Fuck Everyone and Be a Disgrace! In Memory of the Dada Baroness: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven 

(1874 -1927)

 

"Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life ..."

 

I. 

 

The relationship between dada and punk has long been acknowledged; Greil Marcus, for example, famously traces out a secret history of twentieth-century art in which he discerns a direct lineage from the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 to the Sex Pistols in 1976 [1].

 

And it's arguable that the German-born artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who, via her radical performance of self during the years 1913 to 1923 came to embody dada, might also be described as a proto-punk.

 

For not only did she look and act the part, but she even coined the term phalluspistol in her profane and playfully obscene poetry [2], anticipating the name Malcolm McLaren would come up with for the group operating out of 430 King's Road. 

 

I'm not suggesting that McLaren stole Elsa's idea in the same way as Marcel Duchamp allegedly stole credit for his most notorious readymade from her (see below), but it's an interesting coincidence.

 

II.

Apart from her writings, Baroness Elsa was famous for two things: (i) her numerous love affairs and (ii) her utilisation of found objects - including actual rubbish picked up from the streets - into her work and wardrobe (she once wore a bra, for example, made from old tins cans). 

 

Her aim, she declared, was to sleep with everyone and become a living collage, thereby dissolving the boundary between life and art whilst, at the same time, challenging bourgeois notions of femininity and cultural value. If this made her an embarrassment to her friends and family and a disgrace in the eyes of society, well, she didn't care (again, her attitude and behaviour is now what some would term punk).

 

Her colourful and unconventional life took her to New York in 1913 and it was here that she made a name for herself as a model, artist, and poet [3]. To help make ends meet, Elsa also worked in a cigarette factory like Bizet's Carmen. 

 

Whilst Man Ray once filmed Elsa shaving her pubic hair, it was Marcel Duchamp for whom she had the hots and, in a public performance c. 1915, she recited a love poem whilst rubbing a newspaper article about the latter over her naked body, making her romantic interest explicit. Several years later she would make an assemblage entitled Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1920-22), which was only rediscovered in 1966. 

It was her connection with Duchamp that would lead to a more recent controversy. For there is now speculation that several artworks attributed to other artists of the period can either be partially attributed to Elsa, or that she should in fact be acknowledged as their sole creator - and this includes one of the most famous and important artworks of the twentieth-century ...

 

 

III. 

 

In April 1917, a porcelain urinal signed with the name R. Mutt was submitted by Duchamp for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Duchamp entitled this readymade work Fountain - and the rest, as they say, is avant-garde art history [4].
      

But some have suggested that the work was, in fact, the idea of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who had submitted it to her friend Duchamp and there is, to be fair, circumstantial evidence to support this claim. Most art historians, however, maintain that Duchamp was solely responsible for this landmark work in twentieth-century art and he remains credited for it [5].   

   

Ultimately, we'll probably never know the truth of this for sure. 

 

 

IV.  

In 1923, the Baroness returned to Berlin, where she lived in poverty and suffered mental health problems.

 

Things improved after she moved to Paris, but, sadly, she died on 14 December 1927 from gas inhalation (whether this was or was not intentional is unclear). 

 

She's buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, so in good company.

 

There have since been several biographies published and every now and then there's an attempt to bring the name Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to wider public attention [6], though one suspects that she'll always remain a marginal figure of interest only to those in the know.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1989). 

 

[2] See the poem 'Cosmic Chemistry' in Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, ed. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (The MIT Press, 2016). Click here to read on allpoetry.com.

 

[3] Although most of her poems remained unpublished in her lifetime, some were featured in The Little Review alongside extracts from Joyce's Ulysses.

 

[4] The original piece is now lost, but, along with numerous replicas made with Duchamp's permission in the 1950s and '60s, we still have the famous photograph of it taken at Alfred Stieglitz's sudio and published in The Blind Man (a two-issue journal featuring work by dada artists and edited by Duchamp in 1917).

 

[5] See, for example, the letter from Dawn Adès (Professor emerita of art history and theory, University of Essex) addressing this controversy in The Guardian (15 June 2022): click here.  

[6] See for example Irene Gammel's biography, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity (The MIT Press, 2003). Gammel makes a strong case for Elsa's artistic brilliance and punk spirit. 

 

 

Reflections on an Earworm

earworm by jerbing 

society6.com

 

 

I. 

 

I don't know if anyone has ever died from that common form of involuntary cognition known as an earworm [1], but having the same song play over and over in one's head can certainly drive you crazy after a while. 

 

And that's something I can attest to, having had Michael Jackson's 'Smooth Criminal' on repeat for the last few days - and not even the original track [2], but the if-anything-even-catchier version by Alien Ant Farm [3].    

 

I'm pretty sure that, eventually, it will stop. But I do sometimes worry about being reduced to a catatonic state like Gilbert Lister [4]. 

