Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood 0826359337, 9780826359339

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Curious Disciplines

RECENCIES SERIES: RESEARCH AND RECOVERY IN T WENT IE TH-CENTURY AMERICAN POE T ICS RECENCIES

M AT T HE W HOF ER , S ER IE S EDI T OR

This series stands at the intersection of critical investigation, historical documentation, and the preservation of cultural heritage. The series exists to illuminate the innovative poetics achievements of the recent past that remain relevant to the present. In addition to publishing monographs and edited volumes, it is also a venue for previously unpublished manuscripts, expanded reprints, and collections of major essays, letters, and interviews. Also available in the Recencies Series: An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Dale M. Smith Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Dale M. Smith Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime by James Maynard

The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J. H. Prynne edited by Ryan Dobran The Olson Codex: Projective Verse and the Problem of Mayan Glyphs by Dennis Tedlock The Birth of the Imagination: William Carlos Williams on Form by Bruce Holsapple The Maltese Falcon to Body of Lies: Spies, Noirs, and Trust by Robert von Hallberg The Oppens Remembered: Poetry, Politics, and Friendship edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis How Long Is the Present: Selected Talk Poems of David Antin edited by Stephen Fredman Loose Cannons: Selected Prose by Christopher Middleton

For additional titles in the Recencies Series, please visit unmpress.com.

Curious Disciplines MINA LOY AND

AVANT-GARDE ARTISTHOOD

Sarah Hayden

University of New Mexico Press

|

Albuquerque

© 2018 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hayden, Sarah, author. Title: Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood / Sarah Hayden. Description: Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017025969 (print) | LCCN 2017036867 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826359339 (E-book) | ISBN 9780826359322 (printed case: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Loy, Mina—Criticism and interpretation. | American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—History—20th century. | Modernism (Literature)—United States. Classification: LCC PS3523.O975 (ebook) | LCC PS3523.O975 Z68 2018 (print) | DDC 811/.52–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025969 Cover illustration: Women Dancing , early 1920s. Watercolor with graphite, 19 ½ × 15 ½ inches. Courtesy of Roger Conover. Designed by Felicia Cedillos Composed in Minion Pro 10.25/14

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART 4 Loy and “Degenerate” Artisthood

ix

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

vii

9 | Avant-Garde Artisthood in the Era of “Degenerate Art” 175 10 | Reconstructing Insel as “Degenerate” Icon

1

11 | “Degenerate” Artisthood in New York PART 1 Loy and Futurist Artisthood

1 | The Futurist Artist TM

PART 5 Loy’s Legacies

15

2 | Apprehending the Futurist

25

3 | Extracting an Artist from Futurism

39

12 | Susana Gardner

229

13 | Judith Goldman

241

14 | Laura Moriarty

261

PART 2 Loy and Dadaist Artisthood

4 | Artist-Vectors of the Dada Virus 5 | Dadaist Virginology

Conclusion

61

281

73

6 | Dadaist Play, Parody, and Politics

NOTES

91

285

BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

PART 3 Loy and Surrealist Artisthood

7 | The Surrealist: Revolutionary, Explorer, or Researcher? 117 8 | Writing Insel as/and the Surrealist Artist

129

v

351

333

203

189

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

extended to my new colleagues at the University of Southampton, who have provided a congenial context within which to proof and polish. I am grateful to Marianne Elrick-Manley, Rosalind Jacobs, Francis Naumann, and Carolyn Burke for their generous provision of images, insights, invitations, and recollections. Thanks for the images reproduced here are also due to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, ADAGP, IVARO, and bpk, and to Roger Conover again for all the permissions granted. The poets Judith Goldman, Susana Gardner, and Laura Moriarty were unreservedly supportive of my mission to draw their work into dialogue with that of Loy; I hope this might propel further new readers toward their poems. I am glad every day for my parents, Carol and Terence Hayden, and for my brothers, Dan, Luke, and Simon, who teach me to delight in words and world alike. All of my thanks, always, to Rachel Warriner and Jimmy Cummins, for taking me out, and into poetry— as well as for finding Z, the companion creature whose snores have soundtracked the writing of every page of this book. This book is dedicated—warmly, beamingly—to Paul Hegarty, the one I love.

Besides ensuring that Mina Loy achieved the readership she always deserved, Roger Conover’s encouragement and generosity have sustained my work on Loy from the first. I am deeply grateful to him for all he has done—for Loy, as her astute editor and advocate, and for this book. Hearty thanks to my editors, Matt Hofer and Elise McHugh at University of New Mexico Press, and to the anonymous external reviewers. For their guidance on this project in its initial stages, my thanks to Alex Davis and Mary Noonan. For her example, and the stewarding of the project’s middle phase, I would like to thank Lee Jenkins. I was also fortunate to have Keith Tuma and Craig Dworkin as esteemed early readers, both of whom provided invaluable support toward its realization in print. An award from the Irish Research Council enabled the initial scholarship for this book at University College Cork, and a Government of Ireland Fellowship ensured its eventual completion. In between, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) funded ten months of essential research at the “Degenerate Art” Research Centre of the Freie Universität, Berlin. Solid desks and silence were graciously furnished by Trevor Joyce in Shandon, as well as by my amazing parents, amid the magic of Quilty. My gratitude is also vii

ABBREVIATIONS

Lost LB—Mina Loy. The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy. Edited by Roger L. Conover. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. LU—Mina Loy. “Letters of the Unliving.” In The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 129–32. MAC—Mary Ann Caws, ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. NM—Laura Moriarty. Nude Memoir. San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2000. S&E—Sara Crangle, ed. Stories and Essays of Mina Loy. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011. Salt—Rachel Potter and Suzanne Hobson, eds. The Salt Companion to Mina Loy. London: Salt, 2010. SJ—Mina Loy. “Songs to Joannes. In The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 53–68. TS—Susana Gardner. to stand to sea. Portland, OR: Tangent Press, 2006. WP—Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma, eds. Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1998.

AOF—Mina Loy. “Aphorisms on Futurism.” In The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 149–52. BM—Carolyn Burke. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. DIS—Judith Goldman. “The Dispossessions.” In l.b.; or, catenaries. San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2011. DPP—Robert Motherwell, ed. The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. DR—Dawn Ades, ed. The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology. Translated by Timothy Adès et al. London: Tate, 2006. EM—Mina Loy. “The Effectual Marriage.” In The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 36–39. FM—Mina Loy. “Feminist Manifesto.” In The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 153–56. FTM—Günter Berghaus, ed. F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Translated by Doug Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006. Last LB—Mina Loy. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Edited by Roger L. Conover. Highlands, NC: Jargon Society, 1982.

ix

Introduction

T

oward the end of Mina Loy’s 1930s novel Insel, the titular artist charges his narrator with inconstancy of interest. To his peevish lament, Mrs. Jones, Loy’s gallery agent avatar, replies: “I get these wild enthusiasms for things—they don’t last.” 1 Jones’s admission has the air of a theatrical aside addressed to the house. Read in the context of Loy’s life and work, it registers a reference by the author to her own adhesions to and splittings from multiple factions of the avant-garde. Mapping Loy’s timeline onto a history of twentiethcentury avant-garde art movements, one might surmise that she had an enviable knack for being in the right place at the right time. Her period in Florence (1907– 1916) corresponded with the inception of Futurism. She was in New York (1916–1917) in the era of Dada’s evanescent appearance there. She was in Paris (1923– 1936) while Surrealism fomented, and she returned to New York in 1936 at the vanguard of what was soon to become a mass exodus from Europe. However, to attribute these overlappings to chance would be to misapprehend her. For Mina Loy did not merely coincide with these movements; she actively intervened upon them. Her interventions took forms variously critical, creative, curatorial, and indeed parodic: she published in their magazines, played their games, frequented their

salons, performed at events, contributed to exhibitions, and, in the instance of Surrealism, presided over its translation from Europe into America. Notwithstanding her parallel practice as a visual artist, it was in her writing that she responded directly and explicitly to Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and the notion of “degenerate art.” While Loy’s readers have long been aware of her intersections with these practices, her theorization of the avant-gardes’ reconceptualization of artistic identity has escaped examination.2 Curious Disciplines seeks to recalibrate the lens on Loy by foregrounding her critical dissection of protean Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, and “degenerate” artisthood. In tracking these constructions, it will become manifest that Loy’s enthusiasms were indeed wild: in the sense of being sometimes untamed or immoderate and—in their self-generated contradictions, resistances, and subversions—undomesticated and difficult to contain. Notwithstanding all contiguous and contesting appetites for isms, Loy’s affiliations with artist groups were never total. She did not want to dissolve within an artistic solution. Her enthusiasms may not have lasted, but they have left us with enduring insights. Curious Disciplines interprets anew the significance—for Loy, for American poetry, and for modernist studies—of those insights. 1

2

Introduction

In a questionnaire for the last Little Review, of May 1929, Loy responded to the question “What is your attitude toward art today” with a devastatingly glib “I never take such attitudes.” 3 Contra this claim, Loy was in fact processing informed and complex attitudes toward the art (world) of her day in forms more and less c/overt throughout her writing life. Some of these judgments are openly apparent. More often they are obscured. Almost invariably, they admit and indeed play out a compelling ambivalence. Loy’s work contains the testament of a critically overlooked intimacy—not so much with individual artists but with the rhetorical modes and conceptual rubrics used by and, in the case of “degenerate art,” about these artist group phenomena. Curious Disciplines presents Mina Loy as arch theorist of avantgarde artist identity. Owing to the ephemerality of her alliances and to her extraordinary mobility, Loy’s engagements with art(ist) movements have too often been conceived as though the artist/writer were passing through a series of developing baths: each of which, containing a new chemical composition, results in the manifestation of another influence on her work. The individual absorbs from and is imprinted by the aesthetic and intellectual currents of her vivid milieus, and thus from each encounter, she comes away a little changed. This book takes a new approach. Rather than attempting to discern in Loy’s work the traces of diverse literary-artistic movements, I look to see how she responded to the models of artisthood propagated by those groups in the leaflets, broadsides, and manifestos with which they baffled the public and inflamed the art world so as to excavate the richness of what she can contribute to our understanding of what it meant to be an artist within those movements. Loy was an artist and writer who worked across multiple media, whose making (unlike her public profile) was sustained throughout her life from childhood into old age. She spent decades of that life composing and

revising semi-autobiographical manuscripts that are, in part, fictionalizations of her own artistic becoming. She understood, as operator and mobile component part, the mechanics of the transatlantic art world, and she was manifestly fascinated by how these movements constructed themselves as public entities. Just as she was tantalized by what avant-garde collectivities appeared to offer to adherent artists, she was also repelled by the agonistic loss of self attendant upon assimilation.4 In 1996, Loy’s biographer, Carolyn Burke, suggested that “Her life, that of a woman peculiarly responsive to the social and artistic movements of her time, allows us to look more deeply into the self-constructing strategies of the international avant-garde.” 5 Now, twenty-plus years later, Curious Disciplines redirects attention from Loy’s life to her literary oeuvre; it asserts that her writing demands to be read as the site, or the practice, of that peculiar responsiveness. The “painter-poet” Mina Loy was first and forever a visual artist herself. Her unpublished, quasiautobiographical novel, “Goy Israels,” dramatizes to poignant and often comic effect the urgency with which Loy embarked on her artistic career. Avatar of Loy’s adolescent self, the young Goy of “Goy Israels” imagines that the study of art will “patch the shredded fabric of her intellect.” 6 Although her excitement on the eve of her first day at “the worst Art School perhaps in London” precludes sleep,7 she is quickly dismayed by “soiled casts” and a model who bears no resemblance to the Adonis she seeks to depict.8 Notwithstanding such disappointments, and her consignment to the role of “the artist as butt to the bourgeoisie” in her childhood home, her entrance into the institutional art world (and, soon after, its mobile enclaves) is coded as liberating.9 Induction into the artist class enables Goy (as it did Loy) to escape from an aesthetically impoverished birth context of “machine made furniture,” inhabited by socially normative “uni-conscious islanders who maintain that

Introduction

women who ‘did anything’ were still unwomanly.” 10 Making is both Mina Loy’s entry into modernity and, as she pursued interstitial occupations as a designer and artisanal producer, a means to support herself. Reviewing Joseph Cornell’s 1949 Aviary exhibition, Loy wrote: “Something insufficiently heeded has occurred in American art.” 11 Of her own plastic art production and contribution to the shaping of the American art world, we might well say the same. In the future, we will know more of Loy as visual artist. However, for the time being, the second term in the aptly balanced bipartite title “painter-poet,” which Clara Tice granted her in 1917, outweighs the latter.12 While she continued to make art up to and during her final residency in Aspen, her creative confluences with artist groups were conducted primarily in literary modes. We know her as a writer on art and (less fully) as an artist. She was, in addition, a remarkably edifying writer on movements and on the artists they produce. Each of the first four sections of this book is prefaced by a survey of a new model of avant-garde artisthood, as it manifested in Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and the discourse on “degenerate art.” My sources for the discussion of artist-led movements are the manifestos, broadsheets, pamphlets, and polemical ephemera of Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. In my analysis of “degenerate art,” I look at how exhibition apparatuses, speeches, catalogs, and press responses on either side of the Atlantic produced conflicting characterizations of what the avantgarde artist stood for in the years leading up to and into the Second World War. These major movements of the early twentieth century are, today, far from obscure— but neither art historians nor modernist scholars have analyzed how Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, and “degenerate art” polemics reconceptualized avant-garde artisthood for modernity. Woven from the texts produced by, rather than about, those movements, these four prefatory composite

portraits synthesize the narratives that these artist collectives constructed about their origins, their missions, their work practices, and their ambitions for the (art) world. They analyze the auto-fictive myths of the avantgarde to render down a model of the artist archetype to which Loy was reacting. Parts 1 through 4 each reconstrue Loy’s writings in the context of their contemporaneous intertexts: the manifestos, leaflets, and magazines so effusively distributed and energetically debated in Loy’s Florence, Paris, and (in two very different eras) New York. Rather than setting Loy’s work in dialogue with twenty-first-century historical accounts of avantgarde activities, I examine her response, as interlocutor, to how these movements wrote themselves, collectively, into being. The anecdotal details of these episodes in Loy’s history are well established, but they are too often rehearsed through the lens of her relationships and dominated by the glamour of her coteries. In 1919, Loy had a pamphlet printed in Florence to advertise her regimen of “AutoFacial Construction,” asserting therein: “The face is our most potent symbol of personality.” 13 The artist-inventor’s claim, in this instance, was intended to promote her esoteric system for the control and regeneration of the facial muscles through exercise of conscious will. Unfortunately, Loy’s readership has long tended to put rather too much store by this statement.14 Had she not been so abundantly picturesque, had her capacity to decorate a photo or enliven an anecdote not been privileged over her work as cultural producer and critical commentator, perhaps we might more readily have attended to the import of her writing not just within, but about, the avant-garde art world.15 Ranging across Loy’s published and unpublished poetry, prose, drama, polemics, and notes, my readings of Mina Loy are invested, to the last, in bringing the submerged depths (or bas profonds) of Loy’s subtle art world critique into high relief.16 Her theorization of the artistic avant-garde was

3

4

Introduction

arrived at, and delivered, through the practice of a literary avant-gardism that she pursued across multiple highly innovative, and often hybridized, genres, styles, and forms. It is in the elucidation of the particularities of specific phrasings and imagery used, the vocabularies appropriated, and allusions slyly submerged that the value of Loy’s astute disquisition on the construction of avant-garde artisthood surfaces. In Part 1, for example, we witness her countering Futurist machinolatry with organic metaphors and Futurist dynamism with stasis as she shows up the fault lines in Futurism’s speculative projections into the domains of physics and reproductive biology. As well as demanding deep scrutiny, the angle of approach elicited by these texts is principally oblique. We cannot take Loy entirely at her word when she says that she “never discussed anything about doing writing in any particular way, modern or more contemporary.” 17 However, notwithstanding the plasticity of her thinking, the timbre of her poetic remained intriguingly stable throughout her career. Accordingly, I am just as often compelled to point out the divergences between Loy’s literary output and the contexts within which it was produced as to conceive of her style in terms of visible yet only superficial resemblances to words-in-freedom or automatic writing. The object of this book is not to discover how those movements, those curious disciplines, act upon her, but instead to see how Loy intervenes in them. It seeks to define how her processual theorizing might reshape our conceptions of them. This is not to suggest that Mina Loy exerted a greater impact on Futurism than did Marinetti, or indeed that she outranks the prime movers in global Dada or rivaled Breton’s authority in Paris. That said, she was the sole British representative in the First Free Futurist International Exhibition at the Sprovieri in Rome (1914), was named a présidente of Dada in 1920, and served as overseas agent for the Julien Levy Gallery in the context of its transposition of Surrealism from

Paris to its new home in New York (1931–1936)—so she was hardly invisible within these many settings either. Owing to what Roger Conover, Mina Loy’s editor and executor of the Mina Loy estate, terms an amalgam of “intransigence and intrepidness,” Loy knew both renown and amnesia in her lifetime.18 Cognizance of her erstwhile obscurity and the essential task of recovering her legacy have, perhaps, distracted the scholarship from recognizing the scale of her intellectual engagement with avant-garde collectives. This book seeks to redress that tendency. Rather than once more rehearsing her biography, it seeks to expose Loy’s uncredited attention to, and metabolism of, the ways in which these movements talked themselves into being. The history of Loy’s reception is shot through with figures of delay; her recovery is frequently framed in terms of the restitution of a belated regard. Since the 1996 publications of Roger Conover’s edition of The Lost Lunar Baedeker and Carolyn Burke’s Becoming Modern: A Life of Mina Loy, and the publication of Keith Tuma and Maeera Shreiber’s collection of essays Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (1998), the critical discourse of delayed acknowledgment has been supplanted by one of ever more enthusiastic embrace.19 Loy’s postdating of the poem “An Aged Woman” to a date eighteen years after her death materializes the curious prescience that often saw her arriving at things—ideas, attitudes, modes of being—before her time.20 David Ayers has her presaging William Burroughs; conversely, Marisa Januzzi suggests that “Loy’s careful poetic attention to words as sound-images, what she called the ‘belle matière’ of art, is rooted in the word-conscious style of the Decadents, Pre-Raphaelites, and Symbolists before her,” and Sara Crangle has identified in her work “a latent Victorianism.” 21 Even as her writing somehow manages to “[l]ive in the future,” its “antedeluvian tail” anchors it “in the past.” 22 Modeling another intersection of Loy’s paradoxical entails of prescience and delay, her critical

Introduction

and analytical engagement with the movements I discuss barely registered in the instant of their production and partial publication. However, they can be discerned and, I believe, productively exploited today. Loy’s theories of avant-garde artisthood can and should inform our understandings now of the history of the (historical) avant-gardes. Observing in her “Bye-thoughts” that “It is the anarchists in art who become its instantaneous aristocracy,” 23 Loy was undoubtedly stimulated by the revolutionary promise of early-twentieth-century avant-gardism, and the movements dealt with in Parts 1 to 3 all conceived of their activities as in some way counter to the social status quo. Of course, in “degenerate art,” the model is inverted by the externally ascribed identification of the artists thus maligned with antisocial, anti-civilization intent and effects. These, then, are the ostracized artists against whom “The watchers of the civilized wastes / reverse their signals.” 24 Indeed, in her highly informed, personally imbricated, though linguistically nonspecific, embrace of avant-gardism, Loy’s positioning constitutes a perfect negative image of a Nazi cultural policy that set itself up (from a position of deliberate, declared ignorance) against every ism. She was, moreover, a congenital modernist—convinced that modern poetry must reflect “the collective spirit of the modern world.” 25 As her youthful enthusiasm for Rossetti and Burne Jones was supplanted by an affinity for the more recalcitrant “gorgeous reticence” of Brancusi and “the purest enticement of the abstract into the objective” of Cornell, the artistic endeavors that roused Loy’s most ecstatic acclamations were those in the apprehension of which “[v]isitors might gasp on confrontation.” 26 Avowing that “[a] contemporary brain wielding a prior brain is a more potent implement than a paint brush,” she was an early and intuitive advocate for artistic appropriation.27 For Loy, aesthetically innovative creative practices were not just better; they were also (paradoxically) more

comprehensible and more direct than their traditionalist counterparts. If the masses did not agree, it was because they had been corrupted by the staid orthodoxies of popular forms. As she wrote of Gertrude Stein: “It may be impossible for our public inured to the unnecessary nuisances of journalism to understand this literature, but it is a literature reduced to a basic significance that could be conveyed to a man on Mars.” 28 Although the avant-gardes themselves were conspicuously preoccupied with identifying the extent of their territories, indicating the expansiveness of their reach in the case of Dada, marking out what distinguishes them from their peers in Futurism, or policing the borders of Surrealism, these distinctions do not appear to have interested Loy. Not because she was not intrigued by these movements—for this book deals exclusively with evidence that she was. However, Loy’s conceptualization of the avant-garde anima is general rather than specific, plastic rather than static. For Loy, as for many of her contemporaries, the relations between movements were fluid and negotiable. As she moved between England, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Mexico, and Argentina, Loy dealt in the terms modernism, avantgarde, Futurist, Dada, and Surrealist as though they represented a suite of interlinked and overlapping incarnations—or perhaps parallel evolutionary phases—of the same “proto-form” spirit.29 So while this book is structured in such a way as to accord to each scene a separate section, it deliberately allows Loy’s slippages between ideas and terms associated with avant-gardism and modernism. My use of the term avant-garde encompasses much that might elsewhere be termed modernist, though it derives from a broadly Bürgerian conceptualization of artist collectives that sought to achieve the sublation of art into life praxis, subscribed to artistic experimentation, and constructed themselves as being at odds with the bourgeois societies from which they sprang.30

5

6

Introduction

The subject of Loy’s feminism is a freighted and fascinating thing, which has been discussed by critics including Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Paul Peppis, Natalya Lusty, Lucia Re, Christina Walter, Jessica Burstein, and Janet Lyon, and I tangle with it throughout what follows. Although Curious Disciplines is not overtly about feminism, it is written by a feminist fascinated by what Loy called her “weird strictly personal form of feminism.” 31 There is undoubtedly a feminist objective and a feminist consequence to effecting the recalibration of the lens on Loy that this book seeks to achieve. At the same time, it is also necessary to acknowledge that Loy’s subscription to feminism was at least as ambivalent, partial, and attenuated as were her affiliations with other movements. Arguing that feminism was wasting its time by placing its confidence in “economic legislation, vice-crusades and uniform education,” Loy advocated for the “Absolute Demolition” of “the rubbish heap of tradition.” 32 The agenda she propounded was at once more philosophically radical than the initiatives being pursued by her activist contemporaries and less pragmatically harnessable to realizing tangible change. Two compenetrating strands of thinking structure Loy’s feminism as I conceive of it here. The first is encapsulated by her claim, in the “Feminist Manifesto” (1914), that “there is nothing impure in sex—except in the mental attitude to it.” 33 The second articulates her fundamental opposition to the systems ordering patriarchal society: the gender binarisms and circumscribing structures that she repeatedly, wittily, reveals as ridiculous: O God that men and women having undertaken to vanquish one another should be allowed to shut themselves up in hot boxes and breed (“Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” 143)

These are the credos out of which Loy launched a dualpronged poetic assault on prudery and social convention. Wherever possible, she sought to subvert the delimitation of subject matter (and, indeed, the diction and idiolect) deemed proper to a female poet: TO your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark. THEY are empty except for your shame. (“Aphorisms on Futurism,” 152) Her prosecution of this mission manifests most openly and (in)famously in her treatments of sex (“AngloMongrels and the Rose,” “The Child and the Parent,” “Love Songs”), reproduction (“Parturition,” “Esau Penfold”), and infants (“Babies in Hospital,” Maternity)— but they also subtend her oeuvre at large. In the author’s self-characterization as “[t]he girlwho-has-no-reverence-for-her-maker,” there is more at stake than her avowed scorn for the mother whose admonitory Voice threatened to drain her capacity for creation.34 In both her life and her work, Loy resisted everything that her malign mother stood for: fantasies of middle-class moral probity, the idealization of virginity, gendered strictures on behavior and expression, “the fear of God and the flame of Hell.” 35 Throughout the texts discussed in this book, Loy refutes the givens of a traditionally moralistic and rule-bound, not yet modern society. In her writing, sexual and creative freedoms are frequently interfused, and censorship is always idiocy. The narrator’s fury when, in “Islands in the Air,” her drawing of Andromeda on the rock is torn up because her mother misinterprets a shadow on the figure’s thigh, is fierce.36 Loy’s rebukes against the censorship crusaders John S. Sumner and Owen Reed Smoot—encoded in the form and content of “O Marcel” and made explicit

