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TRUE-XX DADA STORIES

(Includes Jane Heap as Coeditor of The Little Review & Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven as R.Mutt) 

 

By -  C.Mehrl Bennett-XX

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      DADA is anti-bourgeois sentimentality and anti-traditional attitudes towards art, employs its own brand of humor and satire, and originally was a reaction by artists to the horror/absurdity of WWI, so it values PEOPLE over ART. Ironically, per Tristan Tzara (born in Romania) who wrote the first Dadaist manifesto, Dada is even anti-manifesto. Duchamp would claim dada is "anti-art" after he moved to the U.S. (where he met the artist, Beatrice Wood). My attitude towards life and art is from FLUXUS, which is heavily influenced by dada. I begin this essay with "Dada is", not "Dada was", because like Fluxus, Dada is an attitude as well as an historical movement, and the Dada attitude lives on!

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     Cabaret Voltaire was established in Zürich Switzerland one hundred years ago (1916) by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings (whom he would marry in 1920). Tristan Tzara performed with them and would later bring the Dada movement to Paris. A photo of Hugo Ball from Cabaret Voltaire is now an icon of the movement and shows Ball in a shaman-like costume, sometimes described as armor. He wore a tall tubular hat, tubes on arms, torso, legs, and frilled cuffs on his hands [like those on Thanksgiving turkey legs], and a silver rectangle around his shoulders - clasped at the front like a cape. He was carried on and off the stage in this outfit to recite his sound poem, KARAWANE. Tristan's Romanian friend, Marcel Janco, would design colorful modern masks for performers. The two Romanians would say "da Da!" to each other which in Romanian means "yes, Yes!" so it's possible that's where the name came from, though there are other speculations about the source. Emmy Hennings danced and sang as one of the primary cabaret artists, and choreographed performances, and performed with her handmade puppets. She was also a wonderful poet and so, like Hugo Ball, she performed her own poetry, and also that of other dadaist poets.*

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      Jean Arp and his partner, Sophie Taeuber, were also prime movers of DADA Zürich, though most art history books only mention Jean (or Hans) Arp. Only today, with the attention of the Dada centennial, has more information been coming to light about the women of Dada. In 1920, along with Max Ernst and the social activist Alfred Grünwald, Arp and Taeuber set up the Cologne Dada group. Taeuber was Swiss born, was among the first artists to create abstract paintings, and was the first women to be depicted on a Swiss banknote in 1995. Arp and Taeuber collaborated on "duo collages" and welcomed chance as a creative principle (as does FLUXUS).

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      Richard Huelsenbeck first joined the Dadaists in Zurich Switzerland and after the war founded Berlin Dada with Raoul Housmann and Hannah Höch, which became the most political Dada offshoot, e.g.: George Grosz and Otto Dix satirizing the army and the bourgeois in their art. Hannah Höch and Raoul Housmann had a seven year relationship as a couple and together they pioneered the art of photomontage, but their dadaist (aka Merz) friend, Kurt Schwitters, was more widely recognized in the history books for pioneering the collage technique. As part of her art, Höch included statements about women's liberation and racial discrimination, aside from the overtones of post-war politics. In 1997 there was a major retrospective of Höch's photomontages that traveled to six major USA museums. In mailart circles, she has been recognized as a famous collage artist via a "Hannah Höch Club" rubberstamp produced by Picasso Gaglione and distributed in the network by Reed Altemus.

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      New York Dada came from France via Marcel Duchamp, who is most famous for his "readymades", including the "R. Mutt" signed urinal, Fountain. However, Duchamp indicates in a 1917 letter to his sister that a female friend was centrally involved in the conception of this work. As he writes: "One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture." His Fountain piece was more in line with the scatological aesthetics of Duchamp's friend and neighbor, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, than with Duchamp's, so it's possible that his concept of the "ready made" sculpture originated from the Baroness, if not the original "R. Mutt" signed urinal itself! I read more about the Baroness in a biography about her subtitled: GENDER, Dada, and Everyday M o d e r n i t y, A Cultural Biography by Irene Gammel, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, 2002, and was further impressed that the Baroness was one of the first artists to actively do performance art in NYC. There l also read that Ezra Pound was influenced by the experimental nature of Freytag-Loringhoven's poetry, covertly paid her homage when she was still living in Europe, and took a dive into Dada via a "crash course" as a result. However, Pound was also threatened by her wild, female nature per a 1921 letter to Margaret Anderson, the editor of The Little Review, a journal that published early examples of surrealist art, dada literature, and critical essays. Pound, as an ex-patriot living in London and as The Little Review foreign editor, then "was expurgating the women from the journal --while championing a more stately male dada, his own included."  *( I should make mention of the other woman, Jane Heap, who was also a co-editor of The Little Review.) Yet her impact on Pound was profound, because he mentioned her in the last Canto 95 in 1955, and also lamented her exclusion from The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse in 1954.

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      The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Hannah Höch, Emmy Hennings, Sophie Taeuber, and the American artist, Beatrice Wood, were never properly acknowledged in much of the established art history of the Dadaists, but since the 1990's their contributions have been coming to the fore. BODY SWEATS was not published until 100 years after Baroness Elsa arrived in the USA - in 2011 by MIT press. [Like Hugo Ball, she was an early pioneer of sound poetry, but she also broke barriers with her erotic material and experimental writing.] In a 2015 Basic Books publication about Dada by Jed Rasula, "Destruction Was My Beatrice", the title is likely a reference to Dante's Beatrice, and not to Beatrice Wood, who is mentioned nowhere in the book. Even that 2015 book was lacking in its coverage of the women of Dada, though the Baroness was not overlooked. Apparently she must've made an impression as a "nasty woman" via her erotic poetry and body art performances and outrageous costumes. Also, per Irene Gammel's book (referenced below), Baroness Elsa critiqued (William Carlos) Williams's sexual and artistic politics in her experimental prose poem review entitled "Thee I call 'Hamlet of Wedding Ring'", published in The Little Review in March 1921." A very public back and forth ensued between the Baroness (representing a female European dadaist) and Williams (representing the American modernist). Further down the road, after Jane Heap inherited full editorship after Anderson's departure, she publicly defended Baroness Elsa from an attack by the American, Harriet Monroe (editor of Poetry Magazine), when Ms. Monroe derided Dada poetry. Jane Heap would later become one of the benefactors of the Baroness during her poverty ridden years. In recent years the Baroness has been the subject of fluxus performances by Viv dey Dada and Mary Campbell of Staten Island, NY, during Chicago Fluxfests and at Staten Island art fests.

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http://www.dada-companion.com/hennings/

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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ RE: Fountain_(Duchamp), Baroness Elsa, Hannah Höch

Baroness Elsa: GENDER, Dada, and Everyday M o d e r n i t y, A Cultural Biography by Irene Gammel, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, 2002    

     

C. Mehrl Bennett 2016