“Where Children Play Among the Ruins of the Language”: A Nest of Ninnies and the Literary Legacies of New York Dada

Narration and dialogues in A Nest of Ninnies rely largely on linguistic equivalents of what are known as “found objects,” or “ready mades,” in the visual arts. This endows Ashbery’s and Schuyler’s novel with a sense of humor much like the one developed by the New York Dadaists in the years 1916-1920. Because of the high incidence of camp humor in the novel, affinities between it, as well as the camp aesthetic more generally, and the New York version of Dada, may be seen. Yet the principal claim of the article is that this novel is part of the literary legacy of New York Dada, a movement significantly different from the original Dada of Zurich.

Fractals of art and life: the Arensberg Salon as a Cubist space

Table of Contents Introduction: The Art Revolution in Walter's Room, Or Where Lou Held Court Part 1: Fractals of Art: Cubism and the Arensberg Collection Part 2: Fractals of Life: The Modern Exhibition Space from the Arensberg Salon to the MoMA Conclusion: From Cubist Wunderkammer to Open House "Hosted during the World War I and postwar era, from 1915-1921, the Arensberg salon served a generative function, welcoming bohemians and intellectuals from different nations and economic standings to convene and engage in conversation, chess, revelry, and collaborative projects. In addition to acting as the physical nucleus of New York Dada, the Arensberg residence, with its"super pictures" adorning the walls, served as an impressive domestic exhibition site incorporating art objects, decorative arts, and artefacts from disparate origins. Its hosts were Walter Arensberg, a poet,journalist, and literary scholar, and his wife Louise, a musician who came from equally wealthy stock. Together the Arensbergs used their sizeable inheritances to become influential collectors and patrons of the arts" -- Page 7.

Fractals of art and life: the Arensberg Salon as a Cubist space

Table of Contents Introduction: The Art Revolution in Walter's Room, Or Where Lou Held Court Part 1: Fractals of Art: Cubism and the Arensberg Collection Part 2: Fractals of Life: The Modern Exhibition Space from the Arensberg Salon to the MoMA Conclusion: From Cubist Wunderkammer to Open House "Hosted during the World War I and postwar era, from 1915-1921, the Arensberg salon served a generative function, welcoming bohemians and intellectuals from different nations and economic standings to convene and engage in conversation, chess, revelry, and collaborative projects. In addition to acting as the physical nucleus of New York Dada, the Arensberg residence, with its"super pictures" adorning the walls, served as an impressive domestic exhibition site incorporating art objects, decorative arts, and artefacts from disparate origins. Its hosts were Walter Arensberg, a poet,journalist, and literary scholar, and his wife Louise, a musician who came from equally wealthy stock. Together the Arensbergs used their sizeable inheritances to become influential collectors and patrons of the arts" -- Page 7.

Limbswish

This chapter explores the interrelation between the everyday object and the art object in the work of New York Dada poet, pioneer assemblage sculptor and performance artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Her intermedial poetics revolves around an unprecedented intrusion of quotidian objects and mass-produced commodities in art and poetry, while her hybrid forms radically redefine both the visual artwork and the poem and do away with the boundaries between different kinds of artistic objects. This chapter situates her artistic practice in the context of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, while making important distinctions between them. Although the Baroness’ assemblages have been eclipsed by Duchamp’s work, she came up with a strikingly original poetics that is literally “ready-to-wear,” integrating singular arrays of objects into her radical self-performances which work toward developing new genres such as a living body assemblage or a body performance poem. This chapter argues that in Baroness Elsa’s “ready-to-wear” poem-objects unravels a radical and ironic craft which inextricably welds together the consumer product and the unique artwork.

Re-Reading the Machine Age: The ‘Audacious Modernity’ of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes

Chapter 2 explores how the proto-Dada artists of New York City proposed new ways of reading Machine Age America. Rather than invoking the power and efficiency of its machines and infrastructure, it argues that these vanguardists emphasised their delicacy, intricacy and fragility. Sections one and two detail the divergent aesthetics of two key modernist formations: the technological sublime of Alfred Stieglitz and his ‘Young American’ literary acolytes (including Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford); and the techno-bathetic proto-Dadaists of the magazine 291, exemplified by Francis Picabia. The third section analyses the techno-bathetic practices of Marcel Duchamp in his New York Dada phase, as well as crucial responses to that work by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams. The fourth section focuses on the work of the Baroness, who interrogated the implications of socio-technics for problems of sex, gender and nationality. Finally, section five focuses on Loy’s poetry, fashion designs, inventions, and technicities; for the first time, it unveils her invention ‘verrovoile’, a translucent thermoplastic she profiled in a previously unknown 1929 newspaper article. The chapter argues that, through her poetry and inventions, Loy helped introduce the concept of the artist-engineer to transatlantic discourse in the mid-1920s.