Introduction

in “Censors Morals Sex”—are ferocious.37 Commending Joyce for flashing “the giant reflector / on the sub rosa——,” 38 Loy strove, in her own work, to do the same. While the recovery of female modernists has restored a formidable cadre of artists to contemporary readership, there prevails still a critical propensity to ascribe to women a purely iconic and self-oriented creative production. In uncovering how Loy’s investigations into the nature of avant-garde artisthood run concomitant with a mission to consternate the social morality she derided as “a system for simplifying the task of the Bureaucracy,” 39 Curious Disciplines counters this proclivity. Loy’s ekphrastic acumen inflects some of the readings in this book, but it does not predominate among them. My focus is not on her exaltation of “Joyce’s Ulysses,” “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” or “‘The Starry Sky’ of Wyndham Lewis.” Nor does it dwell upon her poetic celebrations of cultural icons in “Poe,” “Nancy Cunard,” or “Jules Pascin.” Instead of reflecting on how Loy responds to individual artists or their works, I set out to analyze how she digests the templates of avant-garde artisthood they constructed: explicitly, in manifestos and polemics, and implicitly, in their public performances of being avantgarde artists. The thirty-first of Loy’s “Aphorisms” commands: “UNSCREW your capability of absorption and grasp the elements of Life—Whole.” 40 The true brilliance of Mina Loy’s utterly unscrewed capability of absorption is more conceptual than primarily literary. It is the brilliance of Loy’s capability to absorb ideas of artisthood and her responsiveness—which is unflaggingly critical, surreptitiously informed, playfully complicating (she might say intricating), and wryly self-aware—that Curious Disciplines underscores. In Loy’s idiosyncratic hierarchy, infused as it was with elements of Christian Science, psychoanalysis, Bergsonism, and much else, the figure of the artist was undoubtedly granted an especial significance: a potency often conflated (in a continuum identified by Suzanne

Hobson as that of the artist-angel-bum) with a sort of iconoclastic sanctity.41 Indeed, such is her regard for the artist’s preeminence that in one undated holograph note, Loy considers: “If God created the world simply as raw material for the Artist.” 42 Curious Disciplines concentrates on Loy’s response to the models of artisthood promulgated by avant-garde movements of her era rather than on her representations of the artist as individual genius—though it does borrow its title from her “Apology of Genius.” However, I have always read that poem as temporally bound (modern) and aesthetically oriented (formally experimental) instead of positing an image of the individual artist as inherent and timeless genius. Loy’s use of genius in that poem is, I think, a defensive one. Semi-divine, her “Lepers of the moon” inhabit a sort of parallel artistic dimension.43 Transcending both “the chances of your flesh” and its prosaic requirements, they feed “upon the wind and stars.” 44 Though they forge the “Beautiful” from the “dusk of Chaos,” they incite only the enraged perturbation, “smooth fools’ faces / like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries,” of an uncomprehending populace.45 Immiscibly alien, notwithstanding shared names or genetic material (“You may give birth to us / or marry us”), the genius is a being apart from the masses—if not quite from another planet then at least a resident habitué from Earth’s orbit.46 However, the “sacerdotal clowns” for whom it speaks are outlaws not on grounds of their exceptional character but instead as a consequence of the new modes of art-making by which they except themselves from society.47 “Apology of Genius” defends its avant-garde “criminal mystic immortelles” as exemplars of genius precisely because the censor does not apprehend them as such.48 Alongside her arguably more personally imbricated investments in the fortunes of artists and women, Loy’s work also discloses a worldview that is abundant in compassion for the socially oppressed. Notwithstanding her acerbity and a certain (at times discomfiting) impatience

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with the quietude of her less progressive gender peers, Loy, as we can read her today, is committed to an idea of social justice that is aggregated with and sometimes exceeds her feminism. As Linda A. Kinnahan suggests, “her poems and prose writings from the teens and twenties, heavily influenced by first-wave feminist thought, read economic and gender equality in vexed relation.” 49 Loy herself once claimed that her weakest characteristic was her compassion.50 Long apparent in poems such as “On Third Avenue” (1942), “Chiffon Velours” (1944), “Hot Cross Bum” (1949), and “Mass Production on 14th Street,” since the publication of “The Partition,” “Universal Food Machine,” and “My Catholick Confidante” in Sara Crangle’s 2011 edition of Loy’s short prose, the ethics undergirding her poetic project are coming increasingly to the fore. Notwithstanding her enthusiasm for art and artists, Loy’s esteem for her creative contemporaries was always tempered. In her play “The Pamperers,” she parodies the novelty-chasing ism-mania of a hidebound modernist art scene that makes every actor—artist, patron, cultural enthusiast—equally complicit in an absurd farce. Setting its subjects amid the overwrought aestheticism of “Sèvres bow—Gilded crimson—Curved flutings,” this play constructs a mordant portrayal of an elite social circle.51 The “Picked People” espouse a “passion for danger” and swoon at the Houseless Loony’s ambition to “make Life out of cigar-ends.” 52 However, their predilection for washing artists clean before rebranding them for public consumption (furnishing them, in the process, with a host of new neuroses) exemplifies many of the paradoxes vitiating the histories of the early-twentiethcentury avant-gardes. Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas contends that the play is “directed broadly at an avant-garde that allowed itself to be patronized, sanitized and co-opted by the very class it set out to undermine.” 53 However, Ossy’s promise to the redoubtable salonnière, “Di . . . if you half guessed what I’ve caught in the stables, you’d

throw Futurism to . . .” rebounds, boomerang-like, against the fickle, fleeting enthusiasms of Loy herself.54 In her depiction of the rebranding ritual that sees the artist-outsider Loon remade as “great Vitalist,” Loy invokes her own (past and future) contributions to the mythmaking and reputation-building of avant-garde artist icons and movements. By parodying the means by which artists are mediated and manipulated by third parties, “The Pamperers” both reflects on the commodification of the Loy’s own artist persona and bears witness to a tendency, tracked throughout the readings that follow, for the author to admit (and encode in her writings) complicity with the objects of her critique.55 Her novel Insel is the story of a female gallery agent’s vain attempts to deliver a “cagey genius” into the American art world.56 Although she is ultimately compelled to give up, removing herself entirely from the effects of his “depredatory radioactivity,” Mrs. Jones first expends considerable efforts on the attempt to make Insel a productive, commercial, salable artist.57 Reread against Insel’s narrative of surrender and severance, Diana’s boast “I have never met a genius I couldn’t manage yet,” resonates implicitly.58 Her final speech to the Loon-turned-great-Vitalist constitutes a compressed crib sheet in genteel habits: “Shown a picture . . . Look at the left-hand corner . . . / A book? Pass an innocuous finger-nail down the back of the binding.” 59 Lampooning the superficial nous required of the salon-attendee, Loy ridicules the cultural elite. However, the genius’s speedy absorption into fashionable society— as shorthanded via his immediate adoption of Diana’s penchant for going about singly shod—is no more favorably handled. The artist brut(e) is at least as culpable as those who tame him. Having initially delighted in exaggerating the differences between them, by the end of the play this new-minted genius of tomorrow admits that he and his female patron are, in fact, the same. “The Pamperers” suggests that the trade in cultural capital that

Introduction

regulates and lubricates the avant-garde art world is one in which there are no entirely legitimate traders. In the unpublished novel Esau Penfold, we see Loy rehearsing a countervailing preoccupation to her fascination with modernist genius. Via the scathing depiction of its eponymous character (a faintly fictive stand-in for Loy’s first husband, Stephen Haweis), the author exemplifies the ignominy of a preening artist-pretender. Where Stein “gives such fresh significance to her words, as if she had got them out of bed early in the morning and washed them in the sun,” of Esau she says, “Even his observations were quotations.” 60 What is worse, Esau’s cognizance of his own artistic inferiority compels him to punish his wife for her public acknowledgment as sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne. Fingering his gun in a threatening pantomime, he taunts her for her lack of productivity and, in another fragment, suggests “in gloating irony—‘The Honour that has been “done” you in Paris seems to have made you lazy?’” 61 The agon in these scenes is unambiguously gendered; the crime of the woman’s superior talent is greatly aggravated by the incongruity of her sex. Esau’s insistence on continuing to paint when, as Sophia tells him, he has no talent, is cast as not alone absurd but, in a Loy-al universe, morally reprehensible. The response of this “near moron”—“In pretending to the Arts I am received by Society whereas were I a bankclerk I should be definitely out”—betrays a cynicism that appalls the narrator and contravenes in every way Loy’s atavistic attachment to Romantic ideals of heroic artisthood.62 Inauthentic, derivative, obsequious, and bent on social climbing, Esau is the antithesis of all that Loy most values in the artist. His wife, the protagonist of this undated novel, is a young painter who, “[a]ssisting at the peculiarly unanalyzable conversation of second-rate artists [. . .] despised them with the instinct of blind loyalty to an inner conviction as yet—unformed.” 63 Esau Penfold’s Sophia operates as a quasi-biographical analog

to the speaker of Loy’s early Florence poems. In Loy’s construction of this oppressed, defiant artist-heroine, she delivers the position papers of a young female artist whose aesthetic is still evolving but whose critical faculties and creative will are, nonetheless, prematurely ripe. In her 1925 essay “On Modern Poetry,” Loy identified “the secret of the new poetry” to be “the direct response of the poet’s mind to the modern world of varieties in which he finds himself.” 64 This book analyzes the direct responses of Loy’s poet’s mind to the modern art world and the modern(ist) varieties of avant-garde artisthood among which she found, repeatedly reconstructed, and refound herself. In Part 1 I consider how, under Marinetti, Italian Futurism constructed the Futurist as a dynamic activist committed to achieving the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe: a world transformed by creativity. Focusing on the Futurists’ deployment of propaganda and branding mechanisms to propagate a utopian vision, this chapter describes how an official vision of the Futurist artist as antagonistic everyman was destabilized by the simultaneous dissemination of two alternative visions of Futurist identity: the artist as hero and the artist as martyr. Through readings of “Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” “Brontolivido,” “Pazzarella,” “Aphorisms on Futurism,” “One O’Clock at Night,” “The Sacred Prostitute,” and “The Effectual Marriage,” I demonstrate how Loy reflects and refracts the tropes and motifs of Futurist self-construction. Anatomizing the traces of these incompatible templates of artisthood in her work, I explore Loy’s negotiation of the circumscription of intellectual and creative energies that results from the surrender of artistic subjectivity to the massed will of the Futurist collective. Part 2 describes the Dadaist as a being motivated by disgust and defiance; a variegate and fluid entity, liberated by ambiguity and chance. Conceived of as a

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pan-national spirit, the Dada artist challenges authority and notions of civilization, truth, morality, and the institutional art world with mischief, self-awareness, mockery, and bathos. These chapters demonstrate that for Loy, being Dada meant making art that could be playful, provocative, and political all at once. Reading “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” against “The Black Virginity” and her “Feminist Manifesto,” I situate Loy’s campaign against the cult of virginity for the first time within the context of Dada’s contiguous desacralization of virginity. I propose that “Pas de Commentaires! Louis M. Eilshemius” be reevaluated as a surreptitious treatise on the ramifications of the Independents scandal, a meditation on outsider art, and a Dada-resistant defense of value. Finally, I examine “O Marcel . . . otherwise I Also Have Been to Louise’s.” By embedding it within the environment of pre-Prohibition, censorship-haunted New York, I reconceive of this often-overlooked text as a covert collage-portrait of New York Dada artisthood. Part 3 foregrounds Breton’s efforts to delineate and control the contours of Surrealist artisthood. Charting Surrealism’s initial utopianism and later capitulations to commercial pragmatism, it analyzes the movement’s attempts to configure a new, socially relevant role for the artist. Highlighting the fractures in Surrealism’s selfconception, I evaluate its paradoxical attachment to a model of collectivity founded in routine, bureaucracy, and a totalitarian presumption of absolute artistic submission. I then explore Loy’s complex refraction of Surrealist artisthood via a close reading of Insel. Uncovering the novel’s unacknowledged metatextual commentary on its own construction, I argue for a much less biographically reflective agenda than has heretofore been imputed to this novel. I detail how the trajectory of Richard Oelze’s life up to and after his arrival in Paris is distorted by Loy in Insel to render a dramatically impoverished and seductively subversive Surrealist artist figure. These chapters make the case for a new reading of Insel as an

intellectually engaged and affectively charged meditation on the threat and allure of Surrealist collectivity. Part 4 addresses the notion of the “degenerate artist.” It considers how, in the context of the Nazi rhetoric of “Entartete Kunst,” avant-garde artisthood became a politically and ethically charged issue on both sides of the Atlantic. The preceding sections deal primarily with the ephemeral texts issued by avant-garde movements. Here I draw upon the art journalism, memoirs, and exhibition catalogs that issued from major players in the New York art world of the 1930s and early 1940s. My analysis teases out the often-unfortunate resonances between the rhetoric employed by the Nazi administration to vilify the avant-garde artist and the response it elicited in the United States. American responses to avant-garde artisthood as conceived within the paradigm of “degenerate art” are solicited from the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the testimonies of axiomatic figures in the New York art world: Alfred H. Barr (first director of the Museum of Modern Art), Varian Fry (the man appointed to save important European artists stranded in Europe), and Peggy Guggenheim (the woman whose gallery was to determine the future of postwar American art). At this point, the book returns its focus to Insel, to recontextualize the novel in terms of Nazi discourses of artistic degeneracy. Arguing that Insel discloses a manifestation of degeneracy that runs parallel to its transformation of the artist in surrealism, I advance a new, allegorical reading of the novel as a submerged account of “degenerate” European artist-exiles at the mercy of an American art world. Part 4 then traces discourses of degeneracy through the Galerie Fischer auction of seized modernist art and the exhibition of Art in Our Time at the MoMA. It reveals how, through its reporting on these gallery acquisitions and on exhibitions of German and American art in 1938 and 1939, the American art world prepared the ground for the nation’s self-ordination as champion of cultural freedom. This process was crucial to the enthronement of the American artist as the prime

Introduction

model of avant-garde artisthood in the postwar art world. Finally, I circle back to the recently uncovered “Visitation of Insel.” In light of the “Visitation,” I argue, we must reassess both the supplemental text’s relation to the novel proper and Insel’s significance as an artifact of the artistic avant-garde’s Nazi-propelled transatlantic transfer. Mina Loy’s writing is important not alone to the history of modernism but to its continuing, “unfinishing” development. Part 5 turns from considering Loy’s responses to the cross-cultural evolution of the modern art world to offer a tripartite perspective on Loy’s own legacies for twenty-first-century American poetics. In these three chapters, a trio of contemporary poets—Susana Gardner, Judith Goldman, and Laura Moriarty—are read through three single-poem publications. Each reading represents a different way to consider these works as legacies of Loy. The chronology of this book’s elucidation of Loy’s intellectual engagement with notions of avant-garde artisthood walks in step, albeit a few paces apart, with Loy’s biography in the period (1909–1945). However, it steps around what was, from what we can gather, considered by Loy the crucial meridian in a long life of cosmopolitan vagabondage. I mean, of course, her love affair with Arthur Cravan, the husband “Well chosen and so ill-relinquished.”65 In Chapter 12, I address that lacuna by reading Susana Gardner’s to stand to sea as an elegiac intertext to Loy’s elegies for Cravan and a contemporary mythification of Loy’s own artist persona. Positioning Loy as poet exemplar in American poetry today, I discuss how Gardner’s open paean absorbs, interprets, and innovates upon its typographical, lexical, and historical inheritances. In Chapter 13, Judith Goldman’s The Dispossessions is nominated as an intertext for Loy’s “Songs to Joannes.” I enlist the 1930s rogue anthropology of Roger Caillois to map their shared investments in exploring erotic dissolution and lyric subjectivity through surreptitious citation, mordant irony, and unblushing delivery. By reading William Burroughs

back into Goldman’s poem, I unearth a further point of intersection in their mutual facility for reconfiguring misogynistic found material into “zombified” feminist form. Finally, in Chapter 14, Laura Moriarty’s Nude Memoir is proposed as a contemporary analog to Loy’s feminist poetics of ambivalent, incarnated art critique. Drawing upon readings of the Étant donnés by Amelia Jones and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, I explore how Moriarty’s complex poetic response to Duchamp’s installation interrogates the object, its artist, its audiences, and, crucially, the author herself. Her poem’s processing of Duchamp’s legacy—his art-making, reception, and mythification—evinces a nuanced, self-reflexive, and equivocal potency that is, I argue, distinctly Loy-al. Curious Disciplines explores Loy’s writings from the period when she was most mobile and most (publicly) active and considers her legacies for contemporary American poetry. Taken as a whole, it sets out to open a new perspective on this recently recovered poet—to reposition her cross-disciplinary corpus as a body of work that is of value both as an exemplar of the transnational avant-gardism of the last century and as a conscious and critical camera lucida that works through and on those curious disciplines.  Editor’s note: Mina Loy famously played with spacing and indentation; however, the constraints of this book force some lines of poetry to be broken in ways that do not reflect Loy’s intentions. The reader should note that hanging indents have been used where originally unbroken lines of poetry have been forced to another line due to the limitations of the column width. These runover lines (appearing on pages 41, 42, 233, 235, and 239) should not be confused with the larger spaces and indentations that appear in Loy’s work. Consultation with the published poems in their original context is encouraged.

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PART 1 Loy and Futurist Artisthood

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| The Futurist Artist TM

A

s “the acknowledged spiritual and organizational leader of the entire movement” and supreme incarnation of the Futurist persona, the significance of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti cannot be overestimated.1 Although other artists occasionally opposed his wisdom, many of the patents he attempted to secure on various literary and typographical innovations were discredited, and his preeminence was challenged (as Loy was acutely aware) by Papini’s alter-Futurist group in Florence, none succeeded in usurping his power. Thus it was Marinettian Futurism that was flamboyantly caricatured, celebrated, and reviled in the newspapers of Europe’s capital cities. This is the form of Futurism that aggressively invaded the public consciousness and that was so cannily transmitted to the wider European and Anglo-American artistic communities. Accordingly, and notwithstanding the recent critical turn toward recognizing variegate global Futurisms, this chapter confines its attention to the canonical face of the Futurist anima as trademarked by Marinetti.2 In the conviction that the conceptual vibrations it provoked rippled long after and far afield,3 and cognizant of the absence of a critical consensus on the date of its eventual demise,4 I will hold to Poggioli’s assertion that each discrete avant-garde eruption lasts “only a morning” and attend most assiduously

to Futurism’s matutinal apotheosis in the period between 1909 and 1915.5 What the Futurists seek is the sublation of art into life, a revolution in the way art functions in society. Thus, although the Futurists railed against the tyranny of their artistic heritage and called for the destruction of cultural institutions, “art was not to be simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed form.” 6 Aspiring to the practical realization of an integrated art world—socially engaged art with artistically engaged society—and committed to addressing and reeducating the public at large, Futurism championed a profoundly socially engaged art: an art that “turns young men into gods, increases maturity a hundredfold, and rejuvenates old age.” 7 Extruding a revolutionary credo via an accessible aesthetic, the Futurists sought to rouse the slumbering masses by promulgating an art praxis that never demanded elevated visual or linguistic literacy from its audience. The Futurist artist’s energies were dedicated to inducing the forced sublation of art—in the broadest, most diffusely creative sense—with the daily lived experience of the modern masses. Before Futurism could reconfigure the role of art in society, it had to convince its audience that the concept 15

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of art it was so aggressively promulgating really was a new and unique phenomenon. In open letters, leaflets, and pamphlets, with abrasive gusto and evident glee, the Futurists set about denouncing all “art of the past” as “a great joke based on moral, religious, ethical and political foundations.” 8 Subscribing to what Krauss has termed “a parable of absolute self-creation,” they asserted, “It is only with us Futurists that true ART will be born.” 9 They claimed copyright on all innovation and declared themselves to be “absolutely opposed” to everything that was not Futurist.10 Disavowing the value of all inherited masterpieces, and in thrall to an exclusively Futurist conception of the world, they declared themselves to be without artistic ancestry.11 This antagonistic posture and the enraged responses it elicited—most of which lacked, in their earnest indignation, the playfulness of Marinetti’s initial effrontery—vitiated the Futurist artist’s reputation as an agitator unafraid to challenge the value of any cultural totem and ever ready to incense his peers. Futurism’s distinctly masculinist bent has brought it infamy as a misogynistic movement, obscuring the visibility within magazines such as l’Italia Futurista (June 1916–February 1918) and Roma Futurista (September 1918–May 1920) of work by Futurist women. As Walter Adamson points out, “From its beginning Futurism also held a strong attraction for women anxious to escape the confines of traditional roles, an interest that further increased during World War I as the rapid social changes it imposed created new opportunities and expectations for women.” 12 The woman question was a live and contentious one within the movement—with the Futurists swinging between anti-conventionalist rhetoric and the traditionalist gender values later associated with Fascism. Lucia Re contends that Marinetti’s strategy was to accept women and certain privileged aspects of femininity (as he defined it) that he deemed eminently and inherently Futurist (instinctiveness, sensuality, flexibility, intuition, dynamism, volatility, lack of scruple, and

indifference to the spiritual and the philosophical) while retaining the male hegemony of Futurism and his own position as undisputed leader.13 For female Futurists such as Maria Ginanni, Magamal, Enif Robert, and Rosa Rosà, and, as I will go on to demonstrate, for Loy, the Futurist doctrine of “scorn for women” pointed toward a (somewhat perilous but artistically productive) route by which to escape from constricting models of feminine identity. Predicating their practice on singularity, the Futurists were fixated on the quality of novelty or, failing that, the illusion of it. To the considerable frustration of their enemies, this isolationist stance did not preclude their appropriation of aesthetics and techniques from other movements.14 Futurism’s illimitable appetite for novelty shifted the artist’s primary function from creator to innovator, inventor, and visionary. Conceiving of art praxis and political purpose as conjoined articulations of what Raymond Williams identifies as “a clean break with the past,”15 and purporting to have irreparably smashed the guiding compass of past tradition, the Futurist artist is portrayed as a maverick, a long-awaited art world messiah, primed for real world intervention. Central to this reconfiguration of artistic identity is a reenvisioning of the artist as a performer within public space. Suffused with an essential theatricality in all its manifestations, the Futurist artist was remade as a relentless, often obstreperous vocal performer—a voice interrupting and disrupting public discourse. The artist’s domain expanded, taking Futurism beyond the customary confines of the institutions of the art world and into more democratic public spaces. By dissolving the borders separating the art world from the lived world, by liberating art from the geographical and conceptual constraints that had heretofore limited it to the gallery or concert hall, the Futurists introduced a new, unprecedented degree of interpenetration between the art world and the outside. With the

The Futurist Artist TM

inception, in Trieste, on January 12, 1910, of the Futurist serata, art-making became a form of theater. Raucous crowds were encouraged to participate and urged to consider themselves as co-performers, while the activity onstage functioned as an incitement to action, even violence, among the assembled crowd. By June 1914, the public appetite for, and commercial viability of, the serata concept had been sufficiently established to justify booking Marinetti to appear in London’s Coliseum twice daily for an entire week.16 In contradistinction to the success of Futurism’s divagations in performance art, the Futurist plastic arts were, from the first, neither as innovative nor as anti-traditional in execution as the manifestos promised. Notwithstanding their defining obsession with the “ABSOLUTE VALUE OF NOVELTY,” 17 as the Futurist movement spread, its aesthetic—chiefly concerned with the evocation of synesthesia, kinesthesia, and unanism—failed to advance, and even the vitality of Futurist writing declined with time. In literature, as in the plastic arts, the anxiety to prove precedence motivated many Futurist proclamations and further antagonized the Futurists’ avant-garde counterparts. A canny understanding of the machinations of the media and sensitivity to the legitimizing power of publication incited the execution of numerous instances of subterfuge and tactical redating.18 The promotion of a “synthetic” art, one in which generic boundaries are entirely dissolved in the service of the purest, most potent creative impulse and in which “[t]here is neither painting nor sculpture, neither music nor poetry: there is only creation,” is a foundational tenet of the Futurist vision.19 “[P]reoccupied only with creating synthetic expressions of cerebral energy,” the ideal Futurist creator will transcend consummately the boundaries of genre and medium. Creating indiscriminately, he will paint, write, sculpt, and perform.20 The synthetic creation model coheres well with the movement’s campaign

against the institutionalized teaching of art, a system that historically demanded specialization of its students. Obliging the artist to work beyond the bounds of his or her natural area of expertise and training, it also contributes to the de-reification and subsequent democratization of specific technical expertise, rendering the vision of the artist as untrained, amateur everyman a more attainable ideal. Considerable sums of money and “cerebral energy” were devoted to the construction of hybrid forms such as verbal collage, dipinto parolibero and synchronic tables, experiments that naturally accorded with the anarcho-socialist aspirations of the Futurist program. Combining a high level of avant-garde anti-conventional linguistic experiment with a visual component that could easily be read by the uninitiated, these orthographically and typographically innovative experiments in “shaped poetry” fulfilled Marinetti’s promise of an avant-garde art without elitism.21 By passing the electrical currents of his wealth, marketing nous, and hyperbolic genius through the nascent and heretofore nebulous anima of what Poggioli would later christen “The Futurist Moment,” F. T. Marinetti masterminded the manufacture of the Futurist franchise. From the organizational structures of unions and anarcho syndicates, he borrowed a highly efficient form of centralized control and discredited the Futurist credentials of any rogue artists or writers who claimed precedence over him. Incurring the envy of other Svengali captains of the avant-garde, his capacity for generating news ensured that the Futurist happenings were reported upon far beyond the arts and review pages. Lawrence Rainey notes that “after only six weeks in England” in the spring of 1912, “the Futurists had elicited 350 articles in newspapers and reviews and had earned more than 11,000 francs in sales.” 22 When Tzara expressed his intention to “invent a new artistic tendency,” he admitted that “the notoriety of Marinetti, the head of the Italian Futurists, made him lose sleep.” 23 Under Marinetti’s

