiric poem ‘Lions’ Jaws’ (first published in The Little Review, September-December 1920):

These amusing men discover in their mail duplicate petitions to be the lurid mother of ‘their’ flabbergast child from Nima Lyo, alias Anim Yol, alias Imna Oly (secret service buffoon to the Woman’s Cause)

(LLB: 49)

The ‘copy of Rogue on a low table open at Mina Loy’s poem’ in Barnes’s essay may well have been revealing Loy’s ‘war poem’, ‘Babies in Hospital’ (published in Rogue 3:2, November 1916) or another of her ‘flabbergast’ satires ‘Giovanni Franchi’ from the previous month. ‘Giovanni Franchi’ and ‘Sketch of a Man on a Platform’ (also published in Rogue, April 1915) parody the masculinist pose of the Italian Futurists, with ‘Sketch of a Man on a Platform’ most pointedly suggesting the phallic certainty, the ‘absolute physical equilibrium’ of Marinetti (LLB: 19). The poem, as it both re- embodies and satirises Marinetti’s ‘genius’, ultimately produces Marinetti as a performing puppet, as Roger Conover describes ‘Marinetti is reduced to an amusing spectacle – Marinetti as marionette’ (LLB: 181, n. 5). Dada, Cyborgs, New York 97

Such pieces, and Loy’s futurist fame, meant that soon after her arrival in New York. a New York Evening Sun reporter, spurred on by a quest for the ‘ “modern woman” that people are always talking about’, decided to ‘Try Mina Loy; you know she writes free verse and things like that ?’(LLB: 10). The article articulates a specific version of Loy: despite its opening emphasis on ‘free verse’, it focuses mainly on the ‘things like that’ describing her design activities, her appearance and her opinions on America and contemporary femininity. In this the article emphasises a generational split between the ‘grandmother’ who thinks, feels and says ‘according to the rules’ and would be ‘puzzled’ by Loy’s poetry, and ‘the modern’ who ‘flings herself at life and lets herself feel what she does feel’. What is presented is a spectacular modern woman always, pictur- esquely, ahead of her own time: ‘this lady is always half way through the door into To-morrow she sat in the middle of a harmonious confusion of half dry colours she had been applying to a work of art and read from a yet unpublished, unacted play’. There is a shared perspective with Barnes’s bohemian article negotiations, but where Barnes carefully articulates Greenwich Village to an economic and sexual politics, complic- ating an easy presentation of avant-garde life, the Evening Sun article attempts to reduce the modern woman and her aesthetic endeavours to a desirable and acceptable form, after all we are told Loy’s ‘Clothes Suggest the Smartest Shops’. Loy’s centrality to a certain conception of trendy, bohemian femininity is reiterated in Clara Tice’s ‘Who’s Who in Manhattan’ drawing in Cartoons (August 1917) which features 13 ‘celebrity’ New York women with Loy, described as ‘Painter-Poet’, amongst Frances Stevens ‘Futurist Painter and Horsewoman’, Beulah Livingston ‘Press Agent’, Betty Turner ‘Actress’ and Lou Arensberg (whose key role is not identified). However, this drawing of Loy can be located in a network of articulations that emphasise the multiple possibilities of the spectacular modern woman, of whom Clara Tice was one. An artist and illustrator, Tice had had work published in Vanity Fair since June 1915, but in March of that year she had been at the centre of a minor sensation when Anthony Comstock (leader of New York Society for the Suppression of Vice) had attempted to seize some of her drawings at a Greenwich Village exhibition. In September 1915 Crowninshield actually published some of the offending nude drawings in Vanity Fair. Tice was both a commercial illustrator and an avant-garde artist, using the same pen and ink, minimal, almost cartoon-like style in each. Her drawings usually featured nude females accompanied by birds, insects and other animals, and her work appeared in most issues of Rogue, while the ‘Who’s Who in Manhattan’ 98 Modernist Articulations drawing was part of a series of seven contributions to Cartoons magazine between April and October 1917 that also included ‘Leaps and Jumps from the Hits of 1917’ depicting famous dancers (including Isadora Duncan, Waslav Nijinsky and ‘Doyle and Dixon’ from the ‘Century Theater’). Tice is neither mainstream apologist for the avant-garde, nor radical interloper into popular culture but, like Barnes, occupies an ambivalent position of cultural knowingness, presenting a modernism characterised by a pop decadence and an awareness of the exchange- value of particular cultural currencies. Tice herself, and the modernism she represented, were fully implicated in the populism and popularity of the avant-garde: she appears in a photograph in Vanity Fair in January 1917 with bare arms and a divided skirt, posed in mid-movement, one knee raised, one arm extended, the other holding a cat on a lead; in December 1918 she was designated by Crowninshield as ‘the uncrowned queen of Greenwich Village’.16 Loy’s reputation in Greenwich Village and beyond was also established through a ‘scandalously frank’ artistic production. The first four of her explicit Love Songs to Joannes were published in the opening number of Others (July 1915), with the extended 34-poem sequence appearing as an entire issue of Others in April 1917 (3: 6). The poems provoked intense reactions in their audience. William Carlos Williams, referring to the (in)famous opening poem, recalls: ‘Never shall I forget our fascin- ation with Mina’s “Pig Cupid”, his rosy snout rooting erotic garbage’ (1951: 147). The mainstream American audience was scandalised by such poetry, what one critic termed ‘hoggerel’,17 while Alfred Kreym- borg claimed that ‘It took a strong digestive apparatus to read Mina Loy’ (1929: 489). As well as the reality of sex, the Love Songs explore the impact of military technology (and the militaristic technologisation of the human) on the individual subject. Thus several poems are populated by auto- mata, ‘machines’ with ‘steel eyes’ (LLB: 63) or puppets of the ‘Wire- Puller’ (LLB: 55). The machinic possibilities expressed in Love Songs are easy to articulate to a futurist-inspired celebration of the machine and the techno-speed of the new century. But the technologisation of life (and death) does not open itself up to a single interpretation; like the other becomings released by war that these poems address, the becoming-machinic of Love Songs is an unsettling loss of certainty (and of certain gender roles). This leads, on one line of effect, to the absence of ‘the other thing’ of normative androcentric sex, fertility or pregnancy, and on another to a liberating process of inorganic metamorphosis which is much more than the mechanisation of sex alone. As ‘Poem II’ Dada, Cyborgs, New York 99 relates, the lover is a dysfunctional sex-machine, ‘a clock-work mech- anism/ running down against time/ To which I am not paced’ (LLB: 54), while the implication of the sequence is that, moving beyond the stratifications of ego and gender as well as the assemblages of Romance and Tradition, the true machinic phylum might enable genuine ‘incognitos/ In seismic orgasm’ (LLB: 66). Another of Loy’s Others poems, ‘Human Cylinders’ (1917), also explores the possibilities of machinic subjectivity. Again, the ‘human cylinders’ of the poem can be articulated with futurist technophilia, and here the poem is more explicit about its limits. The ‘lucid rush- together of automatons’ is countered by the ‘singularity’ and ‘absence of reciprocity’ of these ‘simplifications of men’ (LLB: 40). Instead of the ‘indistinctness’ which might signal an escape from molar subjectivities the potentials of inorganic becomings are undermined by a reliance on ‘the absolute’ (LLB: 41), a desire for a mastery, an ‘impartiality’ and complete understanding which, rather than dwelling in, would ‘Destroy the Universe/ With a solution’ (LLB: 41). It is in her involvement with New York Dada that Loy would find a new alternative to the ‘absolute’.

Loy, blind men and mechanomorphic women

In New York in autumn 1916 a group of artists and writers, including Walter Arensberg (managing director) and Marcel Duchamp (director of installation), formed the Society of Independent Artists and began organising their first annual exhibition for the following year. The Inde- pendents Exhibition would have a ‘no jury – no prizes’ policy, would be open to anyone paying the $6 fee ($1 initiation fee and $5 annual membership) and the exhibits would be arranged, following Duchamp’s suggestion, alphabetically with the first letter picked from a hat (it was ‘R’). The first Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists opened at the Grand Central Palace (on Lexington Avenue) on 10 April 1917 with 2125 exhibits. During its four-week run it received over 20,000 visitors and was extensively covered in New York and other newspapers and magazines. This interest in modern art was not completely novel: the Armory Show of February 1913 had also been extensively covered, with Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase attracting much of the attention.18 Duchamp’s submission to the Independent’s committee in 1917 was to prove as ground-breaking as his (in)famous Nude. As all accounts of New York Dada rehearse, Duchamp anonymously submitted a commonplace urinal, signed by ‘R. Mutt’19 and entitled Fountain (Figure 1) in what is generally seen as an attempt to test the democratic 100 Modernist Articulations

Figure 1 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917; photograph by Alfred Steiglietz. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 2006. Photograph courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale

principles of the Committee. Fountain was refused and so sparked a debate which was prominent in the short-lived little magazine The Blind Man (founded to discuss and support the Independents exhibition), and which resonates through art history. Fountain has become an iconic symbol of Duchamp’s ironic negotiation of the ‘aura’ of the art object, the sanctification of the artist and the forces of mass-production, guar- anteeing his status as the Dada-daddy of postmodern and pop art. Dada, Cyborgs, New York 101

The initial issue of The Blind Man (10 April 1917) presents manifesto statements by Henri Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood and Mina Loy about the role of the Independents in an American artistic revolution (both Wood and Loy had pieces in the exhibition). In general it foregrounds the need to connect the public with contemporary art (the public is represented on the front cover as a blind man being led by a dog past a modern-art nude) and the naïve vision required to understand this art. Wood and Loy are less iconoclastic than Roché in their contributions. Wood offers a ‘Dream of a Picture Hanger’ in which s/he is unable to escape the multiple canvases by artists named Schmidt and is caught up in a flood that ‘swamped all the first floor’ and brings ‘blue arms and green legs’ floating past (1917: 7). Loy’s ‘In Formation’ presents the similarities between ‘The Artist’ and ‘The Public’, a public who ‘knew before the Futurists that Life is a jolly noise and a rush and sequence of ample reactions’, and suggests that the two can meet ‘at every point except that of pure uneducated seeing’ (1917a: 7). The pages of the second (and last) issue of The Blind Man focus on ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, with Alfred Steiglitz’s photograph of Fountain accompanying Louise Norton’s defence of the piece, ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’. Also included in the second issue of The Blind Man are Walter Arensberg, Francis Picabia, Alfred Steiglitz, Mina Loy, Charles Demuth, Robert Carlton Brown, Clara Tice, Joseph Stella and Frank Crownin- shield, and many of their contributions highlight Fountain’s articulation of mass-production, technology and the quotidian or ‘found’. Joseph Stella’s Coney Island (full title Battle of Lights, Coney Island) a colourful futurist oil painting of the movement and noise of Coney Island, is reproduced, while Arensberg’s poems ‘Axiom’ and ‘Theorem’ combine the languages of mathematics and technology with poetry, ‘Theorem’ in particular deploying the language of physics and photography to evoke the materialisation of ‘an emotion’ in the ‘three dimensions’ of human existence (1917: 9). Crowninshield, in a reflection of Vanity Fair’s correlations of popular cultural forms with the modernist endeavour, explicitly applauds: ‘an American art which shall truly represent our age, even if the age is one of telephones, submarines, aeroplanes, cabarets, cocktails, taxicabs, divorce courts, wars, tangos, dollar signs’ (1917: 10), while Demuth’s short poem, ‘For Richard Mutt’, emphasises the processual over the terminal in art: ‘For the going every thing has an idea./ The going run right along./ The going just keep going’ (1917: 6). Loy’s contributions are an ‘interview’ with Louis Eilshemius, the ‘eccentric Amer- ican visionary painter’ (Naumann and Venn, 1996: 11) discovered by Duchamp at the Independents Exhibition, and ‘O Marcel---otherwise 102 Modernist Articulations

I Also Have Been to Louise’s’ (1917b: 14–15), a word collage of bohemian New York chatter. As the attribution indicates, ‘O Marcel’ is ‘Compiled by Mina Loy’, pointing to the ‘found’ aspect of this piece which, in its repetitions and variations shares formal grounds with Stein’s verbal portraits (and in doing so highlights the importance of Stein for the linguistic explorations of New York Dada). ‘O Marcel’ presents overlapping and inter- weaving conversations as the speakers enjoy an evening in a Bohemian haunt. The piece, self-conscious in its action of recording – ‘She can’t write it down anyway’ (1917b: 15) – details drinking and eating, snippets of anecdotes, and casual interactions, and mentions avant-garde char- acters – Marcel (Duchamp), Louise (Norton), (Charles) Demuth, Carol (Van Vechten) and Clara (Tice) – but also Billy Sunday (the charismatic baseball player turned evangelist): ‘is that Billy Sunday. One should have an additional star Billy Sunday’ (15). Thus, the avant-garde are not an elite group of ‘stars’, perhaps they are even popularisers of the ineffable (like Sunday), and are shown to engage in gossip, rather than high- flown aesthetic or political discussion: indeed a potential epiphany, ‘Ah this is, this is, this is, is IT’(ibid.: 14) could also be the enjoyment of a much-needed drink. The conversations are also interlaced with repeated ambiguous sexual references, such as to ‘tongue sandwiches’ (‘I want some tongue I will give you some – but don’t do too much what? Suck it’ (14)), and to dubious desires or sexual escapades: ‘you have to squeeze it, maid of the---’,‘Igive you my key Clara’ (14), ‘You know those two girls are crazy about that man, they mustn’t’ (15). The presence of Demuth, who went on to produce overtly homosexual art, in the conversation demonstrates that such desires are not just promiscuous heterosexuality, and there is even the strong possibility of financial aspects to the sex: ‘Well don’t do that because I am perfectly sober now - - - - that’s the kid he looks like-.Itwill probably cost me very much’ (14). ‘O Marcel’ offers disruptions to the American status quo not through an explicit epater les bourgeois stance, or a rigid demarcation between high and popular culture, but through a destruction of boundaries, order and division, a disturbance of the stratification of culture and the decoding of desire within an androcentric framework. Thus America as ideal of democratic order and progress, figuring in the piece as the American stars and stripes, is exposed to the irrational: ‘Don’t let your flag get wet’ (15). ‘O Marcel’ can also be taken as an accurate transcription of the type of events that surrounded the Independents exhibition and New York Dada in general. Many critics have acknowledged the extent to Dada, Cyborgs, New York 103 which bohemia in New York in the nineteenth-century teens revolved around the excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs (cocaine and cannabis), partying at Greenwich Village venues and fancy-dress balls, and intense sexual activities and liaisons. The ‘Ultra Bohemian, Pre- Historic, Post Alcoholic’ ‘Blind Man’s Ball’ (advertised in the second issue of The Blind Man) was held in Webster Hall on Friday 25 May 1917, at which Duchamp got drunk and climbed a flag-pole, ending the evening in his studio bed sleeping with Mina Loy, Charles Demuth and Beatrice Wood. The Independents Exhibition also hosted events such as the poetry reading by Maxwell Bodenheim, Harry Kemp, Mina Loy, Allen Norton, Pitts Sanborn and William Carlos Williams, Robert Coady’s talk on recent American Film, a lecture on psychiatry entitled ‘Are Cubists Insane?’, and Arthur Cravan’s (soon to become Mina Loy’s second husband) infamous ‘lecture’ on 19 April when he started to undress before his audience and was escorted from the Grand Central Palace.20 But ‘O Marcel’ is not actually a piece of journalism, it plays with the status of the report, particularly in a reference to ‘yellow paper’ (1917b: 14) (recalling sensational yellow journalism) and the concern ‘Did you put the pronunciation down’ (15), in order to confuse rather than claim the authority of journalistic reportage. This is again bringing avant- garde modernism into propinquity with mass-culture, demonstrating the fluency of their dialogue with each other, but it is also foregrounding the ‘found’ nature of the material – the quotidian, unaestheticised stuff of which it is composed. In this ‘O Marcel’ shares with Fountain an interest in the ‘ready-made’ as art form: Duchamp’s Fountain can be classed with his other ready-mades and ‘rectified ready-mades’ of the nineteenth-century teens, the first of which was Bicycle Wheel (assembled 1913, termed a ready-made by Duchamp in 1915), a wheel and forks inverted and mounted on a stool and the In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), described in The Evening World (4 April 1916) as ‘Big Shiny Shovel Is the Most Beautiful Thing’.21 These objects are usually read as radical critiques of bourgeois values in their confusion of the distinction of industrial (mass-produced) and aesthetic (the work of an individual creator), of the institutions of art (in a proto-postmodern vein), or of capitalism and consumption (in a Marxian mode). However, I would want to concur with Amelia Jones who argues that in the ready-mades: ‘Duchamp negotiates the treacherous contradictions laid out by the very notion of avant-garde practice and points to the fact that any artistic practice is necessarily embedded in the same value systems (economic and otherwise) that structure bourgeois capitalism the ambivalence of 104 Modernist Articulations the ready-mades vis-á-vis industrialism and capitalism makes them important’ (2004: 141). The ready-mades can be seen as ambivalent interpretations and negotiations of the impact of mass-production on the material and aesthetic culture of America. In this they are machinic art, both literally (as tech- nologically produced objects) and in their exploration of the territori- ality and interdependence of ‘human’ existence, exploring a subjectivity beyond the frame of the anthropocentric humanistic subject. The machine as a governing paradigm for modern culture is one of the stratifications that concerns New York Dada, indeed as Barbara Zabel describes ‘the displacement of God by the machine became a defining attribute of New York Dada (1996: 281). Duchamp’s own explorations of the machinic are explicitly gendered and can be seen from Nude Descending a Staircase onwards. In this picture the cubistic form of the nude super- imposed in a sequence of ‘descents’ recalls the photographic studies in Muybridge’s 1884–85 Animal Locomotion and Barbara Zabel sees it as ‘a kind of Dada automaton – both a humanized machine and a mechanized human – thereby acknowledging how profoundly human beings have been affected by the omnipresence of the machine’ (ibid.: 281). Duchamp also created his own techno-identities through photographic (technological) representations and performances. The most well know of these is ‘Rrose Sélavy’, Duchamp cross-dressed and photographed by Man Ray (Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, 1920–21). The relationship between these stills and Charlie Chaplin’s cross-dressing performance in A Woman (1915) have been noted (Naumann, and Venn, 1996: 25), but what I wish to emphasise is the technological nature of the gender confusion that Duchamp enacts, one impossible to realise, as with Muybridge’s photographs of human and animal movement or indeed Chaplin’s persona, without the advanced visual technologies of the early twentieth century. Rrose, an example of Duchamp’s ‘aggressive dislocations of traditional categories of masculinity and femininity’ (Jones, 1994: 204), is also a negotiation of the association of women with commodities, a self-conscious attempt to challenge the construction of women as both the irrational consumers of modernity and the sex-objects of modern masculine desires. Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass) (1915–23) also negotiates gender and sexuality in the machine-age, offering a bride-motor separated from the bachelor-machines below her. As Amelia Jones discusses, Large Glass is a ‘huge mechanized “portrait” of the impossibility of consummation, the breakdown of gender relations, and heterosexual erotic exchange, but it explores rather than represses Dada, Cyborgs, New York 105 the ambivalence that structures the engagements and clanking “flows” of industrial-erotic energies, an ambivalence that threatens always to rupture their clear path to “production” (which utopically seeks to replace the mess of procreation)’ (ibid.: 241). The non-productive, onan- istic facet of the Large Glass is crucial to the machinic becomings that it poses. In the presentation of the ‘celibate machine’ in the Large Glass, Duchamp produces what Deleuze and Guattari directly describes as a ‘new machine’ which achieves ‘autoerotic’ or ‘automatic’ pleasure, producing a ‘new alliance’ in which the ‘eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces’ (1984: 19). Duchamp’s explorations of gender, technology and machine-age portraiture are far from solitary in New York Dada; they are produced alongside an abundance of mecanomorphic portraits which seek to represent the American new woman. A particular figure, the jeune fille américaine – active, agile, athletic young women such as Anne Oakley and Mary Pickford – was important to the Dadaist impulse long before Duchamp and Picabia actually came to America. She was ‘the personi- fication of the new century many artists and writers linked their own sense of radical liberation from tradition with that of the young Amer- ican girl’ (Zabel, 1996: 282) and she ‘had a particular presence among the Parisian avant-garde’s earliest speculations about an alluring, exotic New York’ (Turner, 1998: 5). That the American woman was not just an image or archetype, that real radical and liberated women frequented the places of avant-garde New York such as Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery or the Arensberg’s apartment should be acknowledged and the machine- women that New York Dada produced can be articulated with these real women and their real affects. The artist Man Ray, in his 1918 photographs Homme (Man) and Femme (Woman) presents a confusion of genders. Homme (entitled Femme in one print) is an egg-beater and Femme two photographer’s light reflectors attached to a glass plate that has six clothes pegs fastened to it; both pieces emerge in a milieu in which the association of women with domestic and reproductive functions had visibly been broken by the women who frequented the varied spaces of New York. It is the French artist, Francis Picabia, in New York in 1913, 1915 and 1917, who most obsessively negotiates the unnatural new women of New York. Picabia’s 1915 drawing Fille née sans mère (Girl born without a mother; see Figure 2) presents a peculiar blend of machinery and the organic with the rounded shapes (buttocks, breasts, eyes?) hardly attached to a set of sketchy springs and gears; ‘she’ actually seems to be a non-functioning organic-techno fusion. Picabia’s mechanistic 106 Modernist Articulations drawing removes the ‘girl-machine’ from the realm of normal procre- ative processes reproducing her through the frameworks of American industrialism, ‘she’ is produced free from her/the mother and is made instantly available for the production of erotic pleasure. The decoding and capture of the feminine-as-machine that is attempted in Fille née sans mère is more fully achieved in Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a young American

Figure 2 Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mère (Girl Born Without a Mother) (pen and ink on paper) 1915. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art; © ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 2006 Dada, Cyborgs, New York 107 girl in the state of nudity) from the same period (July – August, 1915, 291 Gallery, see Figure 3). Here Picabia has taken the functional representation of a spark-plug (repeating contemporary advertising for the Red Head Priming Plug) and offered it as a mecanomorphic young American

Figure 3 Francis Picabia, Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity), from July–August 1915 issue of 291; © ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 2006 108 Modernist Articulations girl with the straight lines reflecting the dress fashions of the time. It clearly suggests the jeune fille américaine as the catalyst or spark for modernisation: she is a mass-produced part, the heart of the Ford revolution, with the insignia ‘FOR-EVER’ promising perpetual activity and satisfaction. But rather than ‘liberating’ woman from reductive representations Picabia’s ‘young American girl’ is fixed as an image and object of and for mass-consumption. A later piece by Picabia, Americaine (1917; a drawing of a light bulb with the words ‘Flirt’ and ‘Divorce’ on the glass bulb) makes the ambivalence about the modern American woman even clearer: the inspiration or enlightenment she may offer is tempered by her threats to the androcentric sexual status quo. The link to mass- production and consumption is unavoidable – like the spark-plug, the light bulb is a cheap, modern technological object.22 That liberated women, the flows of mass-culture and the forces of consumerism are articulated in regressive and consolidatory ways by Picabia and others does not mean that they cannot be reconfigured in alternative ways, ones which highlight the limits and potentials of the mecanomorphic speculations of New York Dada. Loy’s poem ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’ clearly deals with the economic objectification and repression of women through a supposedly natural state (virginity), and its appearance in Rogue (2:1, 15 August 1915) faces Clara Tice’s seemingly incidental Virgin Minus Verse: the result is a double- page spread (Figure 4) which deliberately articulates with other ways of understanding the natural–unnatural dichotomy as it relates to, and is undermined by, liberated women. ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’ offers many possible points of articulation: to Marinetti’s call to ‘Abolish all punctuation’ and use ‘mathematical signs’ in the ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ (the mathematical symbols invoked in the title, +−, are an implicit part of the text of the poem); to a multilingual pun of ‘dots’, the French term for dowries with ‘dough’, the American slang for money; to actual dots (full-stops, ellipsis) which figure in the poem as the censored reality of sex. The Virgins are indoctrinated with a myth of Romance which they can never achieve, but which must suffice the physical urges of their bodies. The myth of Love, the lacy lingerie that disguises the fact of sex, is all these Virgins can hope for but can never achieve – they have no ‘dough’ and so will never have that which the ‘dots’ buys, signifies, and completes. Caught by the double bind of dominant ideology and economic hegemony, the Virgins are condemned to a cloistered, repressed existence. They are the victims of the fictitious value of Virginity, where virginity is revealed as the ultimate commodity fetish; 109 Virgin Minus Verse . Photograph courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and (2:1) pages 10 and 11, showing Mina Loy’s ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Rogue August 15 1915 issue of Figure 4 Dots’, © Mina Loy Estate, and Clara Tice’s Manuscript Library, Yale 110 Modernist Articulations though endowed with supposed essential value (as intact, untouched and pure), its actual value is purely monetary and its meaning artificial. Loy’s poem, in its double-page format, is also articulated with Clara Tice’s drawing Virgin Minus Verse, and the juxtaposition between the poem and the drawing produces a multiple representation of unnatural womanhood. Tice’s drawing offers a corsetless young girl, enjoying her freedom from constraining underwear.23 Tice’s Virgin disturbs binaries, a liberated (and so ‘unnatural’) virgin (the epitome of traditional, natural feminine restraint), in contrast to Picabia who presents instead the traditionally artificial woman enshrined at the heart of the machine of the modern artist. Moreover, the title of Tice’s drawing – Virgin Minus Verse – reworks an interesting cultural trend of the time that is highlighted by Francis Naumann in the Introduction to his New York Dada (1994). An articulation was made between the invention of the bra (supposedly by Mary Phelps Jacob in New York in 1913) and the release of women’s bodies that it allowed, and the ongoing experiments in free-verse forms that dominated the small avant-garde magazines of New York. So for example, Emanuel Julius’s New York Call article on Robert Carlton Brown’s poetry (20 June 1915) was entitled ‘This Summer’s Style in Poetry, or the Elimination of Corsets in Versifying’. Avant-garde poetry without restraints and the cultural resonances of a fashion for corsetlessness are an interesting articulation to follow from the Loy/Tice double-page. If a change in fashion can redefine women’s bodies, undermining the ideal hourglass shape that embodied femininity in the nineteenth century, and a change in poetic form can expose the arbitrariness of traditional forms of literature, perhaps the artificiality of the virgin body can also be revealed, thereby making visible the inorganic, technological woman.

Cyborg-women making Dada

The links between women and technology predate the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ at the end of the nineteenth century, but in the projection and representation of the New Woman in the Anglo-American world her specific association with new technology such as the bicycle is prominent.24 The visibility of the New Woman cyclist, in her divided skirt, can be connected to another increasingly visible fin-de-siècle technological woman, the Typist, who was imagined and represented within ongoing discourses about women’s independence, their sexuality and their relationship to technology, often with an attendant ‘uncertainty about the typewriterasatechnologyofemancipation’(Shiach,2000:122).25 Typing, Dada, Cyborgs, New York 111 like cycling, seems to offer liberation and independence, but it simultaneously challenges the traditional role of women in an androcentric (heterosexual, reproductive) sexual economy. Marcel Duchamp’s own acknowledgement of the changed position of the New Woman and her affinity with technology is demonstrated in two of his ready-mades which deploy the technology associated with her: Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Trav- eller’s Folding Item (1916), an Underwood typewriter cover held up by a stand that gestures, by the very hole under its ‘skirt’, to the presence of the female typist. The New Woman and her technological affinities exemplify themachinicinterruptionsofdesire,interruptionsandproductionswhich fundamentally exceed the molar organisations of the bourgeois family and the normative functions of androcentric sex. She/it is a cyborg figure, what Felski typifies as an ‘uncanny blurring of conventional systems of binary classification; both organism and machine, animate yet inanimate’ (Felski, 1995: 198); she/it is undergoing a meta(l)morphosis which positions the human body ‘in the space between the traditional dichotomies, including the body-machine binary opposition’ (Braidotti, 2002: 228). The cyborg is a contradictory creature that undoes the ideals of organic wholeness and technological perfection. Across the cyborg, self and other, human and animal, natural and artificial are blurred, pointing towards an anti-essentialist paradigm for the specificity of women. Donna Haraway’s late twentieth-century ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ describes the cyborg as ‘resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity’ that ‘has no origin story’ (1991: 151), a ‘creature of social reality as well as a creature of science fiction’ (149) who concerns ‘lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints’ (154). That cyborg women disrupt the majoritarian structures and modes of the Western, masculine subject can be seen in the very fact that theory (psychoanalysis) and literature alike attempt to control her as a libidinal object or draw her back into an oedipalised story of castration. So, just as psychoanalysis emerges in an attempt to hysterisise the becoming- woman and the diagnosis of hysteria spreads across the variety of becomings and deterritorialisations that the Great War triggers, so does literature and art produce controllable women-machines. In Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886), a fictionalised inventor ‘Edison’ creates the android ‘Hadalay’, a simulacrum with a finite number of movements, gestures and conversations (recorded on phonograph) to replace the all-too-human ‘Alicia Clary’. As the essence of the fundamental artificiality and limitedness of femininity 112 Modernist Articulations she improves on the ‘real’ thing and is also a technology that releases men from their enslavement to ‘real’ femininity: Hadalay is the incarn- ation of the fetishised, commodified female sex. However, ever present within this text is the fear of Hadalay’s potentially emasculating and disruptive power – she is an artefact, but in replacing Alicia Clary she becomes a subject – and so the text obsessively dissects, controls and ultimately destroys this ‘Future Eve’. Villiers’s Edison is an imagined one, rather than an accurate biograph- ical sketch but as Gaby Wood points out ‘Villiers’s story had a factual counterpart’ (2002: 144) in Thomas Edison’s patent and production of a talking doll. Early designs for the doll were exhibited at the 1878 Paris Exposition along with his Grand Prize-winning phonograph, and ‘Edison’s Talking Doll’ went into production in 1889 in the huge machine shop at West Orange, New Jersey. Its body, which housed the miniature phonograph that ‘spoke’ one of a selection of nursery rhymes, was produced out of six different metal pieces attached to a German- made head, and wooden limbs and appendages from other parts of America. Wood describes a scene in which ‘eighteen young girls, each with her own cubicle, sat speaking into the machines, recording the words the dolls were to say’ (ibid.: 121). On such a Fordist production line the distinctions, not only between worker and machine, but between woman, machine, producer, product and machine-woman are fundamentally elided in a confusion of boundaries and identities: as a contemporary observer wrote ‘these sounds [of the girls speaking] united with the sounds of the phonographs themselves when reproducing the stories make a veritable pandemonium’ (ibid.: 121). The talking dolls were not a financial success, but nevertheless present a very voluble set of connections between femininity, technology and mass-culture. Edison, the pioneer of the American technological sublime, the exemplary engineer-inventor-hero, devoted an enormous amount of time, energy and resources to creating and marketing this mass-produced mechanised woman. Perhaps, as Wood suggests, he ‘privately thought of women as perfectible creatures, machines or products’ (2002: 145), and was realising Villiers’s fictional enterprise. In an article for Good Housekeeping in October 1913, ‘The Woman of the Future’, Edison does argue that electricity ‘will develop woman to that point where she can think straight’,26 but he is not simply echoing a desire to improve on the real thing. As Good Housekeeping, the Ladies Home Journal and other magazines of the early twentieth century reveal in their features and advertisements, the prosthetic, technological Dada, Cyborgs, New York 113 enhancements of the machine-age were a visible and affective factor in the traditionally feminine (nurturing, natural) space of the domestic. Both texts and real manifestations of the New Woman’s affinity with technology express the ambiguities of the real/artificial, natural/technological divide: what the linking of woman–machine suggests is that there is no ‘real’ thing to improve on, only a process, a becoming-woman/becoming-machine which produces radically new subjectivities beyond the humanist models of self and the anthropo- morphic figure of the productive machine. In the Deleuzian sense the ‘machinic’ is not a unitary figure to defuse the threat of the machine by establishing its metaphorical correspondence to organic systems and bodies (the ‘naturalistic’ approach to the machine), nor is it a teleology of transcendence; the ‘machinic’ expresses ‘the co-extensivity of the body with its environment or territory’ the ‘collective and interde- pendent’ status of the organism (Braidotti, 2002: 227). As a subject to challenge the majoritarian models of identity and the body, the Deleuzian cyborg presents a radical escape from the rigid models of phallogocentrism. However, the articulations of women and machine are, necessarily, contingent and inessential – conjunctions that have to be made meaningful, do not pre-exist the action of articulation and can provoke a gendered anxiety. For many artists of New York Dada, the New Woman’s disruption of boundaries produced apprehensions about the uncontrollable flows of commodity culture projected onto the female body-machine. Their cyborg-femininities function to reter- ritorialise the multiplicity of woman and of desire, to refuse to embrace the multiple possibilities of unnatural identity. Duchamp may offer a less fearful response to the circuits of desire that modernity puts into play, but it is by turning to some of the actual, unnatural women of New York Dada, like Loy and Tice, that the full possibilities of machinic femininity can be activated. With studies such as Naomi Sawelson-Gorse’s Women in Dada (1998), New York Dada has been reconfigured: the key role of women in this modernist moment is now recognised. Pre-existing accounts emphasised the articulations between key male figures – Man Ray and Duchamp, Picabia and Steiglitz – or demonstrated a male tradition emerging from the ‘Skyscraper Primitives’ of New York Dada – W. C. Williams, e e cummings, Charles Scheeler.27 Now it is possible to make a different set of connections, between Beatrice Wood, Katherine Nash Rhoades, Juliette Roche, Katherine Dreier, Clara Tice, Mina Loy, Baroness Elsa and Djuna Barnes, which enable a different reading of the mechanics and productions of New York Dada. 114 Modernist Articulations

Beatrice Wood, Mina Loy and Clara Tice all exhibited work at the 1917 Independents Exhibition, all contributed to The Blind Man and all produced work that commented in particular ways on the construction of female identity, her relationship to mass-culture and the avant-garde, and the liberation of the unnatural New Woman. Wood’s art denaturalises iconic femininity; her Un peut d’eau dans du savon (A Little Water in Some Soap) – a painting of a voluptuous nude torso with a real piece of scalloped-shaped soap nailed over the pubic area28 – was the succès de scandale of the Independents Exhibition. The painting articulates with, and comments on, the whole Western Art tradition of the idealised nude, in particular, as Paul B. Franklin points out, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485), and puts this in proximity to the female consumer of mass-market beauty products (the soap bar). Venus, the iconic ‘girl born without a mother’, is revealed as a sexual commodity (‘I am worth $800 dollars’ muses Wood as she becomes her canvas in her The Blind Man essay ‘Dream of a Picture Hanger’) produced within and for a masculinist Imaginary. But in revealing this icon as an assemblage, Wood also reveals how the forces and flows that are captured in the ‘nude’ can be reconfigured or released, instigated by the tide of technological production and consumerism that sweeps away the supposed ‘nature’ of woman : ‘I was a piece of soap with nails in my back stuck on a canvas. A big flood came I too, must melt’ (1917: 7). Other Dada women are explicit about the role of the technological in modern identity and the possible liberations of the machinic. The artist Katherine N. Rhoades, nominated in the ‘List of Presidents of the Dada Movement’ in the Berlin Dada Almanack (1921) (along with Mina Lloyd [sic]), had work published in Steiglitz’s Camera Work and collaborated with Marius de Zayas and Agnes Ernst Meyer on a visual poem, Woman in the May 1915 issue of 291. In the next issue of 291, which had a John Marin Skyscraper on the front cover with Picabia’s Fille née sans mere on the inside, Rhoades published the poem ‘Flip-Flap’. This piece implicitly compares the audience listening to a piano solo to riders on a rollercoaster: the ‘Flip-Flap’ was the first loop-the-loop roller-coaster in America, opened at Sea Lion Park (bought and amalgamated into Luna Park) in 1895. The audience in Rhoades’s ‘Flip-Flap’ are ‘cringing, count- less,/ round heads, and shapeless – and hair upon hair – and hats – and heads again’ immersed in the ‘whirl and swirl’ of the music.29 All the speaker can posit is ‘A Laugh!’, ‘an inversion – a revision’ which turns the situation on its head. The ‘Laugh’ could function as ‘anti-art’ Dada rhetoric, as Tashjian suggests (1965: 36). But if this laugh is articulated to the roller-coaster Flip-Flap ride, it brings popular culture (the Coney Dada, Cyborgs, New York 115

Island Ride) in conjunction with High Art (the piano recital): the seri- ousness of the audience’s response is undermined; they might as well be enjoying a fair-ground ride. In ‘Flip-Flap’ the ludic potentials of technology, the gratuitous flows of pleasure and play, counter an elitism of art. That this alternative might have its own dangers in terms of an absence of a closure and a complete loss of self is expressed in the final lines: ‘Could I ever stop?/ Who’s laughing?’ In her work Juliette Roche poses herself as an observer of, as well as participant in, New York Dada, challenging traditional gender roles and manufacturing a cyborg identity. Her visual poems from 1917– 19, published together in Demi Circle (1920), draw their material from the avant-garde circles of New York. In ‘N’Existe Pas Pôle Tempéré’ an evening at the Arensbergs’s salon is recorded with ‘H.P.R’ (Henri Pierre Roche) and ‘M.D.’ (Duchamp) placed either side of a pictorial rendi- tion of a chess board. Vertically down the right-hand side of the page is the word ‘Kodak’, in which the eye of the observer and the technology of observation are conflated. As Burke notes, ‘the theme of the observer as recording device [is] enhanced by the typeface and positioning of “KODAK” – the camera eye’ (1998: 564). In Roche’s ‘Brevoort’ (1917) snatches of conversation in French and English are dynamic- ally arranged on a page which has a central black triangle. The poem offers an evening in this Greenwich Village haunt where art, war and sex are discussed and, in one section, a ‘pientre’ says, ‘Je vois, elle est un manometer!’ This phrase seemingly identifies the observer/author of the poem with a device for recording pressure, again offering a mechanised observer/recorder as the poet.30 What Roche’s poems present is a mechanical woman who can register the masculinist and majoritarian contradictions of the New York avant-garde. It is the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, however, who extends the cyborg potentials of New York Dada into a lived transgres- sion of the boundaries of human–animal–machine, walking the streets of New York with shaved and painted scalp, headdresses made of bird- cages or a coal-scuttle, celluloid curtain rings as bracelets, assorted tea- balls attached to her bust, spoons to her hat, an electric tail-light to her bustle. Her appropriation of the objects of consumer culture and mass- production, her prosthetic enhancement of her form through such artefacts, the supplementing and transformation of her body through the technological detritus of the New York streets, mark out her distinctive response to her contemporary context as a ludic embodiment of the mechanomorphic acts of New York Dada. Her ‘lived body satirically engaged the male-centered machine fantasies by planting the technolo- 116 Modernist Articulations gical and consumer items on her performing body, grafting them alongside organic matter, including gilded vegetables’ (Gammel, 2003: 196). Baroness Elsa’s poetry parodies the omnipotence of an American technological teleology, considers how the consumer products of a modern America confuse and blur the integrity of the human form and mocks the American fixation on feminine purity and virginity, a fixation that extends to the work of New York avant-gardists such a Picabia and Duchamp. In this, as Amelia Jones points out, the Baroness ‘exposes the “flagrant illogic” of such attempts (through “freak” notions such as virginity) to control and channel the flux of human (and perhaps particularly female) desire’ (Jones, 2004: 155).31 As well as her performative inscriptions and writing of poetry the Baroness constructed artefacts, such as God (1917), a twisted piece of iron plumbing set on a carpenter’s mitre box, and Limbswish (c.1920), a metal spring encircling a curtain tassel suspended on a wire that she wore from her belt. Baroness Elsa was lauded, however briefly, in The Little Review (where her work was published from 1918–22): in the pages of this magazine in 1922 its editor Jane Heap claimed ‘the Baroness is the first American Dada’.32 Djuna Barnes was to form a close relationship with the Baroness in the 1920s, trying vainly to find her the financial support she needed and collecting her papers and reminiscences for publication. But already in 1922, as Dada became more recognised by the international avant-garde and The Little Review presented a Picabia number and one on Joseph Stella, Baroness Elsa was being marginalised in the pages of this magazine and in the avant-garde circles of New York, Berlin and Paris. She died penniless and despite Barnes’s work on a ‘Baroness Elsa’ biography through the 1930s and attempts to get her poetry published, the Baroness was to slip into footnoted obscurity for many years.33 In her use of commodity objects and the detritus of techno-modernity, in both poetry and visual art, Baroness Elsa produces the body as an assemblage of prosthetic components and denaturalises identity into a processual interplay between artificially enhanced bodies and tools made organic. Amelia Jones associates the Baroness with other transgressive figures in New York Dada – Charles Demuth and Arthur Cravan – but rather than articulating the Baroness to an essentially ‘queer’ aesthetic’ here, it is the machinic, cyborg facets of the Baroness and her work that are important for this reading of New York Dada. By engaging with, reusing, rearticulating the mass-commodities, and commodity detritus of machine-age America, Baroness Elsa offers a radically new way of imagining the ‘fashionable’ woman, a woman Dada, Cyborgs, New York 117 re-fashioned, not formed in the image of a teleology of modernity and progress: like other women in New York in the 1910s, she disarticulated the New Woman and rearticulated her and the transformations and manufacture of femininity to the radically denaturalised flows of the modern. In Barnes’s work on the New York avant-garde these denaturalised flows are of importance, particularly in unsettling the divisions of high and low, and between the feminine spectacle and her audience. Loy also seeks to disarticulate Woman from a supposedly natural role or form and, like Barnes, investigates the fuzzy boundaries between mass- and avant-garde culture as both are caught up in and produced by the machinic assemblages of ‘New York’. As women in this modern city, Loy, Barnes and their female peers confronted the possibility of fash- ioning a Modern Woman liberated by the technological forces of the twentieth century.