Digital Poetics 3.13 Life over Art: Remembering Baroness Elsa by M. Elijah Sueuga
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (c. 1921-22), George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LC 5677-2. From digital scan of photograph
The Baroness
Mimosa House, London
27 May - 17 September 2022
In 1913, amidst the butchery of the first World War, the Dada movement began to emerge. In his diary, Dada founder Hugo Ball describes and reflects on the paramount predicament facing the world as he saw it: “What is necessary,” Ball posits, “is a league of all…who want to escape from the mechanical world, a way of life opposed to mere utility. Orgiastic devotion to the opposite of everything that is serviceable and useful.” (Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time, 3-4). Dada aimed to free itself from aesthetic and social constraints–setting out to achieve radical absolute freedom through abolishing those habits and beliefs coddled by its predecessors; arguably, this was the first true avant garde. Though Zurich was considered the birthplace of Dadaism, New York City can be said to have set in place the constituents which developed the movement. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, like her Dada peers in New York, had a preference for life over art, expressed with an uninhibited flamboyance, and an apathy for most artists popularized during her time. But Elsa was special, even among such eccentrica. She was the first true punk, a subversive by lifestyle, an icon within queer culture generations ahead of her time. With these notions in mind, it was with great anticipation that I made my way to 47 Theobalds Road for the newly minted exhibition honoring Elsa and her legacy.
As I entered Mimosa House in anticipation of the exhibition The Baroness, the word EJACULATION lauded its presence at hip-level to my left. The large script resembled that of hurried handwriting, followed by a block of text in the same style. Elsa’s poems. Directly ahead, the slim surface edge of a gallery wall was covered with text in a similar script. Clusters of exclamatory words, brimming with whimsy and passion– “Woo– Die– Woo”, “Love– Lust– Mixed– Grave–” and “Truth– Joy– Pest– Lie–”-- asserted themselves boldly over the austere white surface. I paused and felt my heartbeat.
Five steps and 30 seconds into the exhibition, the text seemed to tighten its grip around me. In every direction, my gaze was met with plots of sprawling black text. A momentary wave of nausea overtook me, which soon turned to nostalgia. Within these sterile gallery walls, my memory took me to sites of high transit, anonymity–a frequently trafficked alleyway, the bathroom of a dive bar or nightclub. I remembered the sidestreets I had perused in Brooklyn, New York late into the afternoon and evening, littered with tags, throw-ups, exclamations and political musings from top to bottom in permanent marker and cheap spray paint. There was courage here–an unfiltered parade of ideas, a bravado uninterested in cohesion or meaning. These communal journals, hidden in the shade of narrow alleys, archived something personal and intimate, yet publicly available to a curious pedestrian with some time on their hands.
I stood there for a moment, eyes unfixed, allowing my peripheral vision to guide my wander. Light chatter from a gallerist and patron wavered a couple meters ahead of me. Beyond that, I made out a soft interweaving of voice recordings, beckoning my interest. A sequence of black and white photos of Elsa quietly alternated, enveloping the wall on my right. Elsa’s demeanor was alive, visibly full of gusto, despite the stillness of the cold frames. Her bold postures teased to lift her body from these rigid confines at any instant. Perhaps they would.
Further into the exhibition, the spill of text continued to consume my visual sphere, and with it I could hear Elsa’s poems–the same ones scribbled on the white walls–read aloud continuously in various voices, who I learned included the likes of contemporary poets Caspar Heinemann, and Nat Raha. As I waded further, the experience became all encompassing. I could feel Elsa’s presence through multiple sensory modalities in simultaneity. I paused again, searching for the word. Immersive? But ‘immersive’ has a different sense when we speak of contemporary exhibitions. It wreaks of ‘Virtual Reality’ Van Gogh, of overproduced sensationalist amusement, the carnivalesque fanfare of Mexican Geniuses Frida and Diego–a traveling enterprise organized by multinational corporations. Immersion is the trend that alleged curators such as Massimiliano Siccardi and Annabelle Mauger have adopted in recent years.
Installation view. Photo by M. Elijah Sueuga
Elsa’s exhibition was immersive in an honest sense–it remained humble, modest, and without the worldbuilding escapism that taints Imagine Van Gogh. There were no VR headsets nor crowded tour groups here. Elsa was alive in this space, haunting the walls through text, image, and sound. Depending on your physical position in the gallery, you might hear the words of Raha collide with those of Heinemann. One might allow these sounds (colliding or not) to engulf you, and the text to facilitate. In the side streets of Brooklyn, there was a similar atmospheric deluge of the sensorial. Observing the gasconade of text around me, I could catch audible overspill—a phone conversation of a nearby stockbroker, a couple passionately arguing. I imagined that these enveloping physical and sonic features of the cityscape I experienced may have existed earlier in some capacity, perhaps inspiring to those at the onset of the Dada movement.
When Elsa created Cathedral (1918)--a tiny fragment of wood which sat proudly behind the safety of a glass case in the first floor gallery–the wide scale atrocities incurred from WWI were beginning to unearth the futility of meaning, an ethos that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon De Beauvoir later called existentialism. Whether or not Elsa submitted herself to such views explicitly, this was the backdrop against which Cathedral was created, against which Dada took form.
I gazed at the delicate splinter of wood propped by a small metal wire. The uncanny pairing of the work’s title with its referent was stirring. I lingered in this unfamiliar feeling, detecting Linda Stupart’s Cathedral (2022)--a tribute to Elsa composed of a large collection of wooden branches and fragments–in the corner of my eye. Elsa’s sliver of wood, in all its feeble materiality, brought with it a bygone world. This was an era perhaps not so different from the current, but one that neither myself, nor any of Cathedral’s future visitors could ever know. I imagined Elsa strutting through the streets of New York, young, charismatic, confident. Would she be remembered?
Linda Stupart, Cathedral (2022). Mixed-media installation. Courtesy the artist. Photo by Rob Harris.
It is unsurprising that, until recently, Elsa received little widespread acknowledgment for her work. This year, the year 2022, nearly one month into the opening of The Baroness, the historic Roe v. Wade–the landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States conferred the right to have an abortion–was overturned. Women’s bodies, choices, existences are neglected by the writers of history, ignored by the purveyors and protectors of mass culture, ideology, status quo. This we know.
Of the formation of ideology, Stuart Hall wrote that “You cannot learn, through common sense, how things are: you can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of things. In this way, its very taken-for-grantedness is what establishes it as a medium in which its own premises and presuppositions are being rendered invisible by its apparent transparency.” (Stuart Hall, Culture Media and the ‘Ideological Effect’ 1977, 325). Elsa did not fit into the scheme of things. Her existence was anti-schematic, anti-representational; her actions nonsensical, uncommon.
The plight of Elsa’s recognition and legacy (both in conversation with her artistic peers of the time and autonomously) speaks volumes to the treatment of women as makers and thinkers; women living unconventional lives. In the year 2022, Elsa is deemed unworthy by patriarchal rule of free choice and human rights. “This is a man’s world,” sings James Brown in a croaking drawl that carries with it the alcoholism and physical abuse inflicted on his wife. The writing of history is erasure, an insidious violence, reaffirmed by Brown, perpetuated indefinitely.
The man’s world of which Brown sings carries with it the resonance of a history of violence upon the queer body, a violence with which Elsa was familiar. Often, the Baroness walked the streets of New York City in a men's suit, a cigarette in her mouth. She strode confidently, despite being arrested regularly for her gender non-conforming behavior. Elsa lived in a manner that was genuine, truthful, and as such became testament to the position of necessary and perpetual resistance assumed by the queer body. Like many who came before her, and the many to follow, Elsa was shunned by society for her honesty, a similar honesty which is spurned increasingly at present under transphobic policy hustled by the Tory party, quietly abetted by much of the British political left. Elsa’s legacy resists easy assimilation into cis-hetero-feminism, in part evidenced by the perspectives taken on by respondents to her work such as Raha and Heinemann.
Upon my exit, I noticed a block of text at knee level. “I want to die– I want to live– Between this Lovembrace! E.V.F.L”, in the same slovenly script that covered the rest of the gallery walls. The words resonated–a fanatical feeling I recognized. I had felt this way before. Perhaps many of us have. As I studied the text, I wondered: would Elsa have been happy with her treatment in the Mimosa House Gallery? I could not conclude, but I did think there was something special here; here, albeit temporarily, Elsa was re-established as an artist and poet worthy of attention in the contemporary moment, rendered uninvisible.
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M. Elijah Sueuga is a writer, poet and art historian focusing on late modern and contemporary sonic arts. They are a current graduate student in the History of Art at Williams College, and Curatorial Fellow at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. They are currently interning at the87press as Resident Art and Sound Writer. They work additionally as a composer and dj.
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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