 

For if Greil Marcus is right and listening to the radio is a potentially suicidal gesture [5], then I imagine that sitting alone for hours watching music videos on YouTube "with a blank, entranced expression" like Sir Clifford Chatterley is equally self-destructive [6].

 

Síomón Solomon touched on these ideas in relation to his own audiopoetics, in Hölderlin's Poltergeists (2021): click here. But the theorist who has comprehensively developed ideas of listening and written a fascinating history of the ear, is the French philosopher and musicologist Peter Szendy [7] ...  

 

 

II.

 

In his histoire de nos oreilles (2001), Szendy critiques the Romantic and Modernist conceptions of listening and offers an alternative (poststructuralist) model informed by the work of Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida, and so full of ideas to do with otherness and issues of power, for example. 

 

And in his philosophie dans le juk-box (2008), Szendy analyses how haunting popular melodies can form a bridge between the individual's unconscious and the workings of the global market, as their thoughts feelings, dreams, and desires are all captured and expressed in three-minutes of pop perfection. 

 

We think we are listening to the soundtrack of our lives when we play our favourite songs over and over, but, actually, the banging tunes that worm their way into our heads and hearts are produced by a recorded music industry with an annual revenue of around $20 billion [8].

 

The hit song, Szendy argues, functions like a myth; a force of repetition that grows by force of repetition. And it is also an insidious form of bio-melo-technology which is there to produce a docile subject happy and free to sing along. 

 

Of course, this is not a new insight: the artist Jamie Reid recognised long ago that music keeps you under control ... Why d'you think they pipe it out in the shopping malls?

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The term, earworm, is a loan translation - or what linguists like to call a calque - from the German Ohrwurm and was coined by the English journalist and writer Desmond Bagley in his 1978 novel Flyaway.

 

[2] Michael Jackson, 'Smooth Criminal', 1988 single release from the album Bad, (Epic, 1987): click here for the official full-length video, dir. Colin Chilvers.

 

[3] Alien Ant Farm, 'Smooth Criminal', single release from the album Anthology, (Dreamworks, 2001): click here for Marc Klasfeld's video, which pays an amusing homage to Jackson.     

[4] In Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Ultimate Melody' (1957), scientist Gilbert Lister develops a tune that is so perfectly synchronised with the electrical rhythms of the brain that its listener becomes fatally enraptured by it. This is a surprisingly familiar theme within fiction.

 

[5] Greil Marcus, The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 33. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 110. 

 

[7] See, for example, the following works by Peter Szendy available in English translation:

      - Listen: a history of our ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell, (Fordham University Press, 2008).

      - Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox, trans. Will Bishop, (Fordham University Press, 2011).

      - All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage, trans. Roland Végső, (Fordham University Press, 2017).  

 

[8] According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the recorded music market grew by 7.4% in 2020, mostly thanks to streaming, and figures released in their 2021 Global Music Report show total revenues for 2020 were $21.6 billion. Readers who are interested in knowing more can click here and go to the IFPI website.  

We Are Transmitters: Reflections on Síomón Solomon's Audiopoetics

"As we live, we are transmitters of life. 

And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us." [1]

 

 

Rüdiger Görner describes Síomón Solomon's 'Spills of mire I swallowed inside the tower' as "an inspirational meditation on the poetics of audio drama" [2] and I'm happy to endorse this view and echo the praise. 

 

Consisting of five short movements, the text is pretty much perfect as is and hardly needs commentary; it certainly doesn't deserve to be summarized or stripped to its bare bones (so that these can in turn be ground down into fine dust in the name of analysis) 

 

And so, what follows are mostly just brief reflections of my own, inspired by Solomon's in the first three movements [3] ...

 

 

(i) On dying of imagination (or dancing to the radio till you're dead)

 

What do fictional adultress Lady Chatterley and epileptic post-punk icon Ian Curtis have in common? The answer is that both regarded the act of listening to the radio as a potentially suicidal gesture, as Greil Marcus terms it [4].    

 

Lawrence provides a short but rather terrifying description of Sir Clifford Chatterley turning on and tuning in to his newly installed radio and becoming queer in the process, much to Connie's amazement and horror:

 

"And he would sit alone for hours listening [...] with a blank, entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind, and listen, or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing." [5]
 

As for Curtis, the radio, says Solomon, functioned in his imagination not merely as  device to dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to, but as "an acoustic accelerant of auto-destruction, a transmission machine for self-slaughter" [6], that leads to an everlasting silence that might be construed as the ultimate example of dead air; i.e., the void that exists "in the dark heart of hearing" [7].

 

 

(ii) 'Sometimes a wind blows': A quick wor(l)d in David Lynch's ear

 

For some, the ear is the most poetic organ. For others, it's the most open and obliging organ. And for ear fetishists all around the lobe - which, if Solomon's account is true, includes filmmaker David Lynch - aural sex is the only game in town [8].

 

For D. H. Lawrence, hearing is "perhaps the deepest of the senses" [9] and the one we have no choice about; i.e., we can't close our ears in the same manner we can shut our eyes, although we can of course block our ears with beeswax, like Odysseus, should we wish to do so.