Arensberg, Walter (1878–1954)

Walter Arensberg (April 4, 1878 to January 29, 1954) and his wife, Louise Stevens Arensberg (1879–1953), were influential patrons of the avant-garde, building a collection that included modernist art, early American Shaker furniture, and non-Western objects, primarily of African and pre-Columbian origin. They collected modern art by American and European artists, with a special concentration in work by Marcel Duchamp (who also served as their art advisor) and Constantin Brancusi. Their New York apartment, at 33 West 67th Street, hosted a frequent salon of artists, writers, and intellectuals from 1915–1921. These gatherings were a focal point for the activities and antics of New York Dada. Among Arensberg’s many friendships with artists and writers, his long association with Marcel Duchamp was perhaps most influential. When Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915, Walter Pach met him at the pier and brought him directly to the Arensberg’s apartment, where Duchamp lived during the summer of 1915. Later, Arensberg paid the rent for Duchamp’s studio, located in the same building. The Arensberg Collection would amass nearly forty works by Duchamp, including The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1921). When Arensberg was unable to purchase the artist’s infamous Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), he commissioned a duplicate and eventually acquired the original as well.

Wood, Beatrice (1893–1998)

An American potter known for luster-glaze chalices and whimsical ceramic figures, Beatrice Wood was once named the "Mama of Dada." Born on 3 March 1893 into a wealthy family in San Francisco, California, raised in New York City, and a student at the Académie Julian in Paris, Wood rebelled from her traditional upbringing by 1912. Seeking a more bohemian life, she joined avant-garde art circles, became friends with Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché, and was influential in the New York Dada movement. During the 1930s, her early successes in ceramics provided independent income and, by 1948, she settled in Ojai, California, to continue her interest in theosophy. She established a studio developing embedded luster glazes with radiant colors and continued this work for over thirty years. Wood was recognized as a "California Living Treasure" by her native state, named an "Esteemed American Artist" by the Smithsonian Institution, and partly inspired the character "Rose" in the 1997 film Titanic. She died on 12 March 1998 at the age of 105.

Picabia, Francis (1879–1953)

A cavalier individualist, Francis Picabia became an internationally renowned avant-garde artist, spearheading Paris and New York Dada with his friend Marcel Duchamp and also contributing to Dada in Zurich and Barcelona. Picabia was a car enthusiast who embraced modernity, viewing the machine as a form expressive of the modern spirit from which he drew a new and revolutionary artistic idiom. Picabia also drew upon the tenets of the Puteaux Group and, upon arriving in New York to exhibit at the Armory Show in 1913, was lauded as a leading Cubist. He worked for a time in Orphic Cubism, a blend of Cubist, Futurist, and Fauvist themes and techniques to which he added ‘‘abstracted’’ industrial and biomorphic forms. Although he maintained an interest in the figure, Picabia is known primarily for his early dialogue with abstraction and his development of a quasi-machine aesthetic. He looked to industrial diagrams for artistic inspiration and, upon returning to New York in 1915, during a period of involvement with photographer and modern arts patron Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 291 Gallery and journal, produced the famous Mechanomorph series. Depicting Stieglitz and his entourage as bizarre, seemingly dysfunctional, industrial forms, Picabia’s Mechanomorphs shaped the visual vocabulary of New York, and later Paris, Dada. Picabia’s ironic stance in relation to art and culture has prompted scholars to interpret his conflation of human and machine parts as also playful punning of morality, sexuality, and blind faith in technology.

Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa von (1874 –1927)

Born Else Hildegard Plötz in the German Baltic seaport town of Swinmünde in 1874, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was an avant-garde poet, performer, visual artist, model, and autobiographer associated with the retrospectively named New York Dada movement. Arrested in Pittsburg for wearing men’s clothes and publicly smoking in 1910, the Baroness became an increasingly notorious figure in New York city as World War I took hold in Europe. Head shaved and lacquered in high vermilion, her often naked body decorated with the tin cans, ice cream spoons, and gilded vegetables that she collected from the city’s gutters or stole from its department stores, the Baroness both embodied and challenged the limits of established avant-garde gestures through a radical lived-Dada practice performed on and through her body. Well-suited to The Little Review’s tagline "Making no Compromise with the Public Taste," the Baroness was, as editor Jane Heap put it, "the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, is Dada" (1922: 46).