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Dada, Cyborgs and the New Woman in New York

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Dada, Cyborgs and the New Woman in New York 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 tradi- tional gender identities. The modern world that New York Dada confronted was one which inherited a specific articulation of gender and the masses, an articula- tion 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 emer- ging 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 tele- ology. As Rosi Braidotti writes, ‘Machines fulfil a fundamental libid- inal structure, which mimes the workings of sexual energy’, crucially ‘they question the boundary between the functional and the gratu- itous, 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 high- lights, ‘women’ and ‘modernism’ were brought together at the time: the following discussion (as does this study as a whole) seeks to actu- ally 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 activ- ities’, 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 effi- ciency 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.
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