Responding to this latter point, Lawrence writes:

"We may voluntarily quicken our hearing, or make it dull. But we have really no choice of what we hear. Our will is eliminated. Sound acts direct, almost automatically, upon the affective centres. And we have no power of going forth from the ear. We are always and only recipient." [10]  

 

One suspects that Solomon would challenge Lawrence's thinking here, particularly the latter claim, believing as he does that "the physical ear is not merely a passive cavity or vacuous opening but a transfigurative chamber of auditory fantasy" [11]. 

However, Solomon might be rather more sympathetic to (or at least more intrigued by) what Lawrence says here about music:

 

"The singing of birds acts almost entirely upon the centres of the breast. [...] 

      So does almost all our music, which is all Christian in tendency. But modern music is analytical, critical, and it has discovered the power of ugliness. Like our martial music, it is of the upper plane [... acting] direct upon the thoracic ganglian. Time was, however, when music acted upon the sensual centres direct. We hear it still in savage music, and in the roll of drums, and in the roaring of lions, and in the howling of cats. And in some voices still we hear the deeper resonance of the sensual mode of consciouness." [12]      

 

 

(iii) 'The Ether Will Now Oblige'

 

I'm pleased that Solomon brings the Italian Futurists into his discussion of audiopoetics. 

 

I'm particularly pleased to see Luigi Russolo, author of The Art of Noise (1916), given a shout out, as he anticipated Lawrence's thinking in Fantasia concerning the relationship between sound and the material unconscious - just as he anticipated everything that was to unfold in music-as-technology in the twentieth-century. 

 

In another memorable passage, Solomon writes:

"As a culture transforms, the aesthetic spectrum of listening, its scale of aural tolerances and refusals, is continuously recalibrated. Accoring to Russolo's epistolary argument, the ear of the Classical age in music could never have borne the modern orchestra's arduous dissonances. The introduction of nineteeth-century machine technology decisively ushered in the advent of noise - which immediately claimed, it is asserted, an absolute sovereignty over human sensibility. As for us multi-layered, late and lonely moderns [...] while we may still be shaken by Wagner and Beethoven, are we any longer stirred?" [13]

 

If it's true, on the one hand, that noise annoys, so do we moderns love - and seem to need - a constant stream of machine-produced sound as a "stimulant whose manufactured proliferation [...] has become perversely anaesthetizing and/or a form of consensual ambient pollution" [14] 

 

The one thing we do not want - and seem to fear - is silence. For that, we no longer have ears, even though it is the silence - that great bride of all creation - from which we are born and to which we must return [15]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'We are transmitters', in The Poems,  Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 389.

 

[2] Síomón Solomon, 'Spills of mire I swallowed inside the tower (an audiopoetic symphony in five short movements)', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. 89-119. 

      Professor Görner's comment is taken from his blurb on the back cover of this book. He goes on to add that, in short, "Solomon's work is a stunning testimony to the significance of the audiopoetic in our increasingly prosaic world". 

[3] It's not that I didn't find the last two sections - which discuss Greek (amphi)theatrics and the politics of the Hörspiel respectively - of interest, but they belong to areas of research about which I have almost no knowledge and so don't feel qualified to join in the conversation.      

[4] Greil Marcus, The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 33, quoted by Solomon on p. 90 of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 110.

   

[6]  Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 90. 

      Solomon is referring to the Joy Division debut single, 'Transmission', released in October 1979 on Factory Records. Readers unfamiliar with the track - and with Ian Curtis - are encouraged to click here and watch the official video (a live performance on Something Else (15 Sept 1979)). 

 

[7] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 91. 

 

[8] Solomon notes of the Blue Velvet director: "Legend has it that Lynch became so fixated with his film's prosthetic ear that he and his make-up supervisor Jeff Goodwin came to regard it as a character in its own right - calling it 'Mr Ear', redesigning it out of silicone rather than latex and even embellishing it, in a superbly disquieting fetishistic signature, with locks of Lynch's own scissored hair." See Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp. 99-100. 

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 103. 

[10] Ibid.

 

[11] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 101. 

[12] D. H.Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, pp. 103-104. 

      It's interesting that Lawrence mentions the howling of cats as a form of singing that acts directly on the sensual centres. According to Johnny Rotten, his mother once described Kate Bush's singing as sounding like a bag of cats and yet, despite this - or because of this - Rotten loves Kate Bush, as does Síomón Solomon, who describes her musical persona as an angel-cum-banshee. See Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 93.  

 

[13]  Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp 102-103.

 

[14] Ibid., p. 103. 

[15] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Silence', in The Poems, Vol. I., p. 612. 

 

 

This is the 5th - and possibly final - post in a series inspired by Síomón Solomon's work in Hölderlin's Poltergeists. The earlier four posts are: 

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All

 

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked

 

A Brief Note on the Life and Work of Stephan Hermlin

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli