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Dandies, Marginality and Modernism: Georgia O'keeffe, Marcel Duchamp and Other Cross- Dressers Author(S): Susan Fillin-Yeh Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol

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Dandies, Marginality and Modernism: Georgia O'keeffe, Marcel Duchamp and Other Cross- Dressers Author(S): Susan Fillin-Yeh Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol Dandies, Marginality and Modernism: Georgia O'Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp and Other Cross- Dressers Author(s): Susan Fillin-Yeh Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1995), pp. 33-44 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360551 . Accessed: 18/11/2014 15:10 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Oxford Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 209.129.16.124 on Tue, 18 Nov 2014 15:10:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Dandies, Marginality and Modernism: Georgia O'Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp and other Cross-dressers SUSAN FILLIN-YEH Two photographs made at nearly the same time in borrowed his fashionable hat with its wonderful the 1920s, and in the same city, New York, offer the patterned headband from a friend, Grace Ewing, dandy's image to twentieth-century viewers. For, and it was Ewing who posed for the hands. studied singly and in their interrelationships, both Duchamp finished his creation by retouching Ray's Alfred Stieglitz's photograph of painter Georgia photograph, softening the lens' focus to exaggerate O'Keeffe dressed with uncompromising and elegant the shadowy, sultry image of a femmefatale'smyster- simplicity in an oversized man's hat, dark suit jacket ious and elusive mobility. and white shirt open at the neck (Fig. 1), and Man But downtown Greenwich Village Bohemia 'in Ray's photograph of Dadaist Marcel Duchamp in the know' recognised another kind of mobility: drag (Fig. 2) are alluring. As happens generally with androgyny. They recognized Marcel Duchamp cut portrait photographs, each photograph is a collab- loose from conventional notions of gendered indi- oration. In even the most ordinary of such photo- viduation to present himself as the woman he named graphs, the sitter poses her-/himself for a Rrose Selavy - a woman with veiled and shadowed photographer who in turn also has a visual agenda. eyes who has posed as if resting her elbows on a cafe But with these photographs, the situation was in- table. Duchamp, so the image read to his audience, tensified, for photographer and sitter were partners was double gendered, and - seemingly - changed in invention. These photographs were more than his sexual aspect as easily as he changed clothing. simply portraits; they are agents in the construction And what of O'Keeffe? If the politics and mores of of new artistic, cultural and sexual meanings, even of life in avant-garde circles influenced her dandyism, personal narrative. O'Keeffe once alluded to their she also brought with her to New York by 1907 the passionate love affair when speaking of Stieglitz's disposition for cross-dressingnot uncommon among photographs of her.1Her comment, one made in the middle-class young women born in the last decades 1970s, was an unprecedented one, a rare admission of the nineteenth century (Fig. 3).5 that her sexual life had a life in her art. As for the These images of gender doubling and role Duchamp/Ray collaboration, it insinuated the reversal, the one of a man in the guise of a woman, image of Parisianfemmefatale into the New York art the other one of a woman in Baudelaire's moder world of the early twentieth century. That person- man's immaculate linen and starkblack suiting (that age, an elegant, alluring and mysterious woman, at 'moder hero's' garb, Baudelaire wrote, which has ease in a public space, had earlier been a central 'its own beauty'),6 once shaped an ambiance, while figure in nineteenth-century European literature evoking it for us now: Greenwich Village in the and art (in the writing of Charles Baudelaire, and 1910s, where aesthetic experimentation, feminism paintings by Gustave Moreau, Dante Gabriel and other kinds of political activism flourished in a Rossetti and others). The femmefatale is central to new climate of personal liberation, liberated sexual- what Mary Ann Doane has felicitously termed the ity, and at least the beginnings of a new sexual free- 'archaeology of modernism'. As Doane has pointed dom for women.7 These photographs of artists all out, the femme fatale is a nexus for new, early dressed up, with, as one might say (and as their work twentieth-century ideas about modernity and reveals it), everywhereto go, are versions of a special- urbanization (she inhabits a new urban space of ized expression of artifice, a modernist icon/pose/ dance halls, streets and restaurants), she figures in mode: the dandy. Defined conventionally as male, Freudian theory, and is central to the new repro- but also as female, as embodied in the dandyism of ductive technologies of photography and film.2 A turn-of-the-centuryGibson Girl Shirtwaist fashions, 'sign of strength in an unwritten history'3 of the the dandy was coolly elegant, detached but intensely many feminisms, the femme fatale, as Doane has aware of self and situation. As perhaps the best discussed her epistemology, carries with her the known among other artists they knew, O'Keeffe and power of masquerade, a privileged, distanced and Duchamp, as well as Florine Stettheimer, took up disruptive anti-knowledge behind a cool facade.4 and deliberately altered that dandy's image inher- The Duchamp photograph charts the profound ited from the nineteenth century, re-fashioning it to ambivalence about sexual difference characteristicof their own needs, and a new avant-gardeart.8 the late nineteenth century, for it is the image of a It is hardly surprising that the model of Bau- disguise, laced with witty subterfuge. Duchamp delaire's dandy translated so easily from French into - THE OXFORDART JOURNAL 18:2 1995 33 This content downloaded from 209.129.16.124 on Tue, 18 Nov 2014 15:10:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Ef Ln ON .Sc ii "0 C Qt ; n + . U 0\ O *u CZo 1-0- L3 O 9 h) ?C1 0 +o > CS . ^ ?is ?a, o ct ;a, Z 0 (C o c, ?C,y i= (3 o *S1 0S-?U" 4n> Emg JZI C^lfii 4 1 C* II0 'EaEj g fit .4 CZ ;rtcS r' ao *Y ?o Et r;t 3 C 0" This content downloaded from 209.129.16.124 on Tue, 18 Nov 2014 15:10:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions litz and Arensberg circles, were predisposed to a vision of artistic identity as being 'of the moment', and of modernity as heroic. And lively models for dandyism existed: Stieglitz in his well-known black cloak10and Duchamp (both as male and as female) with his consummate elegance. (O'Keeffe once remarked on it.)"1The dandy's persona was seen as a vehicle for breaking with convention: New York artists shared Baudelaire's dandy's 'burning need to make of oneself something original'.'2 Now why was it that the dandy's image had such cogency for avant-gardeart production in New York in the early twentieth century? It may be that the persona of the dandy is especially suited to urban modernism, beginning with Baudelaire's Paris, because, as we know it from his pronouncements, the type so clearly emerges as a composite: the flneur/dandy, stroller/observer, 'passionate spec- tator',13and the painter of moder life who can be identified as 'the perfect fldneur'.'4 In the 1930s, Siegfried Kracauer commented on Baudelaire's thinking: 'On the Boulevards, the dandies lived, so to speak, extraterritorially.'15Kracauer's exile's emphathies for dandyism surface in Walter Ben- jamin's fleneur/dandy, composedly present but 'out 2. Man 'Marcel dressedas Rrose of place',16as Benjamin puts it, on city streets. Fig. Ray: Duchamp Kracauer's and on Baudelaire 1920-21, silver 21.6 X 17.3 cm. Benjamin's glosses Selavy' gelatin print, can of at art earlierin The Samuel S. White III and Vera White Collection, suggest ways looking produced the in New for O'Keeffe PhiladelphiaMuseum of Art. century York; Duchamp, Fig. 3. Photographerunknown: 'Georgia 0'Keeffe in men'sformalclothingfor a New rorkArt Student'sLeague Costume Ball' 1907,photograph, original dimensions unknown. Courtesy of Lila Howard. THEOXFORD ART JOURNAL - 18:2 1995 35 This content downloaded from 209.129.16.124 on Tue, 18 Nov 2014 15:10:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions and Stettheimer each made work which draws atten- dandyism as self-defining artistic strategy, as tion to congruencies between the persona of the absorbedinto the ethosof New York'savant-garde. It dandy and a climate of shifts and dislocations, that is not only that the avant-gardeencouraged shifting is, the paradox of the invigorating and empowering sexual freedom. There was also a significant loss of belief in the certainties of past traditions, the distinctionbetween New York'savant-garde and ear- intellectual and aesthetic loss of 'place' within lier ones: its many women artists.The notion of the accepted conventions, which is generally assumed in 'shifter'goes a long way in suggestingwhy the per- modernism's beginnings. sona of the dandywas such a usefulone tacticallyfor Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that, as with womenof the avant-gardein the earlymodern period - post-modernism now, modernism too was once and why femaledandies abounded in earlymod- defined not in relation to formal concerns,17 but ernism.25For if, like the men, avant-gardewomen rather was structured in cultural terms, and was relishedtheir place apart from conventional art insti- oppositional.
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