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direction, leaflets, posters, letters, volantini (broadsheets), and periodicals, which were specifically engineered to engender controversy, constructed the Futurist artist as an unapologetically oppositional irritant. Provocatively designated, with incendiary titles, these texts often promised greater offense than the works to which they refer ever deliver. In the conviction that a reputation for histrionic boorishness was preferable to anonymity, Marinetti made public every titillating allegation, declaration of enmity, and occasional physical altercation that arose within or against the group. Marinetti’s influence pervades the history of every facet of Futurist production and performance; his imprimatur made a sculpture, painting, or poem Futurist. His dominance of the movement and its history encourages the overdetermining of Futurism by its Fascist future. His capacious finances—deployed to fund various Futurist publications—further consolidated both his own power and the global preeminence of Italian Futurism. For all that Marinetti preached creative democracy, he practiced tyranny. For all that he promoted the destruction of syntax, “the absolute freedom of images or analogies, expressed with unhampered words and with no connecting strings of syntax and with no punctuation,” his writing retained for the most part its Symbolist fulsomeness.24 For all that he incited proletarian revolution and revolt, he was never willing to relinquish control. Posing alternately as hero, as martyr to the Futurist cause, or as just another member of the talented proletariat, Marinetti’s marionetteering incarnates every contradiction of the Futurist conception of the artist. A readiness to confront—indeed to embrace—the commercial reality of art-making in the twentiethcentury capitalist city was crucial to the establishment of the Futurist artist as a being no longer set apart but actively, acutely engaged with the spirit of the time.25 In 1914, Corradini and Settimelli proclaimed: “THE PRODUCER OF ARTISTIC CREATIVITY MUST JOIN

THE COMMERCIAL ORGANIZATION WHICH IS THE MUSCLE OF MODERN LIFE.” 26 Presaging the spirit of Cendrars’s ecstatic “Publicité = Poésie” equation of 1927, Futurism cultivated a symbiotic relationship with the world of advertising.27 As Poggioli observes, the Futurist collective reveled in its “demagogic moment,” deploying “self-advertisement, propaganda, and proselytizing” tactics to parachute a new model of avantgarde artisthood into the everyday environment of the Italian populace.28 This highly sophisticated branding initiative was in large part conducted at the level of language. Although he initially employed the conventional art-historical terminology in his writings about Futurism, Marinetti quickly abandoned the word school, replacing it with the very differently nuanced and thereafter frequently invoked movimento (“movement”).29 By 1914 he was declaring, “Futurism . . . is neither a petty religion nor a school but rather a great, united movement of intellectual heroisms.” 30 Stephen Bury maintains, “This was the first time that an art movement called itself a ‘movement.’” 31 The strategic introduction of this unorthodox nomenclature into the discussion of art imbued the movement with an air of activism, political purchase, and collective agency.32 It spoke of a desire to renovate popular presumptions about what a group of artists might hope to achieve. Eager to establish a brand identity for his movement, Marinetti situated its corporate headquarters in his own house. A plaque inscribed “Futurism” hung over the entrance at La Casa Rossa, at Corso Venezia 61 in Milan, publicly advertising the corporate function of this residence.33 As I will go on to mention in Part 3, André Breton also designated his home a venue for official Surrealist happenings, and other avant-garde groups, including the Omega Workshops (1913–1919), used street signage—but to very different effect.34 Lista and Sheridan argue convincingly for the strategic importance of Futurism’s visibility, asserting that Marinetti’s genius lay

The Futurist Artist TM

in his application of the knowledge that “only the name produces the effective existence of things.” 35 This insight compelled him to cover the walls and billboards of Italy’s major cities with huge white posters emblazoned with the single potent word Futurism—in red.36 Many manifestos, items of official correspondence, and the stationery used for submissions to magazines were similarly branded to bear the stamp of the “Direzione del movimento Futurista.” 37 Futurist artists were also directed to indicate their allegiance to the movement whenever they signed their names, and, as Puchner notes, Marinetti even supplied his minions with “master lists of futurist words and concepts, a lexicon from which futurist manifestos could be made.” 38 In the context of a highly diffuse, prolific, and aesthetically incoherent art practice, these measures conspired to effect, if not the impression or existence of a shared Futurist aesthetic then certainly a sense of a unified Weltanschauung—a commitment to the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe. On February 14, 1915, an essay entitled “Futurismo e Marinettismo,” synthesizing many of the arguments previously made against Marinetti in La Voce and elsewhere, was published in Lacerba. Authored by Giovanni Papini, it was further endorsed by the signatures of Aldo Palazzeschi and Ardengo Soffici. While the “precise aim” of true Futurism is celebrated, the cult of Marinettismo is derided for having promoted the creation and dissemination of new forms that lack the necessary theoretical foundations to be any more than superficially innovative. Such challenges to Marinetti’s patent on Futurism were not unknown, but they failed to dislodge him from his position in the public consciousness, and pretenders to his title ultimately conceded that, in Europe at least, Futurism belonged to him. Writing of his decision to abandon the originally Symbolist periodical Poesia (1905–1909), Marinetti describes his adoption of a new, active approach in terms of an epiphany: “I suddenly sensed that articles,

poems, and polemic were no longer enough . . . we had to go out into the streets, lay siege to the theatres, and introduce the fist into the struggle for art.” 39 Comparing Futurist publications to the precious editions produced by the Surrealists and Cubists, Claudia Salaris concludes that Marinetti was ideologically opposed to the fashion of producing limited print runs of rare and precious books—privileging instead the mass production of widely accessible printed matter.40 All those whose influence was deemed potentially valuable to the Futurist cause, “journalists, politicians, artists, intellectuals, industrialists, potential sympathizers and active rivals . . . found themselves flooded with gratis copies of books, newspapers, journals, magazines, and leaflets streaming forth from the Marinetti factories.” 41 If Futurism’s propaganda-driven auto-construction of its own myth represents the apogee of its art world legacy, the germination and propagation of that myth owes everything to its “arte di far manifesti.” In the spring of 1909, Futurism galvanized a new era in art-making through the characteristically bombastic announcement of its own recent birth. With its first appearance in print, on the front page of Le Figaro, newspaper of record of the cultural capital of Europe, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism” secured the attention of a global and general, non-art-world-specific audience. It also indelibly inscribed Marinetti into the role of visionary leader in the history of the movement. Although the Futurist myth machine prefers to depict the events of February 20, 1909, as an unheralded and explosive point of rupture in the history of European art, the real circumstances of its appearance are rather less theatrical. In further illustration of Marinetti’s harnessing of the mechanisms of the institutional art world, publication of the manifesto, then titled only “Le Futurisme,” had actually been preceded by a number of test runs and false starts in Bologna and Milan.42 Framed as a collective avowal of allegiance, it was in fact the work of one, albeit

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uncommonly catalytic, man. Disguised as an account of artistic fait (mouvement) accompli, the manifesto unambiguously announces the existence of a ready-formed Futurist group. However, it was only with the publication of “The Foundation and Manifesto” that Marinetti came to be introduced to the Futurists-in-waiting: Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, and Severini. Indeed, although the eleventh thesis of the 1909 manifesto describes Futurist painting techniques, they had not yet, at this point, produced even one recognizably “Futurist” painting.43 If, like Austin’s “illocutionary act,” the manifesto’s power resides in its “performance of an act in saying something,” as opposed to the mere “performance of an act of saying something,” 44 then this, as Mary Ann Caws observes, “is a case of the manifesto making the movement.” 45 The 1909 manifesto rendered an inchoate and formless zeitgeist into Futurism Inc. Performed in public arenas and published in affordable mass reproduction, future Futurist manifestos established the Futurist artist as a socially conscious, politically active, and physically and intellectually dynamic figure. Eager to eliminate the Bürgerian “antithesis between producer and recipient,” 46 or art maker and art audience, the Futurists sought to bring about the sublation of art into life by inviting members to actively engage in Synthetic Creation. In “Beyond Communism,” Marinetti elucidates his vision of a future in which art and social praxis are harmoniously integrated to the benefit of all. Describing a utopian society enlivened by constant creative industry, one in which the mechanisms of criticism and valuation have been dismantled, he foretells the advent of “a time . . . in which life will not be simply a matter of bread and toil, nor of idle existence, but a work of art,” of a civic life “made more cheerful, less stressful, by an unending number of art festivals.” 47 The notion of “a Palace or House of Talent” presented in “Beyond Communism” in the form of “Open Exhibitions of Creative Talent” recurs in “The Proletariat of

Talented People.” 48 This 1919 manifesto proposes the establishment in every town of interdisciplinary art exposition centers; state-funded temples to creative talent will display painting, sculpture, and architectural and industrial design and provide a space for the performance of musical compositions and the reading of literary and scientific texts. In an apparent effort to entice members of the public to join the ranks of this “Talented Proletariat” (and echoing the thwarted intentions of the 1917 Independents Group in New York), it stipulates the absence of any form of any adjudication panel, promising both that no entrance charge will apply and that all submissions “will be exhibited or read without being formally judged, no matter how absurd, idiotic, mad or immoral they may appear to be.” 49 “Artistic Rights Defended by the Italian Futurists” was presented by Prampolini to the Düsseldorf Congress of Avant-Garde Art in May 1922.50 While earlier treatises had merely bemoaned “the indifference of the King, the State, and the politicians toward art,” this manifesto—though ostensibly preoccupied with defining the status of the movement as “artistic and ideological,” a very pertinent separation of the art movement from the Fascist party—makes specific, innovative but pragmatic demands on the Italian state.51 As Adamson observes, “[Futurism] opposed high-bourgeois culture but not the principles of capitalism or even the hegemony of the bourgeoisie of the capitalist order.” 52 Epitomizing this acquiescence to the given structures, the tenor of this text is unusually bureaucratic, unequivocally worded, and theoretically if not financially viable. It calls for the establishment of “Loan banks” and “Financial assistance” for artists and recommends the formation of “Advisory Technical Councils” and “An International Consortium.” 53 Born of a commitment to dissolving the boundaries between art world and society at large, it petitions for a tangible system of state-run supports to maintain and nurture the artistic community,

The Futurist Artist TM

commercialize artistic production, and professionalize the artist as entrepreneur. In contradistinction to these admittedly utopian but rationally theorized texts, Corradini and Settimelli’s 1914 manifesto “Weights, Measures and Prices of Artistic Genius” presents a series of particularly inscrutable demands. A vitriolic introduction derides “passéist pseudo-criticism” and proposes the instigation of a new system of “measurement” untainted by the “foul” connotations of critical practice.54 Riddled with ephemeral, neologistic allusions to accumulators of cerebral energy, cerebrators, and fantasticators, this guide to “the first real criticism” fails to provide any operating instructions for the government, of which it requests “A BODY OF LAW FOR THE PURPOSE OF GUARDING AND REGULATING THE SALE OF GENIUS.” 55 Such querulous entreaties can only have undermined the authority of the Futurists in their (admittedly peripatetic) quest to win political power and transform the relationship between art and state. Concluding with the directive “THE STUPENDOUS IMPORTANCE OF OUR AFFIRMATIONS REGARDING THE WILL OF GENIUS AND OF FUTURIST RENEWAL MUST BE EXALTED,” it ultimately stands as an exercise in arrogant whimsy.56 Pushed to its endpoint, the Futurist campaign for real world agency crystallizes in the notion of the Futurist utopia Marinetti called artecrazia. In a state ruled by Futurists, artist-activists would lead a society in which creativity was prized above all. In “Beyond Communism” (1920), Marinetti rejoices in the future promised by the advent of artecrazia, proclaiming: “Yes! Artists in power! The vast proletariat of talented people will rule.” 57 In “The Necessity and Beauty of Violence,” he also advocates the instatement of Futurist artists in government.58 Fully assured of the innate (and it would seem universal) genius of the Futurist artists, Marinetti goes on to assert that just a “few months observation” of parliamentary mechanisms would suffice to equip

them with the expertise necessary to govern. Similarly utopian aspirations pervade the corpus of Futurist texts, but they are rarely supported by any directions for their realization, and inconsistencies abound. Marinetti’s commitment to reconstituting the art movement as a political party vacillated with the fluctuating fortunes of the Fascists, but notwithstanding their political incontinence, the Futurists never wavered in demanding that society recognize and hear them. The radical synthesis they proposed between art and state cleared a space for future art movements to engage with political systems, initiated a new type of discourse, and invited subsequent avant-gardes to claim a more active role within society. As Futurism saw it, an experience of “heterodoxy and social marginality” had long characterized the artist’s experience in European society.59 The pervasive Romantic myth of the artist as a superior being, whose rare and special powers abstracted him from involvement in the quotidian, had rendered the artist impotent. The prevailing autonomy aesthetic of the institutional art world had attenuated artists’ energy, reducing them to “poor madmen in need of protection.” 60 Futurism responded to this culturally induced paralysis by declaring in 1914 that “[t]he artist of genius has been and is still today a social outcast.” 61 A call to arms was issued, urging Futurist poets, painters, sculptors, and musicians to return from exile and enter into the fray “along with the butcher and the tyre-manufacturer, the grave-digger and the speculator, the engineer and the farmer.” 62 A motley militia of artist-activists was summoned to forcibly supplant the Romantics, Symbolists, and all other spineless and melancholic creatives who “cut themselves off from real life because they are unable to face it.” 63 In Futurism, as Cinzia Sartini Blum observes, artists were invited to reclaim the public role they felt they had lost.64 The promotion of this model of the desacralized artist as everyman “alive at last and no longer aloft on the contemptuous heights of aestheticism” was integral to the

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Futurist Reconstruction;65 if the Futurist movement was organized on the lines of a political party, then it is this model of artisthood that corresponds to the party whip line. However, the image of the Futurist artist as an integrated and equal creative component of society is troubled by contradictory currents that haunt Futurist texts and performances, belying an ambivalent commitment to dissolving the border between the worker and the creative artist. Against the chorus of depictions of the Futurist artist as a de-reified everyman figure, two competing models interpolate this rhetoric of democratized art world activism. The first emphasizes individual genius in portrayals of the artist as genius, hero, or superman. The second utterly denies the individual by presenting the artist as an anonymized martyr assimilated into and in the service of a Futurist quasi-religious collective. These cognitive dissonances in the Futurist hive mind register the great dichotomy of the avant-garde group experience: the alluring promise of community that drew artists into art collectives and the threat of effacement that propelled them away. They speak of an incipient predisposition of the artistic ego ultimately to reassert its idiosyncrasy over the rule of the collective. Jarring with its avowed commitment to the proleification of artistic identity, Futurism manifests an atavistic tendency for portraying artistic creation as “—in a word—heroic.” 66 In such instances, as Blum observes, “Futurism reclaims the heritage of the poet-demiurge as ‘chosen’ hero, seer, and genial creator,” and the propagation of the Futurist synthetic aesthetic is repeatedly portrayed as a heroic quest.67 Accordingly, the 1909 manifesto calls for the poet to “spend himself with ardour, splendour, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements,” 68 while “We Renounce our Symbolist Masters, the Last of all Lovers of the Moonlight” resounds with a consanguineous machismo in its glorification of artists who understand “nothing beyond the desire for danger and day-to-day heroism.” 69

Enlisting images of Nietzschean Übermenschen, this hyperbolically charged 1911 manifesto figures the Futurist artists as mythic supermen “who have dared to step naked from the river of time and who create.” 70 Portraying the Futurist’s domain as one remote from the urban realm of the everyman, artists are depicted as mavericks, poised against romantic backdrops of torrents, rocks, and mountains on what Boccioni boasted was “the extreme fringe of the painting world.” 71 In contradistinction to this heroic trope and in spite of his public declaration that “Art is not a religion,” 72 Marinetti repeatedly raided the antique rhetoric and ideological apparatus of the religious discourses he so vociferously opposed. Invoking the late-Victorian appetite for positing the aesthetic as the secular equivalent for all that was once conceived as religious, Marinetti urged artists assembled at the Poets’ Club in London in 1913 to offer up their individual creative identities and submit themselves to the higher purpose of the Futurist collective.73 In the pivotal 1913 manifesto “Destruction of Syntax,” he harnesses eucharistic imagery to describe Futurism’s telegrammatic literary technique as equivalent to the “faculty of changing into wine the muddy water of the life that swirls and engulfs us,” and in “The Necessity and Beauty of Violence” (1910), he summons an image of the Futurists as ideally celibate men “ruled only by a divine, intoxicating intuition, and . . . all ablaze with the proverbial sacred flame.” 74 Both artist and audience are required to surrender themselves unto Futurist art. What’s more, in “Beyond Communism,” he prophesies that “[w]hile the last remaining religions are in their death throes, Art must become the ideal nourishment to console and reanimate the most restless races.” 75 While Richard Murphy notes, “It is a defining feature of the historical avant-garde that it is precisely not interested in creating an alternative ‘meta-narrative’ or ‘master-discourse,’” the Futurist artist as described by Blum is “the creator of a new religion

The Futurist Artist TM

in a world without God, and the spokesman for a collective ‘we’ bound by the cause of galvanizing the nation into regenerative action.” 76 The Futurist religion is not satisfied by communicants and demands martyrs to fulfill its mission on earth. This manifests in what Poggioli describes as the nihilistic avant-garde impulse for “immolation of the self to the art of the future.” 77 A concept common to many agonistic avant-garde groups, but especially evident in the ideology of heroic Futurist martyrdom, it is characterized by anonymous collective sacrifice, “felt as the fatal obligation of the individual artist,” inducing him or her to lose his or her personal poetic within the collective.78 This agonistic trope shaped the rhetoric of Futurist art-making and performance, and in literature it was expressed as a resistance to the use of the lyric “I.” 79 The obedient Futurist artist, then, does not aspire to the creation of artworks that will speak of his glory into posterity. Instead, sacrificing his subjectivity, he prepares the ground for works of greater originality and inventiveness that will be delivered unto society by the artists of the future.80 Writing more generally on the prevalence among the historical avant-gardes of such usually short-lived, often absurd readiness to lay down their individual genius in the service of the movement, Poggioli quips that they “act as if they were disposed to make dung heaps of themselves for the fertilizing of conquered lands, or mountains of corpses over which a new generation may in turn scale the besieged fortress.” 81 This demand for the submission of individual artists to collective enterprise shaped the modes and media of Futurist art. Many Futurist works were coauthored, and in an effort to deny the importance of any individual Futurist, the true provenance of single-author works was occluded by a slew of obfuscating signatures. The prevalence of collage forms served to produce the same effect: a multiplicity of sources eroding the importance of the originator or compiler of the text in question.82 As Perloff observes of the 1909 manifesto,

the images it contains “reflect neither inner struggle nor the contours of an individual consciousness.” 83 In an open letter to the French Futurist painter Felix Mac Delmarle (Lacerba, August 15, 1913), Marinetti emphatically asserts the essentially collective nature of the Futurist movement. He goes so far as to seek to eradicate any claims of ownership of the Futurist movement, declaring: “It is as absurd to think of Futurism as being the monopoly of Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Severini, Buzzi, Cangiullo, Folgore, Palazzeschi, and so on, as to attribute a monopoly of atmospheric electricity to electric lights.” 84 The Futurist anima is conceived of as an adhesive force that unites individual artists within one body politic. Futurism frequently fetishized the crowd as a tractable hydra-headed agent of future revolution. However, this celebration of la folla was not unproblematic.85 As Christine Poggi points out, in text and practice, Futurist ideology “both celebrated and derided the crowd as a force of the future and a regression to a primitive past.” 86 Futurism’s atavistic desire to distinguish the artist from the masses complicates its campaign for the dissolution of the traditional boundaries between performer and spectator, producer and recipient of the artwork. The distinctly anti-populist 1910 text “Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights: The Pleasures of Being Booed” instructs authors “to despise the public,” warning that although everything “that is booed is not necessarily either beautiful or new . . . everything that is immediately applauded is certainly not superior to the average intelligence and is thus something that is mediocre, banal, spewed up again, or overdigested.” 87 The “Futurist Synthetic Theatre” of 1915 elaborates on this motif with the admonition that “It’s stupid to pander to the primitivism of the crowd.” 88 An analogous posture of unbecoming superiority haunts “The Futurist Manifesto against English Art” and the 1912 “Exhibitors to the Public” catalog, which figures Futurist art-making and display in terms of creative largesse.89 These examples point to

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the persistence of an intensely hierarchical conception of the art producer and recipient dynamic, a vestigial remainder that subtends the radical revolutionary rhetoric of the Futurist program. Against Futurism’s agonistic departure from nineteenth-century Romantic ideals of brave, individual artistic endeavor, the balancing figure of the Futurist artist as hero rises as counterweight. He is the superman, the genius, the inventor. Charged with creativity, his innate nobility makes him statesman; he is rendered into an elite artecrat. Marinetti preached democracy in art but ordained himself high king overseer of all things Futurist. Even as he and others continued to publish manifestos, major figures in the movement unclasped their personal aesthetics from Futurism’s suffocatingly totalizing Weltanschauung. In 1916, both Boccioni and Sant’Elia died in combat. In the same year, Severini abandoned Futurist art practice and realigned himself with the Italian painting tradition that the movement had so reviled. Carrà too effected a total transformation of his aesthetic in 1917, turning away from Futurism and toward the primitivism of Le Douanier Rousseau and Uccello and the metaphysical painting of Giotto.

Like many other artists and thinkers who revoked their membership, neither artist would find himself anonymously submitting to the aesthetic of a collective enterprise again. As Günter Berghaus observes, “By 1917 this first, lively phase of Futurism had come to an end.” 90 As Italy prepared for the election of 1919, the ranks of lapsed Futurists were legion and Marinetti was ready to form an alliance with Mussolini—thereby delivering Futurism to Fascism. The model of collective sovereignty upon which the movement based its polemical, aesthetic, and poetic oeuvre is an ephemeral, delicate concept. Its natural life span—artificially extended by Marinettian exertions—was brief. After the visionary utopianism of the initial “Futurist Moment,” other forces, including the irresistible appeal of artistic independence, reasserted themselves, rendering the Futurist artist into something altogether more complex and more reflective of the nature of artistic creation. In Futurism’s modeling of artist identity, the collective sovereignty enshrined in Futurist philosophy “is inevitably accompanied by its other” 91: the artist’s desire for individual creative and intellectual autonomy.

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A

fter arriving in Florence in 1907, Mina Loy first encountered Futurism—its politics, polemics, and personalities—in 1913. Their intersection engendered a new creative impetus in Loy’s work and simultaneously rendered unto Futurism its first, wittiest, and most insightful critic-theorist-chronicler. Electrified by Futurism’s invitation to “grasp the elements of Life— Whole,” she witnessed its explosive beginnings, contributed to its wholesale takeover of the Italian avant-garde, and began to write.1 Although Loy repeatedly attested to the movement’s ignition of her literary career, the degree to which her poetic is indebted to a specifically Futurist model remains a contentious issue.2 Her typographical flourishes evidence its imprint; the canny employment of unorthodox spacing and capitalizations to illuminate an otherwise occluded significance bears testimony to her familiarity with Futurist manifestos. However, notwithstanding a lifelong predilection for austere condensation, her retention of the lyric “I” form so thoroughly denounced in the eleventh commandment of the “Technical Manifesto” and refusal to dispense with adjectives and adverbs sets her work at odds with the Futurist literary mandate. Even at the highest tides of Loy’s Futurist feeling, the extreme grammatical asceticism demanded of Marinetti’s program for parole-in-libertà, and the blunt,

unwieldy writing it produced, did not appeal to her aesthetic sensibility. In the readings that follow, my object is not the exposition of a Futurist intaglio upon her stubbornly idiosyncratic poetic. Rather I propose to read these poems as witnesses to her engagement with, digestion of, and ultimate rejection of Futurist conceptions of artistic identity; as free verse chronicles of the birth of Mina Loy’s individual artistic identity. The two chapters that follow concentrate on four of Loy’s texts, published in the period 1914–1916: “Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” “Aphorisms on Futurism,” “One O’Clock at Night,” and “The Effectual Marriage.”3 Interwoven with these readings are discussions of Loy’s unpublished manuscript for the novel “Brontolivido,” as well as the shorter prose work “Pazzarella” and the play “The Sacred Prostitute,” both of which appeared posthumously in Sara Crangle’s edition of the Stories and Essays of Mina Loy. The emphasis throughout is on how Loy, as a female artist, reflects upon male Futurist modelings of artisthood. “Pazzarella” is dedicated to “the great Tuscan—the most sympathetic of misogynists” and, as the same note goes on to acknowledge, is a “[p]arody of Gio’s work.” 4 Focalized through the Futurist Geronimo (Giovanni Papini), the story narrates his highly prejudiced account of a relationship with the eponymous Pazzarella: a 25

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swooning, clinging “intimate irritant,” who is meanwhile being courted by the no-less-legibly named figure of Mafarka (Marinetti). In a typewritten addendum to the story, the narrator outlines her intention for this work to constitute a “gigantic opus for the vindication of feminine psychology.” 5 In “The Sacred Prostitute,” a wonderfully energetic, impatient, and absurdly infantile “Futurism” jousts with a smitten “Love.” Glaring at each other “amicably while adjusting their boxing gloves,” the pair debates “amorous strategics” and Futurism admits a tenderness that must be concealed from Don Juan, Nature, and “Some Other M[e]n”: “I have to do that for the sake of my reputation.” 6 The Futurist artist first hides and then discloses a similar, “miserably sentimental” softness in “Brontolivido,” Loy’s novel about the movement she tellingly redubbed “Flabbergastism.” 7 The figures of Johannes and Geronimo recur across its inchoate jumble of drafts and fragments; “the Martinet” and “Brontolivido” are invoked to stand in for Marinetti as “leader of the Flabbergasts” and Loy’s alter egos are variously represented by “Sophia,” “Jemima,” and, just once, “me.” 8 “Brontolivido” is notable for the contradictions it contains: the ambivalent swerves to which this pseudonymic indecision bears witness. Alone “with the horrid man she ethically dispised [sic],” she is appalled to find that she is “feeling thoroughly comfortable.” 9 In these texts, the Futurist movement is portrayed as at once impossibly—carnally and cerebrally—seductive and both psychologically suspect and aesthetically lacking. Sketching the Futurist Male With the 1909 publication of “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” Marinetti had established his own pugnacious persona as the unyielding and aggressive brand identity of Italian Futurism. While hordes of avant-garde artists dissolved their idiosyncratic aesthetics in his factory vats of collective creation, equally

many—members of other movements whose ismic fealty lay elsewhere—were incensed by his imperialist invective. True to the principles of “[c]ourage, boldness and rebellion” in which he professed faith, Marinetti rejoiced in the divisive power of his totalizing dynamism.10 He reveled in his simultaneous experiences of vilification and glorification across a panoply of literary, artistic, and political publications in Europe and farther afield. Composed in autumn 1914, Loy’s “Sketch of a Man on a Platform” was published in Rogue in April of the following year.11 A portrait of Futurist artisthood as both brilliant and risible, it depicts an influential Svengali with ambitions for world domination. Addressed implicitly to Marinetti, each heavily enjambed line hovers in a dialectic of semi-scathing bemusement. Man of absolute physical equilibrium You stand so straight on your legs Every plank or clod you plant your feet on Becomes roots for those limbs (“Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” 1–4) The opening quatrain establishes Loy’s commitment to an earthed and embodied Marinetti.12 Celebrating the artist’s body, she emphatically asserts the male artist’s physicality. In spite of the global, apparently illimitable jurisdiction of Marinetti’s fusion of art and life, he remains, Loy reminds us (and perhaps more sharply her addressee), a man of “legs,” “feet,” and “those limbs” (2–4). That unprepossessing pronoun those subtly semaphores intimacy. A reminder of their romantic-sexual entanglement, this intimation of physical familiarity with the mythologized Futurist man both complicates and situates her speaking position. “Let’s identify ourselves with machinery!” declares Futurism in “The Sacred Prostitute.” 13 In defiance of Futurist aspirations of becoming machine-men in an inorganic urbanized world, the metropolises through

Apprehending the Futurist

which Loy’s Futurist Man passes on his quest are constructed of decidedly earthly planks and clods. Eschewing the Futurist vocabulary of hyper-modern engines, pistons, and airplanes, their ambitions to speed along “no lamps——no lamps——no mudguards,” the speaker of “Sketch of a Man on a Platform” employs a timeless, earthbound lexicon.14 Marinetti’s prodigious powers of self-promotion and his self-anointed role as chief evangelist for the (Futurist) future are figured with a vaguely menacing image. Like an impossibly virulent plant, his dominion expands with each vigorous offshoot; his brand self-propagates with inestimable speed and surety. In “Brontolivido,” Loy describes Marinetti as a “Bombastic Superman”—a hypermasculine force “so appallingly dynamic in his misogynist magnetism—the room was vibrating with his emanations—gyrating on the pivot of his virility—.” 15 Futurism’s propaganda-driven auto-construction of its own myth represents the apogee of its legacy on the global avant-garde. Magazines such as Lacerba (1913–1915), L’Italia Futurista (June–February 1918), Vela Latina: pagine futuriste (1913–1918), Noi: rivista d’arte Futurista (1917–1920 and 1923–1925), Roma futurista (1918–1920), and Futurismo (1932–1934; from 1933 renamed Sant’Elia) were variously co-opted and conceived for the purposes of promulgating the Futurist vision.16 Marinetti also published numerous Futurist works under the imprint of his Edizioni di “Poesia” and its successor, Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia.” Unsolicited copies were distributed as gifts, “accompanied by fliers that offered suggestions for reviews and promised forthcoming volumes in exchange for free publicity.” 17 As Marinetti was fond of quoting from an apocryphal piece of fan mail, he was successfully “snaking out [his] hot tentacular tubing all over the world.” 18 The opening lines of “Sketch” are imbued with amazement at his magnetic capacity for creative agitation and unflagging dedication to the Futurist mission.

They also bear traces of a certain inter-artist envy. While Loy shifted restively between “wild enthusiasms,” Marinetti’s metamorphosis from mediocre Symbolist poet into autocratic Futurist leader was a transformation both unidirectional and permanent.19 Decades after Europe had sated and subsequently lost its appetite for Futurism, Marinetti continued to publish manifestos. His political allegiances changed over this time, but his messianic faith in the aesthetic principles he espoused in 1909 were largely unchanged in 1933. It was perhaps this record of unswerving devotion that piqued Loy’s fascination. The form of the first stanza mimics his unshakable equilibrium. Visually balanced and (for Loy) rhythmically unusually even, the opening quatrain of “Sketch” mimics its subject. The “absolute physical equilibrium” (1) at which she marvels—his ability to stand four-square in a world politically, geographically, and temporally in flux—is the readiness to trust in and submit to one cause that characterized Marinetti’s life. The absence of this same aesthetic and conceptual loyalty would sculpt Loy’s life to equally dramatic effect. Among the men you accrete to yourself You are more heavy And more light (5–7) In the second verse, the tone of envious wonderment gives way to one of mischief. In Marinetti’s unrelenting bombast, the speaker espies a lightness unperceived by his acolytes, a significance misunderstood by his legion enemies. The verb chosen for the first line, “you accrete to yourself,” implies that his magnetism is so great that he collects followers almost with the unconscious ease of a bodily function. Jessica Burstein identifies in “Giovanni Franchi” evidence of the poet’s disdain for this willingness, among the Futurists, to follow Marinetti’s example.20 A milder version of Loy’s

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repugnance of his “desire for protégés, for a line of intellectual copies” inheres in this “Sketch of a Man on a Platform.” 21 The speaker goes on to conceive of Marinetti as an elusive jester. The stunt-performing media manipulator appears here as an effete, elegant hypnotist whose sleights of hand bamboozle the art world. Cuff links winking along, his “movements / Unassailable / Savor of the airy-fairy of the ballet” (11–13). Images of the Futurist artist as ludic performer of identity pervade Loy’s work from this period. Sophie, in “Brontolivido,” advises the (Marinettian) eponymous hero, “You’re much more fun when you’re theatrical,” and in “The Sacred Prostitute,” Loy portrays the character of FUTURISM as just such a magician, “( . . . pulling up his cuffs and turning his hands round about for the audience to inspect) You are sure there is nothing there?” 22 In the same text, a more scathing evaluation of the essential theatricality and unabashed commerciality of the Futurist persona presents itself. When the “MEN” who form the audience to this prestidigitating spectacle exclaim, “A prophet has come among us!,” “A MAN” admits to having “mistook him for a conjuring commercial traveller.” 23 A similarly bathetic sentiment inheres description of him with “hands spread uselessly with the air of a salesman offering damaged goods” in “Brontolivido.” 24 In these passages, as Rowan Harris observes, “Loy becomes a kind of camp reader of Futurism, outrageously indicating that Brontolivido, being the most masculine thing extant, appears somewhat feminine.” 25 In these depictions, the overblown authority of Marinetti’s public persona is subverted by a coy reframing of him as a simultaneously powerful and playful Puck. While we might observe a line of Futurist stylistic influence in Loy’s near-complete renunciation of punctuation—the forty-nine lines of “Sketch of a Man on a Platform” sport only a solitary dash—this poem registers a distinct imperviousness to Futurist rhetoric.26

Thus a reference to war (18) is robbed of all violence by its location on a spatial parallel with “ballet” and “cuff-links.” This bathetic juxtaposition echoes an exchange described in “Brontolivido,” in the course of which Jemima charges Marty with the allegation: “There’s just one thing you enjoy more than making love to women—killing people—.” 27 It is the accused himself who flippantly admits the equation, chortling, “Both are equally delightful, only—for the one I am liable to penal servitude for life—to the other there is no inconvenience attached whatsoever.” 28 Marinetti’s glib recollections of his wartime experiences are further critiqued by his Loy-al interlocutor in the “Rome” section of that manuscript.29 In “Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” the statement “Your projectile nose / Has meddled in the more serious business / Of the battlefield” (16–18) reduces grave soldierly responsibility to the level of lustful ramblings with the adjoining qualification: With the same incautious aloofness Of intense occupation That it snuffles the trail of the female And the comfortable Passing odors of love (19–23) Here, Marinetti’s infamously insatiable lustfulness is portrayed in belittlingly benign terms. Against the hypermasculine, virile ideal of Futurist manhood (rapists of the vanquished), this is the superuomo as animal. Whereas the spectacle of Bronty being shaved by his barber was compared in “Brontolivido” to “a sea lion training,” here Loy sketches him as a badger, ambling toward a potential mate.30 The speaker’s allusion, in the third stanza, to the addressee’s “projectile nose” chimes notably with a then-unpublished prose text of Marinetti’s entitled

Apprehending the Futurist

“Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine” (1910). In this singular work, the author posits a startling new theory of pseudo-Lamarckian evolution, heralding the appearance of a “nonhuman mechanical species” that will “possess the most unusual organs”—organs adapted to the exigencies of future living. Most pertinently, he predicts “a development of the external protrusion of the sternum, resembling a prow.”31 In “Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” Loy rewrites this prophecy, perhaps unconsciously, to satirical ends. While Marinetti’s adaptation has putatively practical applications in aviation, the extended proboscis attributed to him in this poem provides its ridiculous bearer with evolutionary advantage only in so far as it enables him to “meddle” in military affairs and pursue fragrant women. “Brontolivido” attributes sentience to its sensing, in the figure of “his cognisant nose.”32 A Freudian reading of the remodeling of Marinetti in “Sketch” suggests itself, as does an analogy with the portrayal, in “The Sacred Prostitute,” of FUTURISM’s bizarre faith in the power of his olfactory organ.33 This image of the projectile nose is further acknowledgment of the poet’s saturation, in that period, in the Futurist aesthetic in the plastic arts. On Soffici’s invitation, Loy submitted three portraits of Marinetti to the First Free International Exhibition at the Sprovieri Gallery, Rome, in the spring of 1914 and traveled to Rome with her subject to attend the exhibition and associated serata.34 When the exhibition opened, Loy and her American lodger, the artist Frances Simpson Stevens, were the sole representatives of their respective nationalities. Tellingly, and in keeping with the rubric of Futurist labeling convention, she entitled two of these “dynamisms” and one a “facial synthesis.” The highly suggestive image in this poem summons up the omnipresent lines of force that crisscrossed Futurist canvases and without which a portrait could scarcely claim the label. It also serves to imply that Marinetti’s own mustachioed visage was

undergoing a physical transformation to render it in keeping with his complete conversion to Futurism. Your genius So much less in your brain Than in your body (24–26) Straddling two verses, this observation venerates his power as a performer and his renown as an embodiment of the Futurist spirit. Privileging the materiality of the man over his intellect, it reflects Loy’s conflicted affiliation with the movement. Though unconvinced by much of its invective, she admitted feeling an abiding attraction to its vituperative leader.35 In “Brontolivido,” a strain of contiguous self-admonition—“Look at us, Marty—I’m a woman & you’re the man who has annihilated me— my prurient womb!”—suggests that Loy conceived of her physical attraction to these Futurist men almost as a betrayal of her mind by her body.36 Aimee Pozorski’s characterization of this contrary response as “an appalled curiosity” is an apt one.37 Inextricably aligned with “The Vital,” it is in Marinetti’s physical manifestations of his Futurist beliefs—his globe-trotting, serata performances, and oratory—that Loy situates his power. Just as the manifestos possess deictic capacities, so Marinetti enacts the Futurist anima through his embodied existence. The nature of the unenumerated “THINGS” he is so happy to push “In the opposite direction / To that which they are lethargically willing to go” (33–36) is not elucidated. The sudden capitalization of this word set apart makes the withholding of meaning doubly, typically, frustrating. Preliminary suppositions as to its import include people, politics, art, writing—and innumerable other possible substitutions. As Loy here so elegantly demonstrates, an impulse to antagonize motivated Marinetti’s behavior in every aspect of his life. His

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will to exasperate is matched only by his proclivity for flirtation. The poem concludes with a return to a more respectful and less satirical tone. Conceding (prophylactically) that her subject is “Fundamentally unreliable” (39), the speaker marvels at the vast, synthetic, multimedia scope of his Gesamtkunstwerk project. In “The Sacred Prostitute,” LOVE addresses LOVE charges FUTURISM with “being inconsecutive,” to which FUTURISM later responds with the imprecation, delivered “(imploringly),” that “You can’t hold me responsible for anything I said last week.” 38 Over the course of his creative career, the “theoretic elastic” of Marinetti’s conceptions was flexed in fields as diverse as theater, fashion, cooking, politics, and dance. As a fellow creative polymath (artist, poet, polemicist, actress, fashion designer, milliner), Loy appreciated the variegated composition of his prodigious output. So highly does she regard this genre and globe-spanning adaptability, which permits the “. . . hooking on / Of any—or all / Forms of creative idiosyncrasy” (44–46), that she awards to it the only extant mark of punctuation in the poem. Making wry reference to the breadth of his franchise on the minds and hands of Europe’s avant-garde artist communities, this image further evokes the clustering compulsion of the contemporary art world, within which individual artists were “hooking on” to the collective enterprise of Futurism and other movements with a gusto in which Loy was ever lacking. While the occasional snap Of actual production Stings the face of the public. (47–49) A manifesto entitled “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” was produced by the Russians Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, and Khlebnikov in 1912. Marinetti’s journey, in 1914, to meet these men, whom he had hoped

to number among the Futurist (alla italiana) faithful, established, quite forcefully, that their intentions were wildly at odds with one another, and the Russians were sorely disappointed.39 Pronouncing one poem to be “[l]ike all his poesie—a succession of headlong plunges into the obvious,” Loy’s name-shifting avatars in “Brontolivido” evince a similar estimation of the Marinettian poetic.40 Of course, Loy may not have sought to reference this particular “Slap in the Face” in the poem, but the face-slapping sentiment is one that resonated throughout Futurist literature at the time—a particularly aggressive, twentieth-century evolution of the avant-garde appetite to épater la bourgeoisie. Whether the allusion is general or a specific, taunting reference to the more radical literary output of his Russian rivals, these final lines reinforce the presentation of Marinetti as an antagonistic figure. That final reference to the “occasional snap / Of actual production” (“Sketch,” 47–48; my emphasis) functions as a playful closing jibe at the inflated self-importance of a man whose propaganda ultimately eclipsed his own artistic output, as well as that of his Futurist fellows. In “The Sacred Prostitute,” LOVE adjudges FUTURISM “disappointing—too primitive” and yet “Oh, one of the most amusing creatures I’ve met.” 41 An analogously immiscible combination of sentiments subtends this poem. An emotionally and conceptually nuanced portrait of Marinetti’s avant-garde artist persona, “Sketch of a Man on Platform” offers a prescient insight into Loy’s acute (and ambivalent) sensitivity to the exposed fontanels of Futurism’s evolving auto-construction. Aphorisms Not “Of” but “On” First published in the forty-fifth number of Camera Work in June (nominally January) of 1914, “Aphorisms on Futurism” represents Loy’s first recorded appearance in print.42 This explosive, exhortative appropriation of the Futurists’ manifesto form served as a striking

Apprehending the Futurist

letter of introduction for Loy to the New York art scene, whose siren calls would, within two years, entice her to shake off domestic concerns in the service of her artistic genius. Constituting the principal literary component of an image-centered issue, Loy’s fifty-one aphorisms published in this photographic quarterly placed the fledgling poet in the company of the photographers Marsden Hartley, Paul Haviland, and J. Craig Annan. Situating her in such illustriously innovative context also, as Churchill observes, secured for this text an audience well disposed toward its visual idiosyncrasies.43 The existence, among Alfred Stieglitz’s papers, of a single, signed holograph of the text bears witness to very minor emendations executed by the editor.44 The conjunctive and is replaced throughout with ampersands, and the typographically enhanced exhortation “Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light” is endowed with greater expression in Loy’s hand.45 Two minor orthographic corrections complete the editorial imprint. However, a printed copy found in Loy’s archives displays another, more arresting transformation of the text.46 In this curious document, the multiple iterations of “futurist” and “futurism” have been replaced, in pencil, with the words “modernist” and “modernism.” Whether or not, as Natalya Lusty posits, these alterations might have constituted “an attempt, after the fact, to distance herself from the Futurist movement,” they were, as Conover observes, probably carried out after the poet had abandoned “her Futurist allegiance.” 47 The readiness with which Loy was willing to swap Futurism for modernism is elucidative of her fluid, protean conceptualization of the avant-garde anima as a spirit—mobile and cosmopolitan—that passes through various evolutionary phases, taking on (like herself) new names and new characteristics. Burke, Schmid, and Lusty all find in its sequence of curt maxims an inheritance from Marinettian parolein-libertà.48 Although the aphorisms do at least enact

Marinetti’s campaign for eradication of the literary “I,” they fail to fulfill the demands of his 1912 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” on all eleven other grounds.49 Marinetti’s 1913 manifesto “Destruction of Syntax-Imagination without Strings-Words-in-Liberty” advocates an approach to language that is as violent as it is stringent: Punctuation and the right adjectives will mean nothing to [the poet]. He will despise the subtleties and nuances of language. Breathlessly he will assault your nerves with visual, auditory, olfactory sensations, just as they come to him. The rush of steam-emotion will burst the sentence’s steampipe, the valves of punctuation, and the adjectival clamp.50 The Futurist littérateur knew what had to be done to language to free it from the Symbolist heritage of “nostalgic, sentimental, or erotic moonlight,” but as evidenced by the opulent prose of his 1909 novel Mafarka le Futuriste, he lacked the discipline to carry out such a severe pruning of his own lexicon.51 In fact, as Matthew Gale has argued, the 1909 “Foundation and Manifesto” itself begins with a Symbolist creation myth.52 When Marinetti visited Moscow in 1914, the audience was grossly disappointed by his reinscribing of the syntactic and grammatical laws he so publicly attacked. Rather than embracing him as leader manqué, the Russian Futurists sought, on the whole, to differentiate themselves from their Italian counterparts. Only Vadim Shershenevich and Constantin Bolshakov turned up to meet Marinetti on arrival in Moscow, and a pamphlet warning “Foreigner, remember you are in another country!” was produced (though not disseminated) against him by Khlebnikov and Livshits.53 The heavily onomatopoeic stylings of Italian paroliberism could not contend with Russian zaum.54 Read against Russian Futurist or Dada systems for the destruction and reordering of language, the paroliberist program is exposed as an artfully

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articulated theorization of a comparatively conservative writerly practice. Even set against his own manifesto declarations, Marinetti’s models of “immaginazione senza fili” sound staid. In “The Sacred Prostitute,” the doctrine of imagination without strings is bathetically figured by Loy as a product not of aesthetic inspiration but, much more simply, of impatience, as FUTURISM declaims: “You take too long saying things” and advocates leaving out all the adjectives and using verbs in the infinitive as remedy to his petulance.55 Similarly deflating his bombast, Perloff contends that “the variety of typefaces, the use of plus (+) signs and phonetic spelling, the heavy alliteration and assonance cannot disguise the fact that Marinetti’s parole-in-libertà are basically just lists . . . what we might call a montage-string.” 56 The interstitial spaces that would come to be the most immediately recognizable visual characteristics of Loy’s poetic topography are nowhere in evidence here, and just one line is indented, again for “Knick-Knacks” (A51). The italicization of three words—“Leap,” “Light,” and “Whole” (A9, A31)—has the customary effect of indicating emphasis. It is in the frequent capitalizations employed by the poet that the greatest evidence of a putatively Futurist typography can be perceived. Rather than representing Loy’s poetic at its most unorthodox, “Aphorisms on Futurism” demonstrates her early employment of the comma and semicolon, which would soon fade out of her infamously bare repertoire of punctuation. Indeed, the last line frames the disposable “Knick-Knacks” (A51) in em dashes but includes, in a gesture of unfamiliar largesse, a final full stop within its horizontal boundaries.57 Enriched with forbidden adjectives and adverbs, syntactically sound, classically punctuated, and bereft of Marinetti’s semaphoric analogies, Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism” contravene— grammatically and formally—the primary precepts of Futurist literature. Placed beside the majority of Futurist manifestos, Loy’s series of “pert, proto-Dada

snippets” 58 appears exceedingly short and distinctly lacking in the extended passages of invective-infused rhetoric that typify the manifestos of Futurism. These compacted in-aerated lines look altogether unlike the manifestos whose campaigns for literary innovation were so often conveyed in decidedly familiar, syntactically and orthographically regular passages. In what follows, I move away from the attribution of specifically Futurist characteristics to Loy’s text in favor of initiating an investigation of how she uses the manifesto form to analyze her own polysemous response to the construction of the artist within Futurism. This reading of the “Aphorisms” endeavors to uncover Loy’s attitudes toward the movement that both ignited and dominated the beginning of her literary career. While Carolyn Burke proposes that in the “Aphorisms,” “Loy speaks to the old self, to the painter lacking the courage to throw over the aesthetic conventions in which she was trained, and to the woman hemmed in by the tight lacing of Victorian propriety,” this reading considers her “you”/“our” address as directed toward the wider, thinking public; the New York literary-artistic cognoscenti who greeted this singular sequence as an envoy from the front line of the European avant-garde.59 DIE in the Past Live in the Future. THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting. IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed. AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision. (A1–A4) In an appropriation of Futurist time-logic, temporal

Apprehending the Futurist

constrictions dissolve and the impossible is imperiously demanded. Past and future are juxtaposed in a dichotomy of life and death. Reminiscent of Marinetti’s condemnation of temerity in such matters, these commands to embark actively upon the business of living and dying are posed in the imperative. In his “Futurist Proclamation to the Spaniards,” he goads those who would attempt to treat life and death lightly, declaring: “You are guilty of the crime of living in a trance, in a dream world. You are guilty of never having wanted to live and of having tasted death merely in tiny sips.” 60 This apparently nihilistic opening is immediately followed by a call for Futurist rebirth. Loy’s lexical choice of “velocity” over “speed” (A3) is both visually and sonorously resonant with the multiple iterations of the Italian velocità, so ubiquitous among the manifestos of Futurism. Following on from A1’s renunciation of time, A2 can be read as a denial of the equally inescapable principle of inertia and a simultaneous promise that ultimate speed will come with the instigation of Futurist life. The close repetition of the word parodies the Futurists’ obsession with speed, the ideal equated mathematically by Marinetti with “the synthesis of every kind of courage in action.” 61 In the “Journey” fragment of “Brontolivido,” Loy describes how, once “caught in the machinery of his urgent identification with motor frenzy,” Jemima “dropped consciousness of everything but Rush.” 62 The author was not, at least in the beginning, immune to their dromophilic contagion—but the tautological ring of Loy’s third aphorism suggests that this fascination with speed might ultimately ring hollow. Aphorisms 3 and 4 maintain this mode of pithy Futurist primer, introducing a number of concepts foundational to the movement and echoing the 1910 manifesto that proposed that only a Futurist reeducation could enlarge the limited vision of the audience to a degree sufficient for the apprehension of their reimaginings of

form.63 In Mafarka, the eponymous antihero boasts: “This is my thought, compressed like my fist.”64 The third aphorism echoes this celebration of condensation but also acknowledges—as though in anticipation of argument— the malformed, fragmented, and unmade products that must result from such extreme and forceful compaction, as “form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision” (A4). This Futurist force alters and fragments matter, enabling the interpenetration of planes, the depiction of simultaneity. As evidenced by her 1922 “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” and 1924 “Gertrude Stein,” both of which exult in depictions of crushing and lopping in the pursuit of the exposure or extraction of a nucleus or of radium, Loy’s own allegiance to compression outlived her entanglement with Futurism.65 In an endorsement of Marinetti’s 1910 declaration “Bravely, we bring the ‘ugly’ into literature,” Loy promotes communion with ugliness: “LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it” (A6).66 For the Futurists, as one manifesto had it, “Beauty has nothing to do with art.” 67 The desire to wring art and literature from the carnage of war, the maelstrom of industry, and the chaos of street violence disgusted those who opposed the movement. It was in this same year (1914) that Loy asked Papini, who called himself “the ugliest man in Italy,” to sit for a portrait.68 In her later literary portrayal of him, in “Brontolivido,” the narrator notes with affection the unfortunate confluence of his features. She remarks that “[t]he meanest harlot would balk at his prurient ugliness—it is a physical commotion to sit in the same room with it—” and Papini himself writes, in Brutezza, of the advantages conferred upon him by physiognomic misfortune.69 The length at which she dwells on her recollection of this face in the “Geronimo” chapter of “Esau Penfold” suggests that Loy remained fascinated by Papini’s apparent embrace of his own ugliness.70 The import of the seventh aphorism’s imprecation “OPEN your arms to the dilapidated, to rehabilitate

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them” is much more surprising. Even if we construe this rehabilitation as a process closer to indoctrination than the altruistic rescue of the damned, the concern it articulates for the fallen expresses a sentiment altogether absent from the literature of Futurism. YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened. BUT the Future is only dark from outside. Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light. (A7–9) Like the opening lines, Aphorisms 7–9 seem first to condemn, only to offer succor and solution immediately thereafter. The addressee, fearful of the unknown, may shrink from this prophesy of a Futurist Future—but such fears, it explains, are born only of ignorance and sightlessness. The future, and the Futurism that makes it manifest, appears destructive only to those who stand outside it. The verbs “Leap” and “EXPLODES” (A9) are appropriately forceful and amply exaggerated with italicization and capitalization. Indeed, these lines correlate remarkably closely with the sentiments of Marinetti’s “A Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity,” in which he declares: “It is stupid to refuse the daring leap out of the fields already explored into the void of total creation.” 71 However, it is the evocation of blinding “Light” which kindles—throughout Futurist literary and painterly production and across Loy’s entire oeuvre—a mass of intertextual connections. Invocations of light recur frequently in the manifestos of Futurism, within which la luce is commonly associated with the movement’s dynamic combat against the darkness and shadows of the premodernist world. Thus the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting” promises that “Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light,” and in “Against

Past-loving Venice,” Marinetti conflates the onslaught of Futurism with the introduction of electric light: “Let the reign of holy Electric light finally come.” 72 By 1925, Loy would find herself embroiled in a turbulent business venture with Peggy Guggenheim, designing and selling lamps on the Rue Colisée. These flamboyant light fixtures—decorated with flowers, butterflies, clowns, and peacocks—subscribed to an utterly un-Futurist aesthetic but have served as a material memento of the poetdesigner’s fascination with illumination.73 In “Brontolivido,” Loy alludes to the “florescent gallantry” of the Futurist male, and in “The Effectual Marriage,” she plays with the Futurist promise of cerebro-spiritual illumination in a satirical portrayal of her own hopeful naivety.74 Figuring herself as Gina, a woman risibly in thrall to the Futurist male, she rues her credulousness. Expecting that she should one day come upon her Futurist mate to find his head ablaze with the light of the absolute avantgarde, and fearing that she should instead see “Nothing at all,” Gina remains safely behind the door. The authoritative manifesto-voice of “Aphorisms on Futurism” forbids any such reticence.75 In another foreshadowing of the symbology of “The Effectual Marriage,” “houses,” in “The Aphorisms,” signify bondage, containment, and assimilation within the unconscious collective. The appeal to “FORGET that you live in houses, that you may live in yourself ” (A10) is consanguineous with the “personal mental attitude” that the speaker of “One O’Clock at Night” struggles to achieve. Although, as I have discussed, many Futurist manifestos celebrated the idea of the artist as everyman, these lines allude to an enterprise altogether more individualistic. If the houses here—as in my analysis of “The Effectual Marriage”—can be read as emblematic of the collective consciousness of the art movement, then Aphorisms 10–12 constitute a bold contravention of Futurist dogma. Within this frame, the house that is Futurism is inhabited by “the smallest people,” each of

Apprehending the Futurist

which “potentially,” if they were to forget the house, “is as great as the Universe” (A12). She seems first to castigate but then raises up the ordinary wo/man who can be great only if they “Leap” into the future. The question of whether this future is one directed by Loy or by the Futurists remains seductively ambiguous. A classic manifesto moment arises in A14–15. Celebrating the deictic function of the form, the manifesto poses its own performance as a hinge in time spanning the chasm between “HITHERTO” and “in the Future.” A caricature of Marinetti shimmers in the “great man,” “tremendous—a God” who inspires “the people to expand to their fullest capacity” (A15). It would be most uncharacteristic of Loy to profess faith without irony in such a god. Having summoned him up, the next two lines— LOVE of others is the appreciation of one’s self. MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy (A16–17) —can be construed as a jibe at the infamous Marinettian ego. Such a conception of self-love is entirely absent from the Futurist manifestos, and any references to egotism are, somewhat myopically, found only in diatribes against the “vile egoism of the peasant, who deliberately injures himself rather than serve his country.” 76 In an interview conducted with Marinetti after Lacerba’s flight from Futurism central, he condemns the magazine’s “ridiculous, revolutionary attitudes” as “individualism, egoism, intellectual anarchy.” 77 Interpolating her apparent endorsement of the precepts of Futurism, these are the same antithetical attitudes that Loy, in her “Aphorisms,” is so boldly and publicly advertising. Aphorisms 18–22 revert to the synopsizing of Futurist

rhetoric, contributing little that is novel or startling. The “limitless” potential of the (Futurist-directed) Future is reiterated (A18), as is the call to free oneself from inherited attitudes. The realization of such freedom is purported to necessitate destruction, and the past (“a trail of insidious reactions”) is again derided as a corrupt and passive-reactive object of scorn (A18). Aphorism 20, “TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness,” certainly gestures toward Futurist philosophy but imparts only a sound bite, a gobbet of Futuristic nonsense. Loy seems to have been particularly interested in the Futurist prophesy of “Human energies” enhanced, as she phrases it, to “command Time and Space,” so that “THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem” (A21).78 This mythological presentation of the Futurist as a being located “[o]utside time and space” is evoked in “Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” “The Effectual Marriage,” and “One O’Clock at Night.” 79 Encompassing control over the spatial dimension, the enhanced capabilities of the Futurist artist make him able to “compress every aesthetic principle in one line” (A22), a feat of spatial and conceptual genius. The immeasurable potential of the Futurist mind is the subject of the twenty-third aphorism. Once set “loose,” it will be rendered capable of carrying out that most Futurist of all quests: the negation of the past. In a strange and telling subversion of a negative Futurist mythos predicated on destruction, the annihilation of the past, and opposition to every inherited value, A25 presents an entirely unfamiliar image of a Futurist who must “leap from affirmative to affirmative, ignoring intermittent negations—must spring from stepping-stone to stone of creative explorations; without slipping back into the turbid stream of accepted facts.” This new, affirmative version of Futurism is an amusing, if unreal, invention. The “excrescences” of Aphorism 26 are everything that must be cast off in order to arrive at the ideal state of absolute compression exalted in A3 and A22. This “absolute” is the sacred, elevated position in which the signatories

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of the 1909 “Foundation and Manifesto” claimed already to reside, boasting: “We are already living in the realms of the Absolute.” 80 In a dictum reminiscent of the fourth aphorism, Loy reminds us again that the untrained mind cannot be expected to accept immediately the revelations of the new Futurist aesthetic: CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that molds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it. (A28) Futurism, as irritant, molds consciousness, just as Gina, the “mollescent irritant” of the “Effectual Marriage,” molds Miovanni.81 As Frost writes, “For Loy, the poet’s task is to create the ‘irritant’ of the new, to jolt the reader out of a language that leaves its speakers stuttering over anything but time-worn forms. Futurism’s power—as Loy conceived it then—was precisely this brand of disruptiveness.” 82 New forms produced by creative genius must sculpt the minds that will eventually be capable of perceiving and appreciating them. Consciousness, for Loy, is perpetually being enacted—a process never complete. The image of the Universe (another of her preferred, capitalized words) flowing into this everchurning consciousness (A30) is powerfully implicative of Boccioni’s renowned 1911 painting The Street Enters the House.83 It evokes an analogous sense of permeability and of the enlivening, vital effects of increasing the flow of “Universe” into consciousness by way of this wittily termed “UNSCREW”ing action (A30). In Aphorism 32, the concepts of misery, intellect, and acceptance are juxtaposed with the putatively Futurist alternatives of joy, intuition, and inspiration. By way of a rhetorical sleight of hand, the indisputable first

statement, “Misery is the disintegration of Joy,” establishes a structure that wills us to accept “Acceptance” as the antithesis of “Inspiration.” We must presume that the “ejections of irrelevant minds” refers to all “past art,” which the Futurists so vociferously rejected.84 Loy’s lexical choice in Aphorism 34 betrays the operation of an agenda also perceptible in the second aphorism. She entreats her audience: NOT to be a cipher in your ambiente, But to colour your ambiente with your preferences. (A34) This enjoinder to remake the surrounding world with the force of your consciousness contains another significant invocation of an Italian word, ambiente, which, redolent of their attempts to reconceptualize figure and ground in painting and sculpture and of the emplacement of the spectator within the artwork, is charged with a particular valence in the Futurist manifestos.85 Aphorism 35, which beseeches the audience “NOT to accept experience at its face value,” echoes the earlier concern with engaged consciousness and Marinetti’s statements about the imperative for “involving oneself totally in the living of one’s life.” 86 These commandments, culminating in a call to “readjust activity to the peculiarity of your own will” (A36), are proposed as “primary tentatives towards independence” (A37), the changes that must be instituted to arrive at the Elysian “personal mental attitude” of “One O’Clock at Night.” 87 Whereas in “One O’Clock at Night,” mental lethargy is depicted as an obstacle to achieving independence, here it is “the mechanical re-actions of the subconsciousness, that rubbish heap of race-tradition,” that obstructs the pursuit of free thought (A41). In a letter to Mabel Dodge in which she recounted her meetings with Freud, Loy described the horror she experienced at the recognition of her subconscious as the poisonous

Apprehending the Futurist

“dumping ground” of paralyzing emotional effluvium, gathering the dross expelled by the collective consciousness of “race-tradition.” 88 In Aphorism 42, she goes on to underline that even those who deem themselves liberated are actually unknowingly subject to the illogical whims and imperceptible seepings of this dangerous, secret, psychic sac. Yet, in a restitution of the problem/ solution construction instated at the opening, salvation is seen to beckon. The idle but potentially productive space in which the subconscious currently squats, “the fallow-grounds of mental spatiality,” will be razed by Futurism and thereafter left “clear” for whatever use you yourself—“brave enough, beautiful enough” and Futurist—deem fit (A43–44). TO your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark. THEY are empty except for your shame. (A45–46) In these lines, perhaps the most strikingly phrased statement of the “Aphorisms,” the poet foreshadows the proclamations of her “Feminist Manifesto” of the same year.89 This self-ordained position, that of performing a brave, necessary service for those not strong enough to do it themselves, appealed to Loy and wholly fits the high rhetorical mode of the manifesto form. Swollen with her fluctuant sense of agency, Aphorisms 45 and 46 convey the poet’s fleeting conviction that she could speak for and to the passive masses. In the final lines of the manifesto, Futurist misanthropy is justified as a necessary condition for the eventual resurrection of Humanity: THUS shall evolve the language of the Future.

THROUGH derision of Humanity as it appears— TO arrive at respect for man as he shall be— (A48–50) When society is thus reborn, the taboos of the past will be rendered soluble and lose their potency. The phrasing of “man as he shall be” (A50) is imbued with an aura of prophecy. As though in answer to critics who condemned the movement’s brutality and aggression, Loy foretells that humanity, when it has shaken free of the conceptual shackles of the past, will earn the respect of Futurism. This freedom can be arrived at only through Futurist agitation and assault on passatismo. A51 offers an interesting conclusion to this dialogue with and on Futurism; in this last aphorism we are commanded to: ACCEPT the tremendous truth of Futurism Leaving all those —Knick-knacks.— (A51) Reading the “Knick-knacks” as constituents of the genus of “sleight, artifice, subterfuge” and to be those “of Futurism” divests the coda of its cryptic air. With this glib ending, Loy enjoins her reader to adopt, as she has done, a highly, wryly selective and epicurean approach to the movement. We are encouraged to embrace the “tremendous truth” of Futurism while discarding those more ridiculous—typographically isolated and portentously punctuated—aspects of the movement. Lampooning its excesses of untempered and grandiloquent arrogance, she entreats us to accept what is great in Futurism while ignoring its gimmicks. If Loy’s closing words constitute an avowal of her ambivalence, they also represent an unusual wielding of the manifesto’s deictic capabilities, effecting a

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hijacking of the Futurist ur-form to execute a critique of the Futurist manifesto. The preposition around which the title of this text hangs is a highly suggestive one. Although “Aphorisms on Futurism” is almost invariably read as an example of a Futurist manifesto, or a manifesto of Futurism, its given title in fact declares it to be a treatise “on” the movement. In the “Vallombrosa” section of “Brontolivido,” Loy writes of “the meretricious timbre of [Marinetti’s] wretched voice,” acknowledging that, notwithstanding her misgivings about much of the content it so forcefully transmitted, his is the “voice that set Europe to an orgasmic appreciation—.” 90 In “Aphorisms on Futurism,” the “indisputable voice” of Marinetti’s manifesto is co-opted to articulate an uneven, unstable admixture of emphatically endorsed Futurist ideology and parodies of that same ideology, along with anti-Futurist individualist rhetoric, nonsense shaped to look like Futurism and a variety of ultimately hollow maxims.91 Charged with articulating this contradictory confection, the speaker’s voice oscillates between the ecstasy of endorsement and the delight of defiance in a rapid-cycling display of mimicry, devotion, and mocking. The scholarship on this text has failed to register the

implications of the incorporation of senseless sentences that destabilize the entire edifice, calling into question the authority of each and every aphorism. By granting her generically slippery text its oddly prepositioned title, and cognizant of the fact that her Florentine residence and intimate entanglements with Futurist celebrity were well-known, Loy guaranteed an avid audience for a text that might not otherwise have garnered quite such attention. Her apparent alignment with the movement endowed her with a marketable public profile, just as the manifesto form provided a platform and persona out of which she could speak with fearless authority. As Marinetti himself was not an English speaker, there is no record of how he reacted to this harnessing of his manifesto mode to Loy’s purpose. With this text, the construction of Marinetti as the ventriloquist to Loy’s semi-supine dummy that forms the central image of “One O’Clock at Night” is radically subverted. In “Aphorisms on Futurism,” Loy appropriates the inherently masculinist manifesto model to conduct an ambiguous but utterly unpassive experiential investigation, a disquisition on her own reading of Futurism.

3 | Extracting an Artist from Futurism

A

n illuminating testament to the complexity of Loy’s response to Futurist constructions of artistic identity, “One O’Clock at Night” was first published in Rogue 1, no. 4 in May 1915 as the initial composition in a triptych entitled “Three Moments in Paris.”1 Appearing in the May 1915 edition of Louise and Allen Norton’s sophisticated, though notably inexpensive, magazine, it followed “Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” which just a month earlier had introduced the poet to the magazine’s Greenwich Village audience.2 Presenting seductive and unsettling portraits of commercialized and constricted femininity in a Paris at once glittering and decomposing, “Magasins du Louvre” and “Café du Néant” aptly fit the triptych’s frame. The unpunctuated free verse of “One O’Clock at Night,” however, stands somewhat apart. In this poem, Loy delineates the shifting dynamics of her engagement with Florentine Futurism and narrates the moment of her artistic becoming. Like “Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” it is addressed to Marinetti and features a comedic cameo appearance by Giovanni Papini.3 However, in contrast to the affectionately teasing tones of the former, “One O’Clock at Night” is possessed of an acidly satirical sensibility. It also articulates a markedly more self-aware and potent version of Loy’s poetic voice. Here, playful analogies

give way to scathing irony, and the reader witnesses the crystallization of the speaker’s subjectivity. No longer content merely to commentate, Loy writes herself into a poem whose pronouns swing almost metronomically between “I” and “you,” “my” and “your.” Thus, though the speaker of the earlier poem was a wry, if anonymous, portraitist of the Futurist artist, the objective of this work is the analysis of a Futurist inter-artist dynamic and of the intra-artist development it provokes. Devoid of the admittedly conflicted transports of awe and admiration that animate each line of the “Sketch,” this poem conflates the personae of Marinetti and Papini as “brother pugilist[s] of the intellect,” so as to depict Loy as a one-time prisoner of Futurism whom we witness agitating for release and for the artistic autonomy of her “personal mental attitude.” 4 Though you had never possessed me I had belonged to you since the beginning of time And sleepily I sat on your chair beside you Leaning against your shoulder (“One O’Clock at Night,” 1–4) The opening four lines promise a romantic tableau. Physical intimacy, somnolence, and the implied Parisian 39

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setting confect a misleadingly conventional prelude to a poem that immediately thereafter is transposed to an altogether less hackneyed key. As Andrew Michael Roberts writes: “It begins with a romantic cliché and the reader may at first wonder whether it is parodic or not.” 5 Without knowledge of Loy’s 1914 “Feminist Manifesto,” and of her concordant philosophy of gender and campaign for the devaluation of virginity, we might read these first lines as a typical avowal of eternal love and coy defense of untroubled virtue. Possession, in Loy’s writings from this period, is often portrayed as a particularly problematic preoccupation of Futurist men. In “Brontolivido,” possession is synonymous with sexual conquest,6 and in “Pazzarella,” with a more complete victory that, in vanquishing its object, would “put an end” to the lucky woman in question.7 In this context, the opening must be read as a parody of all such romantic ideology and an immediate introduction to the deeply ironic tone of the subsequent lines. Challenging a body of rhetoric dedicated to denying any association of the Futurist movement with the reviled passato, the poem begins by anchoring Marinetti in history. The speaker’s rejection of Futurist tropes is thus established from the outset. He who would attempt to shrug off chronological emplacement—declaring: “we, the powerful young Futurists, don’t want to have anything to do with it, the past!”— is introduced to the reader of this poem as a being doubly and damningly bound—to a woman and into time—under “the great Romantic Moonlight” he so reviled.8 Indeed, the “beastly sentimental moon”—with its doubly damning connotations of the feminine and the eternal—is charged by Brontolivido with the capacity to spontaneously induce “a venereal disease; in its onlookers.” 9 As Loy presents it here, notwithstanding the credo of “ABSOLUTE NOVELTY” that Futurism espouses, patriarchal gender relations remain immutable.10 Loy’s attachment to Marinetti was brief,

but her subordinate, semi-supine position in relation to Man was to be permanent, inherited, and apparently inescapable. The Futurists eulogized as “free moderns” in the “Manifesto of Futurist Painters” are reframed in this poem as players in an eternally running, unchanging drama. The allusion to “the beginning of time” (2) further enforces this sense of tedium, the boredom of acting as semiconscious dummy audience to such conversation. Just as the coda to the poem conveys the disturbing manner in which these men, Churchill observes, “dismiss her as a mere child driven by physical needs,” 11 so these first lines suggest the hyperbolic complaints of a bored child as the speaker parodies her own subordinate, infantile position. Sibilance in the third line fortifies the effect of the multiple allusions (3, 10, 13, 29) to her somnolence. Like the slurred speech of the barely awake, these sibilant reiterations threaten to slip from the page and the reader’s mouth as she, semiconscious and semi-supported, seems likely to slip from the shared chair. In a 1911 manifesto, first published as “Le Mépris de la femme,” Marinetti figures femininity as a slow, sleepy “poison.” She is “tragic plaything, fragile woman, haunting and irresistible, whose voice, weighed down with destiny, and whose dreamlike mane of hair extend into the forest and are continued there in the foliage bathed in moonlight.” 12 “Pazzarella” mirrors this conflation of the feminine and the (reviled) natural world in the image of its eponymous antiheroine “become one with the earth, the air, the season.” 13 In “One O’Clock at Night,” Loy takes this image of toxic passivity and recolors it, challenging this ubiquitous and problematic image with a counterpointed depiction of vital female intellect, induced to initiate her own creative evolution by the verbal jousting of her male companions.14 Within the Futurist Weltanschauung shared by these men, the “female” is coterminous with “semiconsciousness.” Loy uses this poem to construct an opposing template of the female artist as

Extracting an Artist from Futurism

that which results from the cleaving apart of the two terms. As in “Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” the speaker conspicuously emphasizes Marinetti’s embodied presence. In this poem his physicality is significant and overstated; his movements are wastefully energetic and his voice needlessly loud. Barely aware of her presence, he perceives no threat in her drowsy proximity. Neither of the men conceive of her as the potential agent of revolt she later reveals herself—to the reader if not yet her companions—to be. The female speaker’s acquiescence, her readiness to fall in with Marinetti’s posture, is unquestioningly assumed within that eternal gender dynamic. And your careless arm across my back gesticulated As your indisputable male voice Through my brain and my body (5–7)

roared

In these lines, all semblance of romantic intimacy dissolves. With typographic emphasis, Loy spatializes the affective discord. His arm across her back is careless rather than caressing; his voice is unpleasantly loud. These first interstitial spaces function like breaths held before revelations, isolating and so amplifying the words thus distinguished. The verbs they herald are unexpected and jarring; “gesticulated” falls in a polysyllabic clump at the end of the line—its five syllables demand deliberate articulation and warrant the preparatory pause that precedes them. The reader must infer that Marinetti’s body, as it describes these “gesticulant imperatives,” constitutes a less than comfortable resting place.15 Like the “gymnastics” of the second stanza, his movements are energetic, showy, and theatrical. At such an hour, and in such company (this is no Futurist serata), gesturing would surely suffice. His roaring seems equally inappropriate. It is, however, an apt oral correlative to what

Marinetti was at that time producing in print. Manifestos and pamphlets such as the “Second Futurist Political Manifesto,” “Futurism’s First Battles,” and “The Foundation and Manifesto” rang with incitements to “introduce the fist” into the realization of “the blood red vocation” of the Futurist artists, inciting Sophia, in “Brontolivido” to remark that “the Flabbergast Manifestos [. . .] read like obscene remarks of interned maniacs.” 16 At the same time, Russolo was harnessing noise as a new medium of art and the innovators of Futurist typography were employing unorthodox typography, strategic capitalization, and elaborately mapped calligrams to ensnare the attention of their overwhelmed audiences and readership. On December 12, 1913, Loy attended the infamous Futurist serata at the Teatro Verdi.17 Writing on the event for the Florence Herald later that month, Frances Simpson Stevens relays Loy’s claim that the experience was so invigorating that she “felt as if she had benefited by a fortnight at the seashore.” 18 In “Brontolivido,” Sophia makes the sly observation that “the way [the Martinet] was wearing his overcoat” was “very much louder” than the brass band she half-expected him to have arranged on the train platform.19 As Loy here and elsewhere makes emphatically clear, in every arena and with every means available, Futurism roared. The parallel alignment of “careless” and “indisputable” in lines 5 and 6 of “One O’Clock at Night” results in a readerly experience of a sort of eye-line matching. It might be argued that, through this design, Loy semaphores her unease with a man whose self-ordained leadership of the warmongering political and artistic wings of the movement combined a despotic sense of quasidivine authority with a lack of social or moral responsibility. However, mindful of Loy’s own vague moral orientation, it seems more germane to read it as an indictment of Marinetti’s misogynistic underestimation of the female. As he shouts and waves his arms about, he fails to guess at the yet-unvoiced opposition of the

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woman at his shoulder. The very indisputability asserted in such claims as “THE STUPENDOUS IMPORTANCE OF OUR AFFIRMATIONS REGARDING THE WILL OF GENIUS AND OF FUTURIST RENEWAL MUST BE EXALTED” 20 is problematized by the fact that Marinetti—whose voice, because male and Futurist, is indisputable—finds it necessary to exert that powerful tool with such belligerence to convince his audience. Surely, the speaker implies, the truly indisputable does not require volume to endorse its veracity. The performance of indefatigable virility was a vital component of Marinetti’s public profile. Publicly performed, and aggressively promoted, Futurist lust was cast as a matter of public concern, with the result that on September 25, 1914, Loy found herself described, in the Chicago Evening Post, as “the woman who split the futurist movement through the jealousy of the painter [Marinetti] and the Italian pragmatist-philosopher, Papini.” 21 Lampooning the clumsiness of their adolescent posturing, Loy depicts FUTURISM, in “The Sacred Prostitute,” passing around a book labeled “Women I have had” and “absent-mindedly” attempting to imply sexual intrigue with a false play of coyness.22 In “Brontolivido,” she seizes upon this adolescent homosociality and braggadocio, identifying him, in one tremendous image, as behaving “as if his dictatorship depended on attaching the other men to him with chains of his female conquests!” 23 As when, in “Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” the speaker repeatedly makes reference to her recollections of Marinetti as a man of flesh, so the description of his voice penetrating both “brain” and “body” in the poem reminds the reader that Loy’s engagement with Futurism comprised the intellectual and the sexual. Here, in addition to conveying the vibratory quality of his projected voice, this line serves to remind us that her interest in him was not in his Futurist theories alone. Indeed, in this poem, the speaker appears to be more comfortable with the physical presence of the Futurist man

than the bellowed rhetoric of the Futurist superuomo. A commitment to privileging Futurist physicality does not, however, correspond to a flattering portrayal of the Flabbergast’s performance as a lover. Failing to attain orgasm, but mindful of her duty to flatter the male ego, Sophia, in “Brontolivido” “knew enough to emit little gasps.” 24 In one especially absurd sex scene, the maligned male first promises a feat he calls feuille de rose before “flapping her about on the bed like a busy fishmonger slapping a dab on a marble counter.”25 Elsewhere in the same manuscript, Loy describes his inept caresses in mechanical terms— but selects, for her mechanical analog, the automatically emasculating figure of a sewing machine.26 The verb tense of “understanding” imputes extra semantic value in the lines “Arguing dynamic decomposition / Of which I was understanding nothing / Sleepily” (8–10), with the choice of past progressive implying that her inability to understand did not persist. Even if the speaker through which she ventriloquizes this poem is content to remain silent and supine—at least for a while—Loy is careful to ensure that the reader never doubts that such theories were absolutely within (and often, she seems to imply, below) her comprehension. Fortifying this covert defense of her temporary bafflement, the speaker chooses again to declare her somnolence. Repeatedly reminded of her sleepy state, the reader at this point is induced to consider the import of such overt repetition. If we are to interpret the poem as more than a recollected account of a tedious night in Paris, we are compelled to question whether this sleepiness is really a response to the situation. Is sleepy femininity the only role available to her within this milieu? And the only less male voice of your brother pugilist of the intellect Boomed as it seemed to me so sleepy Across an interval of a thousand miles

Extracting an Artist from Futurism

An interim of a thousand years (11–14) The spacing in Line 12 slows the line to the pace of dream time or, as in this poem, to that of the recently awoken. Thus isolated, the booming voice of Papini, Marinetti’s “brother pugilist of the intellect,” appears to resonate throughout the line.27 This evocation of a semiconscious perception of sound—delayed and withholding of meaning—is one of the most striking examples of Loy’s delicate manipulation of the soundscape. This extra sonic sensitivity is sustained across the following lines. Reminiscent of a fairy tale and mimicking the hyperbolic transports of Futurist rhetoric, the speaker hears his voice as though from a great distance and across centuries. This couplet also constitutes another covert attack on Futurist conceptualizations of time and space, its childish overtones mocking their fantasy of a future unmoored from history and of fragmented, exploded space. The poem hinges on Lines 15 and 16: “But you who make more noise than any man in the world when you clear your throat / Deafening woke me.” At this point, the exuberant exclamations and rib-jabbing gesticulations of the men penetrate and electrify the woman’s slumbering consciousness. Here is an openly legible allusion to the Futurists’ antagonistic propaganda campaigns—to the barrage of Marinettian bombast that Loy, in “Brontolivido,” alludes to as “his reputation for ‘unexpectedness’” and, in “The Sacred Prostitute,” represents as Futurism’s nonsensical stream of exclamations: “Coward—pouah! Milksop! Poo-uuu-aaah! Tango Tout!” 28 Equally bathetically figured in this poem, his is a rhetoric of eructation.29 Descriptions of the other actions performed by Marinetti’s busy mouth—and the nonsignifying sounds produced by “he who even masticated didactically”—pervade these writings.30 In sum, they amplify Loy’s attribution of the success of the movement

to how rather than what it promoted. Marinetti’s ample wealth and canny wielding of the machinery of publishing meant that it often appeared as though his every thought—even his most whimsical notions, his mucous movements—reached an audience. Again, his influence on her is portrayed as clumsy, unfocused, and accidental. This image is highly suggestive of Loy’s conceptualization of the “shot in the arm” provided to her by Futurism.31 Similarly, when Loy portrays herself as Pazzarella, the woman seen through Marinetti’s eyes, she claims that “her impact with the male had shattered her silence.” 32 Crucially, in each instance, her artistic awakening is portrayed not as the directed outcome of Marinetti’s solicitous attentions as mentor but as the felicitous and unexpected consequence of her exposure to the precious contagion of the Futurist movement. Once rendered conscious, the speaker becomes capable of comprehension: And I caught the thread of the argument Immediately assuming my personal mental attitude And ceased to be a woman (17–19) These lines fortify the prevailing suspicion that, under the Futurist worldview, to be female is necessarily to be semiconscious. The speaker is “a woman” only when she is asleep or when her capacities are sufficiently impaired by “post-nap-syndrome.” In “One O’Clock at Night,” nodding to de Beauvoir avant la lettre, one becomes and ceases to be a woman. Demonstrating an aspect of Loy’s philosophy that is hard to square with even her “strictly personal form of feminism,” the poet disassociates genius from her gender.33 Such problematic depictions of women are not confined to the emanations of Loy’s Florentine Futurist period. In a portrait that is itself riven with contradictory affect, the commonality of “most women” against which the

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hyper-sexualized figure of Gloria Gammage distinguishes herself is execrated as a “tepid pulp.”34 The ambiguous cast of Loy’s evaluation of women at large is neatly represented in “Brontolivido,” wherein Jemima laughingly chides “Bronty” for his misogynistic attitudes: “Don’t—the way you talk about women has made you repulsive to me—I have quite a few sympathies with my sex, she smiled at him—.” 35 Notwithstanding any such “sympathies,” Loy was nonetheless given to setting herself apart from her sex/gender. In “Brontolivido,” it is her Futurist companion-cum-sparring partner who makes this distinction, identifying the occasion of his encounter with Jemima as the pivot upon which his entire estimation of women turned. In another attempt to counter his interlocutor’s charges, he announces: “I did believe all that about women till I found you.” 36 It is unclear whether this dissociation is derived entirely from Futurist misogyny or in fact drawn from Loy’s own worldview. Churchill repeats this blurring, writing that “the mentally alert woman is no longer a ‘mere . . . animal woman’; her intellectual capacities eject her beyond the physical limits of her sex.” 37 Burke provides some elucidation, offering that “educated to a polarized view of sexual roles, Mina Loy could be disquieted by her analytic and creative powers.” 38 Rowan Harris writes that “for Mina Loy in the early teens ‘woman’ as an appellation was being experienced as profoundly debilitating, even wounding, and that femininity was to a considerable degree conceived as a mark of degradation.” 39 For Harris, Loy’s repudiation of the category of woman was crucial to her effort “to forge a feminist position.” 40 Drawing on Denise Riley’s notion of gender “claustrophobia” and Emily Apter’s theorization of a feminist “gynophobic subject,” Harris provides a convincing framework within which to understand Loy’s profoundly ambivalent response to Futurism’s scorn for women. The poet is seen to dislocate her identity as an artist, writer, and

intellect from her gender. But Loy is targeting a specific model of womanhood, as it was constructed and vilified within the Futurist doctrine of “scorn for women.” Read through the most sympathetic filter, this axiom of Futurism purported to attack not women but an antiquated notion of femininity. Caught between solidarity with her sex and repugnance for the role patriarchy assigned to its feminine subjects, Loy oscillates between scorn for Futurist misogyny and scorn for those against whom it was directed. However, its denunciations were broadly damaging, and the Futurists failed to proffer an alternative, more palatable mode of female existence. Paralyzed, as she initially appears to be, and entirely subordinate to these men, the speaker’s conception of “woman” narrows accordingly. Her sleepy, passive existence as a woman is cracked by the persistent irritation of Futurist activity and rhetoric. A new being emerges. This incarnation—Loy the (woman) poet—is unfettered by the claims of sex and operates an independent “personal mental attitude.” Marinetti’s 1913 “The Variety Theatre” celebrated “all woman’s marvellous animal qualities,” and his avatar in “Brontolivido” accordingly pronounces woman “a wonderful animal”; but notwithstanding these stirring presentations, Loy is not reconciled to renouncing the humanity of the female. In the second stanza, she derides both the infantile posturing of the Futurist men and the self-erasing parasitism of the hollow women they trail: Beautiful half-hour of being a mere woman The animal woman Understanding nothing of man But mastery and the security of imparted physical heat (20–23) The “defensive irony” that Virginia Kouidis aptly designates as the inflection of “One O’Clock at Night” is here

Extracting an Artist from Futurism

at its most cutting.41 The preceding account of this millennial “half-hour” has been anything but “[b]eautiful” (20). Loy’s decision to use such an overdetermined adjective is suggestive. Beyond its most obvious function—that of throwing into relief the discomfort and tedium of the preceding stanza—the scopophilic connotations also summon reflection on Loy’s fate as a famously “beautiful” poet within modernist circles and, perhaps more problematically, in modernist criticism. In Line 23, the Futurist male is once again reframed as a physical being; he is reduced to the sum of his material components. These animal women, who seek nothing more from men than their bulk, force, and metabolic effulgence of heat, recall the women of Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” whose “desire for comfortable protection” overrides their every other ambition.42 Contra the example of those objects of disdain, the independent creature who hatches in “One O’Clock at Night” beckons toward the possibility of a model of female identity that might operate as an alternative to the trio of “PARASITISM, & Prostitution—or Negation.” 43 Of course, the female as parasite is a common Futurist trope. The Second Proclamation of 1909, “Let’s Kill off the Moonlight!,” depicts men fearful of “supplicating arms being wrapped around” their legs, and “Against Sentimentalized Love and Parliamentarism” figures love as “that immense leash with which the sun keeps the valiant earth chained in its orbit.” 44 Loy implies, however, that Futurism continues to inscribe women within this parasitic position. For the Futurist “animal woman,” “hamstrung,” as Janet Lyon puts, by this “paucity of cultural roles,” 45 there is no exit. Indifferent to cerebral gymnastics Or regarding them as the self-indulgent play of children Or the thunder of alien gods (24–26)

The semiconscious Futurist woman may adopt one of three stances on Futurist masculinity: indifference, disdain, or fearfulness. The allusion to their performance of “cerebral gymnastics” echoes the gesticulations of the first stanza and is analogous to the “airy fairy of the ballet” of “Sketch of a Man on Platform.” 46 Similarly, in “Brontolivido,” Jemima imagines herself as an indulgent adult woman charged with entertaining and succoring a petulant Papini-derived man-infant who, though now “grown too tough to smack,” may yet be invited to come and sit upon her lap.47 Images evocative of the “selfindulgent play of children” that have hovered in implicit analogy throughout are finally articulated here, in this depiction of the Futurist artist as monstrous toddler. The third option—fearful deification—conjoins the Futurists’ empty noisemaking with their widely disseminated depictions of themselves as godly in wisdom and power. The poem hinges again on the line “But you woke me up” (27). At this point, the speaker’s reverie is abruptly suspended. She repeats her representation of Marinetti as unintentional activator of her “personal mental attitude” (18) and reverts to reporting on the men. Because she has been awakened, the aforementioned three positions are no longer available to her. Although her companions—the captors of her creativity—have not yet registered the transformation, the reader is assured that regression is impossible. Coming at the end of a stanza that critiques prevailing Futurist gender dynamics, this line is imbued with a resonance altogether different from that of the initial claim that he “Deafening woke me / And I caught the thread of the argument” (16–17). In this second instance, all hesitation, previously conveyed by the spacing, is gone. The assertion is clear and direct; the speaker’s enhanced sense of self-realization is apparent. Now it conveys a note of gratitude. “Brontolivido,” she admits, “really did make things happen to people.” 48 Much as he may have desired to keep her “fatuously silly,” Marinetti has accidentally irritated, shaken,

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jostled, and roared her from passive acceptance into creative existence.49 Throughout Loy’s writings, the Futurist artist’s transfer of vitalizing energy across the sex line is consistently figured as accidental. As Loy writes of “the Martinet” in “Brontolivido,” “he had the right stuff to give; and he flung it about this liveness of his careless of who picked it up.” 50 The facetious self-deprecation of the penultimate line, “Anyhow who am I that I should criticize your theories of plastic velocity” (28), is jocular. The transformation cannot be undone. The speaker mocks the misogynistic myopia of these men who so underestimate her and parodies her own former passivity. The vastness of the chasm between Loy’s selfhood and that voiceless vessel perceived by Marinetti and Papini is elegantly expressed in the last line, “Let us go home she is tired and wants to go to bed” (29). The “indisputable male voice” (6) again appropriates the voice and volition of the female speaker. Propelled by the force of her irony, the reader is compelled to look beyond this last line and into Loy’s subsequent literary career to hear the speaker’s no-longer-sleepy answer. On Marriage as Madness Between 1915 and 1920, many of Loy’s early poems, including “Love Songs I–IV,” “Songs to Joannes,” “The Black Virginity,” and “The Dead,” appeared under Alfred Kreymborg’s influential Others imprint.51 Composed in the summer of 1915, “The Effectual Marriage, or The Insipid Narrative of Mina and Giovanni” was first published in the 1917 edition of Others: An Anthology of New Verse.52 Featuring alongside new work by Eliot, Stevens, Moore, and Williams, this poem—much more than Loy’s other contributions to the same volume (“Human Cylinders” and “At the Door of the House”)—secured the attention of all its many commentators, most notably eliciting admiration from Pound and Eliot. Their enthusiastic responses have shaped both canon and criticism. Reviewed in Poetry, The Little Review, The Egoist,

and Future, the Others anthology situated Loy within an elite coterie of modern poets. The absence of any manuscript or proof copy with which to compare the published text of this poem is lamentable, but Loy scholars have expended considerable energy and not a little ire in recounting Pound’s infamous remodeling of it as “The Ineffectual Marriage” for Instigations (1920) and Profile: An Anthology Collected in Milan (1932).53 Where the original poem runs to 123 lines in 15 stanzas, this incarnation contained only 24 lines in three. Although this remastered version possibly attained a wider readership as a result of Pound’s incorporation of its truncated text into his writings on logopoeia, an analysis of the original text is much more germane to the issue—that of Loy’s engagement with, digestion of, and rejection of Florentine Futurism—which is under scrutiny here. “The Effectual Marriage” is, as Cristanne Miller has argued, “perhaps Loy’s bitterest poem on heterosexual conventions.” 54 A portrait of an imagined cohabitation with her former lover, Giovanni Papini, it constitutes an extended meditation on the life she might have lived as the captive female “correlative” (23) to Futurist genius. During the period of his own brief entanglement with Futurism, Papini was roundly considered to provide the intellectual counterpoint to Marinetti’s flamboyant dinamismo. If Marinetti shook her awake, it was from Papini, claims Hofer, that Loy learned her “Latinate diction, arch rationality and clinical vehemence.” 55 Papini’s “Massacre of Women,” published in Lacerba in April 1914, was, Hofer argues, a satirical rebuff to Futurist misogyny, and it shares with Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” of that year a complex of consanguineous and contrasting perspectives. A year later, the publication of his “Futurismo e Marinettismo” in the same magazine (February 14, 1915) would mark his disengagement from the movement. Geronimo, in “Brontolivido,” challenges Jemima with the claim, “You loved the Martinet__because he’s so extremely energetic.” 56

Extracting an Artist from Futurism

The same could be said of the international art world, which continued to respond with irritated enthusiasm to Marinetti’s provocations rather than switching its attentions to Papini’s subtler satires. Although Papini might represent an alternative model of Futurist masculinity, Loy’s rendering of this more ponderous, pompous template is no more forgiving. The narrative diegesis of the poem is entirely confined to the house shared by Gina and Miovanni: “a house that,” as Suzanne Churchill observes, “both describes and prescribes the limits of a marital relationship.” 57 Just as, in “Aphorisms on Futurism,” houses function metonymically to represent constricting social structures, so here the house is a place of imprisonment, self-inflicted blindness, and self-abnegation. In “Aphorisms,” she commands that the comfort and security afforded by “houses” be forsaken “that you may live in yourself.” 58 Although alert to the possibilities of this reading, I seek to propose that this “house” of commingled safety and suffocation might also, fruitfully, be read as symbolic of the Futurist movement as artist collective. As the preceding chapters demonstrated, the cohesive brand identity, dogma, and ideology of Futurism granted the Futurist artist an instant creative identity. With the comfort of numbers and clearly defined aims, it provided intellectual comfort and security to the artist. Although the tone of this poem is at times undeniably scathing, her vitriol does not indicate an unequivocal condemnation of the movement. Instead, she shifts back and forth, ridiculing Miovanni as Futurist artist but tempering her critique with a tender delineation of the promise, even the seduction, she associates with submission to the might of the collective. Initially exciting, intimate entanglements result in disappointment as stirring concepts ring hollow and doctrine threatens to erode entirely artistic autonomy. In “The Effectual Marriage,” Loy writes an allegorical defense of her commitment to her own artistic

identity—elliptically insisting that even an “effectual” union with Futurism would result in a desubjectifying assimilation and ultimately in her psychic disintegration. The door was an absurd thing Yet it was passable They quotidienly passed through it It was this shape (“The Effectual Marriage,” 1–4) In this first stanza, images of captivity abound. The speaker depicts her potential Futurist-bound self as “kept” (15) in a house with doors that never open (70), hanging out of windows (11), in a socially constructed prison from which “no well-mated woman ever returns” (30). Fifteen stanzas of protest about the fate of individual female creativity within Florentine Futurism culminate in a parenthetical note that closes the narrative opened by the first stanza’s meditation on an “absurd” door. Perhaps the door is ridiculous because, though daily “passable” (2), it functions neither to keep Gina inside nor to permit her exit; these limens—whatever “shape” (4) they might be—are governed by society. In the absence of any manuscript drafts, we are left casting about for an explanation of the Franco-slanted misspelling “quotidienly” of the third line. Defending its uncorrected reappearance through successive editorial revisions, Marisa Januzzi argues for the intentionality of this orthographic idiosyncrasy, contending that Kreymborg, as a “relatively conservative editor,” permitted it to remain.59 This somewhat cryptic opening stanza develops greater semantic significance when reappraised as a foundation for the multiple figures of enclosure embedded in the poem. The fallout from conceiving gender categories as impermeable is exposed in the final revelation that even Gina’s forbearance and seeming acceptance of her supine situation cannot protect her from the disintegration of her psyche.

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Gina and Miovanni who they were God knows They knew it was important to them This being of who they were They were themselves (5–8) In direct contravention of the demand of the “Feminist Manifesto” that women “Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not—seek within yourselves to find out what you are,” the appallingly pliable woman in “Brontolivido” petitions him to “Tell me what sort of a man will choose me—so that I may know what kind of woman to become.”60 Loy was ever impatient with the construction of masculine and feminine identities as correlates of each other. The anagrammatic naming technique that extrapolates Gina and Miovanni from Mina and Giovanni in “The Effectual Marriage” underlines the inseparable nature of their roles within a dynamic of gender-defined mutuality. Loy’s anagrammatic methods are always arch and knowing; she is striving not to erase or even occlude the identities of either party but to imbricate them in these mutually disabling hybrid identities. The heavy irony of the facetious remark “who they were God knows” (5) underlines her intention that the identities of both individuals should be legible and recognized. Their selves have become interfused; their gender-assigned identities are interdependent. Gina and Miovanni have molded each other and themselves to create a closed, coherent unit; her “being a female” (21) permits him to be “magnificently male” (56).61 Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” further exemplifies her convictions about the mutually injurious effects of men and women living within “a protectorate of ” the opposite sex and exhorts both sexes to remove themselves from this compact of mutual dependence.62 She insists on the toxicity of the conventional model, asserting that “Men and women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited for the

parasite, the parasite for the exploited—.” 63 Parallels can be drawn between these hybrid characters and the image, which arises later in this poem, of Madonna fused with man: a grotesque spectacle that “anybody” outside the house “could see” (33). Thus a neat exchange of initial consonants produces proliferating ramifications that echo down through the poem. Having established the identities of her protagonists, the speaker goes on to mock the preening proprioception of these petty, housebound egos. Their hyper-conscious performance of their ordained roles, “[t]his being of who they were” (7), is significant only to them. As though in answer, the syntactic return to the point of origin, “They were themselves” (8), in the next line, produces another image of encirclement, the exchange of “themselves” for “who” emphasizing their closed-off, self-reflexive existence. Without pause or other punctuation, this couplet is aurally evocative of their stifling cohabitation and faintly reminiscent of the limited vocabulary and syntactic reversals common both to nonsense rhymes and the internal monologues of claustrophobic rumination. It sounds like madness. “The Effectual Marriage” exhibits a number of the typographical quirks common in Loy’s earlier work. A pattern of thirty-nine simultaneously punctuating and puncturing interstitial spaces of varying lengths is introduced in its second stanza. As Matthew Hofer puts it, “the poem’s ‘irritation’ proceeds almost entirely from its syntax and semantics [. . .] what is withheld, whether a comma or a coordinating conjunction or an exclamation mark, is no less crucial than what is given.”64 The spaces that fragment the ninth and tenth lines work to isolate and visually spotlight the adverbs. The pauses they represent demand emphatic pronunciation of each individual descriptor, embossing every Latinate syllable with deliberate, solemn effect. Spoken aloud, this concentration of interrupting absences interspersed with an alliterative accumulation of hard c sounds makes these lines sound

Extracting an Artist from Futurism

artificially careful, politic in tone. We wonder what is being left so audibly unsaid. Read in this way, these particular examples of Loy’s artful spacing appear somewhat ominous. Where “Corporeally” and “transcendentally” pertain, presumably, to Gina and Miovanni, respectively, “consecutively” and “conjunctively” restate their status as correlative counterweights within this insipid equation. The space introducing “complete,” the final adverb in the sequence, has a particular valence; it seems to replace or signify a negating prefix. Coming after the breath it implies, “complete” sounds like a second guess, a wry dissimulation on the part of the speaker whose efforts, in every other line of the poem, are engaged in portraying these intertwined lives as anything but complete. Indeed, as Virginia Kouidis argues, “their marriage possesses only a negative completeness.” 65 In the evening they looked out of their two windows Miovanni out of his library window Gina from the kitchen window From among his pots and pans Where he so kindly kept her Where she so wisely busied herself (11–16) Binary constructions of the “Miovanni/Gina,” “Where he/Where she” type compose much of the skeleton of “The Effectual Marriage.” They almost invariably express the construction of a gendered dyad in which the syntax remains stable while the experience differs. Every action performed by Gina or Miovanni is seen to induce an equal reaction in the lover; they exist entirely in counterpoint to each other. These almost echoes pull to the aural surface any points of similarity and difference. Both characters spend their evenings separately within, gazing out. However, while the library is “his,” the kitchen is not, as we might expect, “hers” but is marked only with a definite article. Equally, the “pots

and pans” among which Gina moves are also the possessions of Miovanni. In her “Feminist Manifesto,” Loy rails against a system that incentivizes marriage with the promise of capital gain for women and yielding virginity for men: “The advantages of marriage are too ridiculously ample—compared to all other trades—for under modern conditions a woman can accept preposterously luxurious support from a man (with-out return of any sort—even offspring)—as a thank offering for her virginity.” 66 Is it, then, because their relationship lacks the official sanction of marriage that Gina fails to qualify for the material boons of matrimony? The tone of the paired lines “Where he so kindly kept her / Where she so wisely busied herself ” (15–16) is unequivocally facetious. In this correlative couplet, Miovanni appears to exact as much control over her actions as his own. At a grammatical level, he (as agent) keeps her (as object), whereas she acts upon only herself. Pots and Pans she cooked in them All sorts of sialogogues Some say that happy women are immaterial (17–19) The capitalization of “Pots and Pans” (17) is both unexpected and significant. When all seven instances of unorthodox capitalization are read together, they produce an embedded, abbreviated précis of the poem. Thus “The Effectual Marriage” is rewritten in this capitalized shorthand to depict an “Empyrean” (29) marital “Universe” (120) inhabited by separate beings, “Each” (59) in an existence circumscribed by the material concerns represented by “Pots and Pans” (17) and a “Basket” that fundamentally amounts to “Nothing” (73). The “sialogogues” of Line 18 provide the first example in this poem of Loy’s customary plundering of distancing medico-scientific terminology.67 Carolyn Burke remarks that “we infer that all is not wedded bliss from

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the speaker’s ironic use of the pompous polysyllables that Miovanni himself might favour.” 68 However, this appropriation of the term for a saliva-inducing medicine also serves to hint that Gina’s employment of pots and pans is but faintly connected with the provision of nutrition. Instead, she has redirected her sexual energies (evidence of which is conspicuously absent from both marriage and poem) to produce upon him physical effects analogous to those that are missing.69 Gina instigates the conjugally congruous flow of bodily fluids via the creations she carries from the kitchen. With the pause in the line “Some say that happy women are immaterial” (19), suggestive of a faltering conviction, Loy implies that within the Universe of the poem, happy women—women without matter—cannot exist and are merely mythical creatures. So here we might dispense with her Gina being a female But she was more than that Being an incipience a correlative an instigation of the reaction of man (20–24) In Valentine de Saint-Point’s 1912 “Manifesto of Futurist Woman,” she declares that “Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being.” 70 For Loy, as for de Saint-Point, maleness and femaleness are coexistent, commingled qualities rather than binarily opposed identities. Within the domestic universe of this poem, however, male and female are utterly divided—essences divorced from each other. Gina is entirely, even especially or excessively, female. She is a woman and also, somehow, “more than that” (22). However, this extra quality does not enrich Gina’s own life or productivity. Rather, her excess of

femininity makes her an ideal muse for the creative productions of the man in her life. She unknowingly induces a dramatic, productive response in him; igniting his creativity, she instigates his activity. Strikingly, even as Loy ridicules Gina’s lack of agency, presenting her as a somnambulist’s finger, squeezing the trigger of male creation, so she subversively reframes the Futurist artist. If Gina is the vessel-like, empty muse, then Miovanni, contra Futurism, is the artist as reactor rather than actor. In myriad manifestos, the Futurists delighted in the prospect of art entirely untethered, upon which “no logic, no tradition, no aesthetic, no technique, no opportunity can be imposed on the artist’s natural talent.” 71 The Futurists’ chauvinistic agenda is identified and undermined in the fourth stanza: From the palpable to the transcendent Mollescent irritant of his fantasy Gina had her use Being useful contentedly conscious She flowered in Empyrean From which no well-mated woman ever returns (25–30) Gina’s pliable softness, which enables her to confine herself so productively to the realm of domestic, material existence, constitutes “her use” (27). Redolent of the past, of sentiment and materiality, she exists to irritate the Futurist artist.72 As she unthinkingly shops, cooks, and cleans around him, she incites him to write abstract, transcendent diatribes against the enabling softness of the monstrously mollescent feminine. In a 1909 interview, Marinetti called for an end to what he colorfully termed an “obsessive leitmotif, a depressing literary fixation,” asking, “Truly, is woman the only starting point for, and the only purpose of, our intellectual development, the unique driving force of our sensibilities?” 73 The speaker of “The Effectual Marriage” suggests that

Extracting an Artist from Futurism

the Futurist artist—notwithstanding the radical promises of his revolutionary rhetoric—continues to trap women in a position from which no escape is possible. Gina’s use is to embody all that he finds so repugnant. Thus she is soft, domestic, corporeal, physically and temporally rooted, practical, romantic, desirous of love, and given to wishing on stars. Her domestic role permits no greater creativity than what might be expressed, as in Line 109, on the back of a “milk bill.” Miovanni puts her in this position, confines her to this existence so that he might observe and rebel against it. The parasitic analogy from the “Feminist Manifesto” invoked above is equally apposite here; Loy’s evocation of gendered dependency damns all parties. The description of Gina as “contentedly conscious” (28) reflects a contemplation of female consciousness first encountered in “One O’Clock at Night.” Here the adverb negates, or at least troubles, the adjective. Everything else we have learned about Gina indicates that she is functioning at the lowest level of consciousness. As she is unprotestingly and industriously confined to the kitchen, her poetry is painfully limited. In Line 28, the speaker presents contentedness and consciousness as diametrically opposed conditions. Placed within this conjunction, they divest each other of any semantic weight, alleging once again that to be content within this Futurist construction of the art world, woman must be barely sentient. The reference to the “Empyrean” in the next line is doubly allusive, evoking the heaven that domesticated passion is promised to be but also the fiery sphere within which her flowering (not waving but drowning) might be construed as burning (29–30). Fortified by the elaboration that this is a place “from which no wellmated woman ever returns,” the speaker suspends the female figure between heaven and hell. Her ringing sarcasm effects a sort of verbal trompe l’oeil effect, evoking an image of the harmonious ersatz marriage that is sold as h(e)aven but is lived as hell.

Sundays a warm light in the parlour From the gritty road on the white wall anybody could see it (31–33) The disordered syntax of these lines chimes with the topsy-turvy pattern of Gina’s disordered thoughts and introduces the troubling images they preface. Gina and Miovanni’s life together is so openly, legibly sinister that “anybody could see it” (33). Gina’s descent into madness could, the speaker suggests, have been predicted by even a casual passerby. In the image that follows, the concept of hybridized identity is further developed, pursued to conclusion in an ominous tableau: Shimmered a composite effigy Madonna crinolined a man hidden beneath her hoop Ho for the blue and red of her The silent eyelids of her The shiny smile of her (34–39) Male and female, in this “Effectual Marriage,” are grotesquely fused. Recalling once again the presentation of Loy and Marinetti as dummy and ventriloquist in “One O’Clock at Night,” it depicts an ornamental virgin whose movement is directed by the lascivious man who hides beneath her skirts. This composite effigy collapses categories and erases the borders of individual identity with unsettling effect. The Madonna’s face is a doll-like mask of “blue and red” and “shiny smile.” Her beauty and air of sexual availability parodies Loy’s particular experience as the infamously photogenic face of modernist poetry. Running on from the “hoop” of Line 36, the “Ho” of the following line evokes the rollicking roll of an old bawdy rhyme. With similar visual effect, contemporaneous theories of color contrast

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demonstrated the vibrating effect produced by the proximal collocation of red and blue. Sibilance in the final lines, when combined with the aspirant “her . . . her . . . her” (37–39), produce a soundscape of susurration, while the parallel matching extends the singsong rhyme. Ding dong said the bell Miovanni Gina called Would it be fitting for you to tell the time for supper Pooh said Miovanni I am Outside time and space (40–45) Futurist aspirations of escaping time and conquering space are ridiculed in this verse, as earlier they were mocked in “Sketch of a Man on a Platform” and “One O’Clock at Night.” Miovanni’s refusal to acknowledge the authority of these concepts is portrayed as a risibly infantile affectation, a further example of Futurism as the “self-indulgent play of children.” 74 His claim “I am / Outside time and space” (44–45) is fantastically absurd. The phatic “Pooh!” with which he prefaces it is the same childish exclamation “growled” by Joannes in “Brontolivido.” 75 Miovanni’s (admittedly short-lived) zeal for Futurist theory has abstracted him from embodied existence. Futurist time is constructed as opposed to real time, as lived through the body. In this, the satirical zenith of the poem, Gina is pictured pathetically attempting to fit with Futurist time logic. Her excessively polite attempts to divine his master plan on a meal-by-meal basis expose her too to the reader’s ridicule. The pooh-poohing philosopher’s helpmeet responds with appropriate absurdity to her inane living situation: Patience said Gina

is an attribute

And she learned at any hour to offer The dish appropriately delectable (46–48) Parroting the counsel meted to her by society, Gina performs her own sort of “cerebral gymnastics.” 76 She contorts herself into the friable form of a perfect effectual wife. Miovanni clearly still needs physical sustenance but presumes that his semiconscious helpmeet will bend to perform these domestic duties: nurturing his body that he might revel in the capacity of his mind. The spacing in this stanza gives it—in defiance of its male subject—an aura of measure, a rhythm of deliberately counted time. As the final line of the stanza approaches, the spoken tempo steadily decelerates. What had Miovanni made of his ego In his library What had Gina wondered among the pots and pans One never asked the other So they the wise ones eat their suppers in peace (49–53) Once again, the activities of Gina and Miovanni, he in “his library” and she among “the pots and pans” (my emphasis), are depicted in counterpoint. In another submerged sideswipe, the source of Futurist production is located in “ego” (49) rather than genius. As a woman, Gina merely wonders; her mental capacity extends to nothing more active or creative than this vague, aimless pondering. Confined to a place of hollow vessels, her thoughts are consumed with the apparently intense cerebral activity of her lover. The last line of this stanza is worthy of special attention. Shifting suddenly into the present tense, “they” (53) enlarges its remit in this line to refer to a wider group; the “wise ones” encompasses all those who continue to “eat” their suppers in this paralyzed peace (53). While we

Extracting an Artist from Futurism

can intuit a certain sarcasm in this seeming vindication of the innumerable Ginas and Miovannis of Loy’s world, the reader might also detect a certain acknowledgment of regret. “One O’Clock at Night” is patterned throughout with the speaker’s recognition of the losses incurred by the woman who abandons an unconscious cocoon state for the more bracing climate of her “personal mental attitude.”77 Similarly, this invocation of “wise ones” conveys the speaker’s nostalgic appreciation for the “peace” that is risked when the house is abandoned. Their peace has the quality of an ineffable mystery. The speaker muses: Of what their peace consisted We cannot say Only that he was magnificently man She insignificantly a woman who understood (54–57) Here, in another gendered reverselet, man is to woman as magnificent is to insignificant. Such broadly drawn comparisons are heavy with irony. The object of Gina’s understanding is ambiguous, as is the capacity Brontolivido accredits to women alone—that of “understanding the misunderstandable.” 78 Is the womanly brand of understanding just a form of tender acquiescence? Does Gina understand Miovanni, his theories, the constraints of their gender roles, and the limits imposed on her by this existence? Or rather, was she a woman “who understood / Understanding” (57–58)—one who understands the challenge of achieving consciousness? “[C]ontentedly conscious,” Gina deliberately remains in this state because she knows the perils that fully conscious understanding—the adoption of that “personal mental attitude”—will engender.79 To Each his entity to others their idiosyncrasies to the free expansion

to the annexed their liberty (59–61) Within the prosody of the poem, it seems reasonable to presume that these two groups—“the free” and “the annexed”—can also be divided along gender lines. While Miovanni is clearly afforded ample space to expand, liberty is not available to Gina. This lack of balance is mimicked in the spatial composition of these lines, with the withholding of an anticipated pause separating “free” and “expansion” contributing to this sense of a grandiloquent though unbalanced rhetoric. Later in the same stanza, “his work” and “her love” are polarized in another of these gendered couplets. In “Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine,” Marinetti explicitly calls on men to “kill, within [them], the deep-seated sickness of Love with a capital L.” 80 In this Futurist world, in which love is the domain of the female and creative activity the preserve of the male, Gina is required to provide only “Succulent meals and an occasional caress” (64). The indentations that set apart the staggered antiphon— So be it It so seldom is (65–66) —suggest the voices of two external commentators, or perhaps the coexistence of two contradictory opinions within the speaker’s mind. This simple account of clearly defined, mutually appreciated roles represents the dominant patriarchal model, that which resides in the collective consciousness as the template for (effectual) marriage. In spite of the hegemonic sway of such an ideal, the poem proposes, such simple harmony rarely occurs within nature. “It,” pure, harmonious, and satisfying, “so seldom is” (66). While Miovanni thought alone in the dark

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Gina supposed that peeping she might see A round light shining where his mind was (67–69) The tenth stanza contains what is probably the most pointed representation of Loy’s crisis of faith in the promise of Futurism. Here, Miovanni performs his thinking holed up and sightless, in a vacuum. Gina, a woman made childlike, envisions his secret cogitation as a dramatic illumination, his head flooded with the light of original thought. Conveying Gina’s internal doubts about Miovanni’s greatness, the speaker observes that: She never opened the door Fearing that this might blind her Or even That she should see Nothing at all (70–73) This, I believe, is the poet communicating her own assimilation anxiety. For Gina, Futurism seems to promise illumination, yet she, like Loy, wonders whether—in spite of all its noisemaking and attentionseeking—it might ultimately amount to “Nothing at all” (73). The capitalization here is significant, visually connecting this word with its capitalized counterparts and emphasizing the gravity with which Gina, whose life is dedicated to the physical maintenance of the Futurist male, considers this terrible possibility. The space that precedes it is a teasing one. It grants us space or time to imagine, to seed our own expectations of what the Futurist ego might produce, only to produce this bathetic answer. The reader is reminded of Marinetti’s commanding act of throat-clearing in “One O’Clock at Night.”81 This suspension between embracing the promise of an artistic movement and fearing that its performances and publications might mask a void is a major preoccupation for Loy and animates each of

these three poems. Even her scarcely sentient alter ego, Gina, is shaken by this worry: So while he thought She hung out of the window Watching for falling stars And when a star fell She wished that still Miovanni would love her to-morrow And as Miovanni Never gave any heed to the matter He did (74–82) Having disclosed the anxiety that haunts Gina’s somnambulant quotidian, the remainder of this stanza describes the woman embracing the script assigned to her with gusto. Sentimental, silly, and passive, like the women of Futurism’s nightmares and Loy’s own giggling, dotless “Virgins,” she is a clinging creature of “sighs” and “romantic sobs.” 82 While “he thought” (74), she leans from the window, her head swimming with wishes and her eyes trained on the stars. The repetition of “falling stars . . . star fell” (76–77) reintroduces the rolling, storytelling tone described earlier. Miovanni, as earlier stanzas have demonstrated, places himself above time, space, food, and love. In the “Futurist Address” of his 1909 novel Mafarka the Futurist, Marinetti scoffed: “Yes, love, womankind . . . all of that can hide the sky for a moment and fill the well of space! . . . but I have erased them from my memory!” (148).83 Of course, in their reimagining of a world without women, the Futurists did not intend the extinction of the human race. Instead, as in “The Sacred Prostitute,” Futurism hoped to invent a “new game—we want to make our own children, evolve them from our own indomitable intellects.” 84 Papini, in his manifestation here as Miovanni, appears equally committed to this ludicrously misogynistic andro-gynetic project.

Extracting an Artist from Futurism

The next stanza constructs a dichotomy: Gina was a woman Who wanted everything To be everything in woman Everything everyway at once (83–86) The tongue-twister tangle of these lines, coupled with the alliteration and repetition of “woman/who/wanted/ way,” creates a soundscape of auditory confusion; “ . . . everything . . . / . . . everything . . . / Everything . . . everyway” sounds greedy. In a 1919 letter to Marianne Moore, Pound wrote: “The female is a chaos / The male / is a fixed point of stupidity.” 85 In “Pazzarella,” the male Futurist dreams that he might “organize that revolving chaos” of Pazzarella, his female “creation.”86 Contra the Futurists’ eulogizing of speed and dynamism—“I am—on the go—on the go—on the go!—,” Loy, in “Brontolivido,” charges the Futurist artist with the same incongruous fixity, exclaiming: “Bronty—you’re static!” 87 In Stanza 11 of “The Effectual Marriage,” Loy posits a remarkably apposite Poundian dialectic of fluid femininity and immovable masculinity: Diurnally variegate Miovanni always knew her She was Gina Gina who lent monogamy With her fluctuant aspirations A changeant consistency Unexpected intangibilities (87–93) While Miovanni exempts himself from the dominion of time and space, Gina is both of the everyday and eternally in flux. Gina’s analog, Jemima, is depicted as inhabiting a state of amoral feminine fluidity—“feeling for a

protoform to crystallize to.” 88 Crucially, however Gina might shape-shift, she cannot escape his recognition and classification of her; she is—to him—eternally Woman. Her “aspirations” (91) both encompass the sighs of the swooning woman and hint at Gina’s unfulfilled wishes, her longing for something more. The multiplicity that Gina implicitly contains evokes Loy’s own polymorphous creative persona, her thinking tinged with the blended hues of many isms and multiple modalities of avant-gardism. The poem hints that these “unexpected intangibilities” (93) were, perhaps, equally imperceptible to a Futurist leader who expected only “monogamy” (90) and who was indeed so absolute in his totalitarian control that “he would have renounced Venus to hold his movement together.” 89 Staying with this Poundian model, Miovanni is depicted as profoundly anti-dynamic, a paragon of static masculinity: “Miovanni remained / Monumentally the same / The same Miovanni” (94–96). Contravening the principal tenets of a Futurist aesthetic composed around ideas of perpetual movement, lines of force, and dynamism, Loy portrays Papini as utterly motionless. Inert and unchanging, he is antithetical to Boccioni’s model of the thrusting, forward-propelled Futurist man whose every molecule embraces motion, to Carrà’s lines of force or Russolo’s crowd propelled forward in perpetual waves of energy. In “Pazzarella,” this liquidity of the feminine is hypostatized to a new level as the Futurist narrator witnesses, to his great disgust, his erstwhile lover reduced to a “mixture of quivering mucous and clammy flesh running with tears!” 90 In a still more subversive twisting of Futurism’s self-conception, an enraptured Brontolivido is portrayed “getting flabbier and flabbier”—his physique deliquescing in a material evocation of melting submission in love.91 The repeated application of the comparative adjective here imparts an extra dimension to Loy’s recategorization of the Futurists as Flabbergasts. Witnessing this corporeal renunciation of his male Futurist

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privilege, Jemima concludes that “it was for me to mould him.” 92 These sly denials, refusals, and contraventions of Futurist doctrine attest to Loy’s unacknowledged familiarity with the specific linguistic and conceptual tropes of their self-construction as well as her intention to rebut them on their own terms and in their own voices. The stanza concludes with a multilayered meditation on the potential implications of Miovanni’s eventual movement: If he had become anything else Gina’s world would have been at an end Gina with no axis to revolve on Must have dwindled to a full stop (97–100) Building on the accreted references to containment, Gina is here figured as held in place by Miovanni. In “Brontolivido,” Jemima is struck with the realization that Brontolivido “is trying to create an axis for me to revolve on—in order to take it away—.” 93 A similar construction in “Pazzarella” sees the Futurist speaker claim to have created and fixed his female companion: “Until now she had nothing but her breath and the everlasting attraction toward man, lacking an axis about which to revolve. I am man and I shall be her axis.” 94 For an axis to provide such stability, it must completely penetrate the body (celestial or corporeal). The Futurist male provides her with a position out of which to create but demands an absolute, agonistic sacrifice. Miovanni’s support necessitates his invasion and inhabitation of Gina’s core. Once secured, indoctrinated into the Futurist faith, she is rendered unable to move, change, or escape. Loy’s horror of such a fate can be traced throughout her work and pervades the speaker’s hyperbolic forecast of catastrophe. The last line of this stanza is especially polyvalent. The full stop it threatens (a point of punctuation Loy so conspicuously spurned in her own writing) most obviously

signifies ending: the disintegration of the unconscious Domestobot in a world bereft of her magnificent man. It might also be read, however, as a prophecy of transformation or rebirth. In a poem haunted by the spectral “Nothing” (73), Gina’s demise—rather than continuing or intensifying the emptiness—produces a punctuation mark. The “full stop” that marks the site of Gina’s dwindling is also the mark of authorial control. Once Loy dislodged herself from the Futurist axis, she began to write. If this stanza concludes with the premonition of Gina’s death, it implicitly heralds the birth of Mina’s artistic selfhood. The twelfth stanza resumes the cataloging of Gina’s daily duties: “In the mornings she dropped / Cool crystals / Through devotional fingers” (101–3). In the speaker’s reifying ritualization of trite domesticity, this mundane act is stylized and aestheticized—even, it could be argued, rendered colloquially “poetic.” Another strategically employed interstitial space visually uncouples “Saccharine” from “for his cup” (104), giving the noun the momentary appearance of an adjective and encouraging the reader to associate this sweetness with Gina herself. The capitalization of “Basket” in the description of Gina’s market trips has been addressed above (106). Just as a visual trigger can provoke daytime uneasiness by invoking the memory of the preceding night’s disturbing dream, the “red flannel flower” recalls the garish and grotesque Madonna of Stanza 5. Its rosy tincture imbues this wholesome portrait of domestic industry with an unsettling air of latent menace. An artificial simulacrum of organic life, the flannel flower further underlines the lifeless futility of Gina’s incarcerated existence. When she was lazy She wrote a poem on the milk bill The first strophe Good morning The second Good night Something not too difficult to

Extracting an Artist from Futurism

Learn by heart (108–13) For Gina, as the woman artist trapped within this Futurist Universe, poetry is a trivial pursuit, of secondary importance to the smiling execution of her wifely chores. Her art is domestic. Only “a poem on the milk bill,” it is tied to the earthly concerns of food and money, both of which Giovanni appears to disdain. Suzanne W. Churchill argues that “by mocking Gina’s literary endeavors, Loy reasserts the distinction between herself and a “poetess” who contents herself with simple rhymes to pass the time.” 95 Rather than thus construing Mina’s embedding of Gina’s poem in her own text, I read the closed-off round of “Good morning” and “Good night” as another hermetically sealed, impermeable, and potential-less circle. The banal and childish acknowledgment of night and day is all she can achieve in this suffocating context. Her mind, like her dematerializing body, has withered in the service of Futurism. The final stanza opens with an appealing evocation of the physical, sensory pleasures enjoyed by this (immaterial) woman: “scrubbed smell . . . greasy cleanliness . . . coloured vegetables . . . intuited quality . . . crickly sparks” (114–18). Though rich in olfactory, visual, auditory, and tactile detail, her universe is entirely bereft of thought. Such animal sensuality accords neatly with Futurist conceptualizations of woman. To ask for such simple, mindless “happinesses,” the sardonic speaker implies, is anything but “audacious” (119). These “Pet simplicities” are palpably lacking in intellectual stimulation. While Miovannni earnestly strains to free himself from the indignities of physical existence, Gina is defined by her contact with material substances. In his infamous 1911 treatise “Against Sentimentalized Love and Parliamentarianism,” Marinetti writes: “It goes without saying that if nowadays women dream of gaining political rights, it’s because, without being really

aware of it, they have a deep conviction that as mothers, brides, and lovers, they form a closed circle and are simply totally deprived of any positive role in society.” 96 “The Effectual Marriage” abounds in circles, images of spheres, and round objects. Gina surrounds herself with such images of closed coherence: “[w]here circles were only round / Having no vices” (121–22). Permitting no escape, endless and eternal, the circle repeats itself incessantly. The vice is functionally analogous to the axis. Whereas the latter grips internally, the former holds from without. Gina’s circles possess these essential qualities, but she fails to perceive the enclosures they represent. The vices Gina fails to recognize in her domestic environment are wrought of social expectation. They are the conventions that seek to fix women, voicelessly, in position “as mothers, brides, and lovers.” 97 In this book I hope to demonstrate that Mina Loy was, at every stage in her career and throughout her engagements with Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, concurrently concerned with the pursuit of her own artistic self-realization. Reading “The Effectual Marriage” from this perspective, the “vices,” which Gina attempts to ignore and which so appall Mina, are refigured as representing the constricting clutches of Futurism. Two full stops represent the only concessions to conventional punctuation. As before, the indentation sets the line “Having no vices” (122) apart, giving it the appearance of an interjection, a musing voiced by an external commentator. Perhaps these interjections are made by Mina. They can be read as the knowing addenda with which she interpolates— and hence complicates—Gina’s naive account. The parenthetical note upon which this poem concludes demolishes any abiding suspicion that Gina’s experience of controlled and contained artistic identity can result in anything but mental evisceration. Instantiating a sudden detour from the cryptic atmosphere of the preceding stanza, this addendum, added after the fact, nullifies any potential romanticization of Gina’s insipid

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narrative. It was Forte dei Marmi to which Mina Loy fled in 1915 when her affair with Papini had disintegrated,98 and as Churchill observes, “The note exposes the house as the source and site of female madness, implicitly linking the mad woman to the female writer,” 99 summoning up images of Bertha Mason and Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis of the madwoman in the attic. In all her brief, heady entanglements with avant-garde artist collectives Loy would always eventually find herself compelled to leave, repelled by the prospect of being fixed within a single aesthetic or ideology. The “home of a mad woman” (123) is a warning from the poet to her future self and vindication of her fickle creative career. Having played out, in fifteen stanzas of rich and complex free verse, the projected course of her life were she to submit to the assumed authority, the “indisputable voice” of this man who represents the Futurist movement, she leads us to the conclusion that such a route would result not only in a stifling of her own creative voice but even in insanity.100 When the limiting, paralyzing containment of the collective loomed, Loy abandoned this narrative as she would so many others, upon recognizing a potential threat to the development of her nascent voice. Reports of Loy’s Florentine domicile, intimate entanglements with Futurist celebrity, and perceived allegiance to the movement preceded the publication of these poems in New York and granted her a rapt Arensberg-centered audience. She used the transatlantic loudspeaker thus granted her, in Rogue, Camera Work, and Others, to launch a complex critique of the movement—not for its problematic politics but for the flaws and fractures that trouble its template of avantgarde artisthood. Her experience of Futurism was one of nourishment and negation, galvanizing energy and paralyzing misogyny. The self-mythologizing Futurist artist as heroic, time- and space-commanding

superuomo struck her as a seductive but ultimately ridiculous character. The agonistic rhetoric that reconfigured the artist as a nameless martyr assimilated into and in the service of the Futurist collective horrified her. As the numbered dicta of an ever-increasing body of manifestos threatened the very notion of the artist as individual, Loy was shaken awake by the aggression and hyperbole of Futurism and delivered into faith in her own artistic idiolect. On October 15, 1916, she set sail for New York. Her subsequent engagements with Dada and Surrealism would see her counted as an ally, but never a conscript, of the collective. In a letter to Carl Van Vechten, Loy wrote: “If you like, you may say Marinetti influenced me—merely by waking me up.” 101 This qualified acknowledgment of nothing more than an accidental awakening is all the influence, all the infectious transfer she deigns to admit. In a neat encapsulation of the poet’s verdict on the movement, “Aphorisms on Futurism” ends with an entreaty to accept what is great in Futurism while ignoring its gimmicks: “ACCEPT the tremendous truth of Futurism / Leaving all those / — Knick-knacks—.” 102 Loy’s Futurist encounter activated her poetic voice, ignited her interest in avant-garde innovation, and posed a vibrantly antagonistic system against which so productively to rail. As Jemima puts it, “gratefully,” her encounter with the Futurists turned her from the “hideous echo of Neurasthenia to the healthy inconsequence of the Flabbergast world.” 103 Or at least that’s how Loy came to see and write it. Henceforth, her artistic identity would be overwhelmingly characterized by the preeminence of her “personal mental attitude,” by a concomitant readiness to draw new energy from a series of emergent avant-garde movements, and by her commitment never again to fall asleep on another artist’s chair, a passive “cipher in [her] ambiente.” 104

PART 2 Loy and Dadaist Artisthood

4

| Artist-Vectors of the Dada Virus

D

ada’s expert topic is Dada. It constantly talks about and describes itself. Where the Futurists have speed, dynamism, war, and the threat of the feminine, Dada has only Dada. Its treatment of anything else is minimal and, when considered at a global level, rather inchoate. Dada relentlessly advertises itself, but what it advertises is an unknowable product. Employing all the heated self-mythologizing rhetoric that so successfully served the Futurists, the Dadaists use it to obfuscate, as often as to illuminate, their project. The utility of the manifesto form is constantly called into question by Dada’s very preference for it. As Martin Puchner observes, the self-aware, belated manifestos of Dada obey the rules of the form “only for the purpose of subjecting it all the better to critical analysis and ridicule.” 1 The concurrence of competing assertions produces a semantic cacophony that refuses to resolve into a coherent ur-manifesto. We are left with a splitting, splintering record of earnest explanation blended with willful misdirection. The self-conscious nature of its campaign for confusion is crystallized in the 1921 manifesto “Dada Excites Everything,” which offers a prize of “50 francs reward to the person who finds the best way to explain DADA to us.” 2 On April 1, 1914, the Société Anonyme organized a symposium in New York on the

question “What Is Dadaism?,” echoing the misleadingly promising title of Van Doesburg’s “Wat Is Dada?” 1922 tour pamphlet. Neither event nor publication delivered the elucidation guaranteed, and in 1967, Duchamp could still claim, though perhaps disingenuously, “I didn’t even know what Dada was.” 3 In spite of Dada’s fondness for pointing-hand iconography, its conception of language was fundamentally anti-indexical. Although Tzara claims that “[t]he magic of a word—DADA—which for journalists has opened the door to an unforeseen world, has for us not the slightest importance” and that “DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING,” that same word is incessantly invoked in Dada texts.4 Frequently capitalized and/or in boldface, it is repeated so often as to be rendered unintelligible. The word Dada comes to resemble an arcane and redundant mark of punctuation whose original function can no longer be recalled, an arbitrary, recurrent hieroglyph, its signification so disputed as to have become empty of any signification. The plethora of mutually contradictory origin(ary) myths purveyed by Tzara, Arp, and Hausmann only amplifies this effect. Whereas the Futurists exulted in the superiority of their “movement” to the “schools” formed by previous avant-gardes, Dada delighted in declaring itself to 61

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be everything but an artistic movement. In a welter of competing claims, it strives to construct itself as something still further removed from the institutional model. Within this slippery context, then, the spirit of Dada is variously figured as curative (“DADA—and the sick are healed, move about, and sing ‘The Watch on the Rhine’”) and, within an aesthetics of negation, purgative.5 In a 1946 interview, Duchamp attests to this cathartic quality of the Dada spirit, observing that it was a way “to avoid being influenced by one’s immediate environment, or by the past: to get away from clichés—to get free . . . Dada was very serviceable as a purgative.” 6 Meanwhile, Theo van Doesburg contends that it also serves as a stimulant that acts “on men’s minds like an ebullient, stimulating potion.” 7 Huelsenbeck, in “En Avant Dada,” presents Dada in one of its habitual guises as a spirit, an unsought-after visitation possessing the massed body of avant-garde artists: “Dada came over the Dadaists without their knowing it; it was an immaculate conception.”8 This Dada parasite, as Sanouillet observes, is sentient independently of its hosts.9 According to Huelsenbeck’s model, the artists are its co-opted subjects rather than its agents. The Dada spirit is recognized and harnessed by the Dadaist but exists before them. Chiming with this depiction, Georges Hugnet’s figuration of the movement as a malevolent force, “[e]ager to spread, to gain ground, intent above all on action . . . a lowdown skunk,” employs ominous imagery to portray Dada greedily harnessing artists’ minds, hands, and voices as vessels through which to achieve its agenda.10 In a related rhetorical strand, the Dada spirit is frequently figured as a mode of existence, an amalgam of character trait and lifestyle. Thus Richard Huelsenbeck writes, “Dada is a state of mind that can be revealed in any conversation whatever, so that you are compelled to say: this man is a DADAIST—that man is not.” 11 Presenting the Dada impulse as timeless and eternal, Tzara denies that Dada

is “modern” and declares: “You are mistaken if you take Dada for a modern school, or even for a reaction against the schools of today.” 12 This presentation of a primordial Dada is countered by another, much more prevalent contextualdeterminist account, within which Dada is born of the particular confluence of circumstances then present in Europe: “the fatal product of a state of affairs.” 13 Hanne Bergius suggests that “seeing man dismembered and dissected, turned into a fool’s commodity, the Dadaists were forced to abandon the belief in a closed, organic society where the artist had a clearly assigned place.” 14 This explanation of Dada as a necessary reaction to the world of its moment prevails today. As one prescient reviewer recognized in 1919: “it is the confirmation of a feeling of independence, a distrust of society, of everything which smacks of the herd.” 15 Within an ecosystem of art ethics, Dada is invoked to satisfy the needs of its time. Throughout its plastic, literary, and performative art practice, differences in ethos can be perceived in the various Dada centers. Berlin Dada’s particularly political and socially conscious complexion is reflected in its construction of the movement as a “Dada Club.” 16 In Paris, as Mileaf and Witkovsky observe, the Dada spirit was especially aware of, and engaged with, systems of bourgeois capitalism as they manifested in that city.17 In a letter to Tzara in 1922, Duchamp describes a potential new Dadaist venture for the manufacture of a range of silver, gold, and platinum insignias with “the 4 letters DADA punched or fashioned in metal.” 18 In an interview fifty-five years later, Duchamp clarifies the intent that motivated this creative critique of art’s complicity in a corporate-capitalist ordering of the world, saying: “It wasn’t to make money. It wasn’t at all lucrative. Besides, I never made any of the insignia. . . . At a certain point, Breton had had the idea of opening up a Surrealist office, to give people advice. It’s in the same spirit.” 19

Artist-Vectors of the Dada Virus

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Huelsenbeck, Heartfield, Grosz, and Herzfelde did go ahead with releasing a leaflet for their “Dada Advertising Company,” which asked business owners: “Do you realize what a horde of sandwichboard men and Dada Procession could mean for your advertising? . . . The Dada Advertising company awaits your telephone call every afternoon.” 20 Gestures toward establishing Dada as a commercial entity were executed not to generate wealth but to further devalue the concept of art as transcendent, to repudiate its purity and make visible art’s inextricably imbricated position. Contra Futurism and Vorticism, at every point and in every Dada center, the Dada artist is constructed as deliberately pan-national, defiantly polyglot, and unpatriotic. Hugo Ball establishes Dada’s innate internationalism at the outset, stating in Cabaret Voltaire (May 15, 1916) that the Zurich cabaret “is aimed at a few independent thinkers whose ideals extend beyond the war and their native land.”21 The first night of the cabaret had inaugurated this internationalist bias, a quality of Dada that, enhanced by a rash of wartime migrations, would be maintained throughout its geographically diffuse moment. The unparalleled internationalism of the Dada artist’s persona was engendered in part by the extraordinary mobility of its chief protagonists. While Tzara performed his proselytizing mission across Europe, Picabia traveled between France, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.22 This denationalized vagrant motif resonates throughout Dada, for the movement “has members all over the world, in Honolulu as well as New Orleans and Meseritz.” 23 On the last page of Cabaret Voltaire, a notice headed “Notes Rédactionnelles” makes clear the motive for the magazine’s polyglot selection: “In order to avoid a nationalist interpretation the editor of this magazine declares that it has nothing to do with the German mentality.” 24 Printed in both French and German, this commitment to dispelling any potentially limiting taint

of national identity is still more explicitly articulated in a short item published in Littérature 13. Originally attributed to Walter Arensberg, it declares: “DADA is American, DADA is Russian, Dada is Spanish, Dada is Swiss, Dada is German, Dada is French, Belgian, Norwegian, Swedish, Monacan.” 25 At this point in history, when patriotism was fueling ongoing world war and pan-national political institutions were making grand claims for a utopian, borderless Europe, such declarations carried a particular charge. A brief note appended to Tzara’s “Zurich Chronicle” exemplifies the essential mobility of Dada magazine production: “Rebirth of 391 no. 8 travelling review founded in New York printed in Barcelona appears in Zurich.” 26 Thus, rather than Dada artists being represented as a community in thrall (as was Futurism) to a globally recognized leader, the Dadaists are frequently framed as geographically dispersed hosts to the same parasite. Dada artists conceive of themselves as the vectors of a virulently communicable Dada disease, which is mobile and constantly adapting itself to succeed in new environments. Rather than radiating outward from one original progenitor, this infection is understood to have arisen simultaneously in various cities. Conceived against a context of the 1918 influenza pandemic, these accounts present the proliferation of discrete and often differently oriented Dada centers as analogous rather than homologous outbreaks. Tzara explains that “Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.” 27 In her 1949 retrospective of the movement, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia insists that the “highly remarkable circumstance” of Dada’s simultaneous appearance in New York and Zurich arose in spite of the fact that “no possible contact could have made known the one group to the other.” 28 Her faith in this bilocatory ability of the Dada spirit is shared by many of her contemporaries and critics alike. Asserting that

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contiguous events in New York were “not Dada, but . . . in the same spirit,” Duchamp goes on to suggest that the Dadaists’ commitment to action and “fighting” denied them the opportunity “to laugh,” which he himself so enjoyed.29 These accounts of outbreaks of Dada occurring parthenogenetically across the world without any exposure to inter-artist infection sit neatly with equally prevalent portrayals of artists simultaneously seized by a compulsion to “be” Dada. Many Dada publications contained semi-parodic, semi-gossipy updates on Dada doings around the globe. These pseudonym-laden, knowing nods to the cognoscenti—bulletins à clefs— worked to enhance the sense that Dada activities, however formally diverse, were taking place within a shared ideological interface. Thus the final page of 391 no. 8 hosts a bulletin board of Dada publications, openings, launches, and performances in New York, Paris, Zurich, and Barcelona.30 These bulletin boards, and the intertexual citation that typifies Dada magazines, evidence the Dadaists’ determined campaign to foster a loose, democratic (horizontal rather than vertical) network linking various Dada centers and figures. In contradistinction to the centrifugal push toward unity and group membership witnessed in the Futurist (and later Surrealist) contexts, the Dadaists were not driven to cohere into a unified mass; nor were they compelled to adopt an enforced aesthetic. Countering any suggestion that a “consistent style” unifies Dada art practices, Matthew Gale cites Hans Arp’s analogy, which posits Dada artistic production as analogous to the unprescribed, designless appearance of “fruit on trees.” 31 Michel Sanouillet compares the structure of Dada to a system of “rhizomorphous underground roots, which are strong and determined enough to proceed and expand, however slowly, but flexible enough to constantly adapt to changing environments and to circle around obstacles.” 32 Different models of Dada artist identity arose in different cities. It is the New York

manifestation, centered around the Arensberg salon and 291 Gallery; dynamized by the arrivals of Picabia (1913) and Duchamp (1915), the Société Anonyme (established 1920), and the Society of Independent Artists (established 1916); and disseminated via publications such as New York Dada, the Blind Man, TNT, and RongWrong, that will preoccupy the next two chapters. As Rudolf Kuenzli remarks, “The group in New York did not distribute revolutionary pamphlets at factory gates, they did not provoke large audiences in concert halls or cabarets, they did not even write manifestos.” 33 The playfulness of the New York Dadaist originated in a sociocultural moment and diasporic milieu altogether at variance to that which prevailed in the much more politicized and affectively charged context of Berlin. This is not to say, as I will go on to demonstrate in my reading of Loy’s Dada-era treatments of ideas about censorship, value, and virginity, that there were not serious matters covertly at stake in New York. As Amelia Jones points out: New York Dada, it is crucial to note, would not have existed if it weren’t for the fact that Picabia and Duchamp, like Jean Crotti and others working in contact with the New York avant-garde, had come to the city to escape the war raging in Europe and its rhetoric of heightened belligerence and inflated narratives of male heroism and nationalism.34 Interfused with antinationalist sentiment was the hope that America could be the site of new modes of artmaking. Duchamp declared: “If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished—dead—and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions.”35 An article in the New York Tribune (October 24, 1915) introduces Picabia, de Zayas, Crotti, Chastel, Gleizes, Roche Gleizes, and Duchamp as

Artist-Vectors of the Dada Virus

“Modernist French Artists, Who Find Europe Impossible Because of Its Wardrenched Atmosphere.” Smug with the flattery of these exiles who speak for “this sudden and potent pilgrimage of artistic Europe to our free shores,” this article rehearses the postulation of a natural affinity between avant-garde artisthood and the American spirit, constructing a transnational salvation narrative that would be reprised, as I argue in Chapter 4, in the next world war.36 Debates about Dada’s point of origin and degree of influence inevitably come to rest on the figure of Marcel Duchamp. Describing the trajectory of Duchamp’s dalliance with the movement, Calvin Tomkins notes that the word Dada was introduced to New York via the ten copies of Cabaret Voltaire that Tzara sent to Marius de Zayas in November 1916 and that Duchamp’s first encounter arose from his reading (in late 1916 or early 1917) of Tzara’s Antipyrene text.37 Concurring with the claim made by Tzara as to the eternal prehistorical essence of the Dada impulse and acknowledging the contiguity of the Dadaist and Duchampian agendas regarding the mutual realignment of art and life, Tomkins asserts that Duchamp “saw in Dada the spirit of Jarry, and long before him, Aristophanes—the antiserious attitude, which simply took the name of Dada in 1916.” 38 Duchamp claimed that Dada was “principally a matter of questioning the artist’s behaviour, as people envisaged it. The absurdity of technique, of traditional things,” and he maintained that his Dada publications, the Blind Man and RongWrong, came into existence simultaneously with, rather than as reaction to, the activities of New York Dada.39 Duchamp’s resistance to identifying himself with any discrete movement is reminiscent of Loy’s own refusal to allow her poetic to be subsumed into any collective literary project and her self-nomination as an outsider figure. Recognizing Duchamp’s sustained independence from any movement’s own aesthetic, Marjorie Perloff observes that

“Duchamp’s New York works do not belong to any of the generic Dada categories.” 40 The same can be said of Loy’s New York writings of this era. Tzara’s demagogic genius for leading the avant-garde’s incursion on mainstream media was secondary only to that of F. T. Marinetti or, in his later, Surrealist manifestation, Breton. His adoption of Futurist-style tactics, as evidenced in his adoption of the “Mouvement Dada” letterhead, served an altogether different function from that which incited Marinetti to instate the Italian genre of Futurism as the official, true model. Whereas Marinetti’s establishment of official Futurist headquarters, headed stationery, and a Futurist rubber stamp effectively obscured alternative Futurist manifestations in Florence, Venice, Padua, and Verona, subsuming them into the Milanese mother ship, Tzara’s freely distributed letterhead, subtitled “Berlin, Génève, Madrid, New York, Zurich, Paris,” advertised Dada’s hydra-headed, globalized character with an altogether more generous spirit. By 1920, it had appropriated the pointing-hand symbol from the world of advertising, successfully integrating it into the symbology of pan-national Dada.41 In the absence of any codified register of members, the symbols, taxonomy, and manifesto forms of Dada were open to be used and adapted by all who elected to position themselves under the broad umbrella of the movement. Because “art isn’t serious,” the Dada artist is free of any fear of brand dilution and untroubled by the need to defend entry into Dada membership.42 Instead, the promulgation of such publicity materials was championed by Tzara and others as a means by which to publicly warn of, and celebrate, sites of Dada contagion. In “The Dada Case,” Albert Gleizes salutes their valor in “the field of propaganda,” asserting, not without irony, “Never has a group disposed of such equipment for saying nothing, never has a group gone to such lengths to reach the public and bring it nothing.” 43 This sentiment is echoed in an editorial from the New York Times that

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concludes with an equally wry summation: “In the fine art of advertising their genius should be admitted even by their enemies.” 44 Dada cannily harnessed the mechanisms of the advertising industry as part of a strategy to make visible the successes of the Dada invasion. While Dada pursued its negative anti-art project, it meditated on art, its roles and responsibilities. Rather than doing away with art-making, Dada’s anti-art project is directed against “Art with a capital A.” Through the execution of this unbounded art practice—comprising installations, performances, and interactive and media events, as well as in two- and three-dimensional objects—the contours of the avant-garde artist’s identity are exploded, opening the way for conceptual and performance artists later in the century. Abstraction was ordained a prerequisite of the new Dada art, as “an intelligible work is the product of a journalist.” 45 In the texts and objects they produced and chose, in performance, and in Dada’s every encounter with the machinery of the institutional art world, the Dadaists strove to prove themselves as “learned denunciators” of art.46 Tzara’s 1922 “Lecture on Dada” contends that the movement began not as an art movement but as “a disgust,” echoing his seminal 1918 “Dada Manifesto,” which identifies disgust as the motivation for all Dada activity and charges the Dada artist with the abolition of “knowledge . . . logic . . . memory . . . archaeology . . . prophets [and] the future.” 47 While Futurism directed its scorn at the crowd and Surrealism’s initial enthusiasm for the masses quickly soured, Dada’s scorn is self-reflexive, bouncing back to include the artist as prime object of its critique. Picabia’s 1920 “DADA Manifesto” articulates Dada’s scorn for art outright and absolutely, declaring that “Art is a drug for imbeciles.” 48 A year earlier, Raoul Hausmann had announced that art, in its habitual presentation as a “fair female figure, no clothes . . . [who] reckons on being taken to bed or inciting this to be done . . . no longer exists! She is dead.” 49 Art is often described as a

redundant, deadening fossil from a more innocent time, but the Dadaists differ on how they propose to perform being artists after the death of art. Whereas there appears to be an overall consensus that art and life have become disastrously alienated, Dada dicta dispute the continued importance of active art-making for the Dada artist. Challenging, as the Futurists did, the divorce of art world and lived experience, Tzara attempts to de-reify art and recommends that Dada will recalibrate this relationship.50 Seeking to revolutionize the artist’s modes of production in terms of art-life sublation, he makes a distinction between painting and creating that he explains in terms of a shift from “symbolic and illusionist reproduction” to direct creation “in stone, wood, iron, tin, boulders. . . .” 51 Huelsenbeck proclaims that “[t]he Dadaist considers it necessary to come out against art, because he has seen through its fraud as a moral safety valve.” 52 Whereas Futurism was frequently framed as a replacement for religion, the Dadaist is called to relinquish any atavistic attachment to notions of the redemptive, moral functions of the creative act. The equation of old art with distaff religion is one that recurs frequently in Dada texts. “Art is dying as religion has died,” writes Otto Flake in the Zurich-based Der Zeltweg in 1919, because we have moved to “a higher plane of intellectual activity,” in which both transcendental signifiers are redundant.53 In a television interview for NBC, Duchamp opines: “Dada . . . wasn’t interested in questions of technique or with the movements before it. . . . In fact it was negative, a total refusal.” 54 Evoking a similar aesthetic of refusal, Flake heralds the arrival of Dadaist “Buddhas of art.” 55 These evolved (anti)artists will cease producing art, articulating their revolt as “disgust with art, irony towards pathos, laughter at the seriousness of problem-solving.” 56 Dada’s destructive project is portrayed as a necessary civic duty. Tzara typifies acts of “disorder, disorganisation [and] destruction” as being “of public utility,” the execution of which ought

Artist-Vectors of the Dada Virus

to instigate revelry and Dadaist delight, while Hausmann advises, “[b]ecome a Dada and you will share our delight in the attack” and Huelsenbeck compares the Dadaist’s zeal with “that displayed by the Inquisition.” 57 In a markedly self-aware parodying of this comical zeal to represent themselves as intensely vigorous, Tzara advises that the Dadaist’s life is one “with neither bedroom slippers nor parallels” and concludes another manifesto with the commandment: “Punch yourself in the face and drop dead.” 58 Seeking to antagonize the greatest possible proportion of his audience, in “Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto of 1916” he declares, “we spit on humanity.” 59 Individuals who excelled at mass provocation were lionized as heroes of Dada. Histories of the movement are rife with admiring recollections of belligerence in the service of anti-art. Breton recalls that “Duchamp cabled from America these simple words: ‘Balls to you,’ which obliged Tzara to fill in the gaps with enormous signs bearing the catalog numbers of the missing paintings.” 60 In his infamously inflammatory review “Exhibition at the Independents” (1914), Arthur Cravan admits that his motivation for baiting so many sacred cows of the Parisian art world is “quite simple: if I write, it is to infuriate my colleagues: to get talked about and to make a name for myself. A name helps you succeed with women and in business.” 61 This desire for notoriety compels him to describe many of the exhibiting artists in puerile, near-incendiary terms. Thus Robert Delaunay is “a flabby cheese,” with a face “of a vulgarity so provocative that it gives you the impression of a red fart.” 62 Cravan’s model of criticism as irritant coheres well with Dada’s wider anti-art agenda.63 By articulating his critical responses to a major salon in such emotive and derisory terms, “Exhibition at the Independents” effectively reduces a signally important event in the European art world to a theater of fools, assaulting a well-selected sacred bastion-metonym of the institutional art world.

As the Dada artists present themselves as committed to revolt and absurdly broad antagonism, they reveal themselves as correspondingly against logic, intelligence, and reason. In Huelsenbeck’s 1920 “En Avant Dada,” the Dadaist is posed as the antithesis of various inherited templates of artist identity: “philosopher in the garret . . . the professional artist, the café litterateur, the society ‘wit.’” 64 Otto Flake bemoans the gravity and sustained belief in art’s capacity for salvation of these heavy-spirited artists of the academy and castigates them for pestering us “with the moods, agitation and self-importance of their souls—their art becomes a burden.” 65 For Hausmann, writing somewhat facetiously in the same year, even the Dada artist’s alternative to this maudlin figure “still possesses too much feeling and aesthetic,” with the result that he is compelled to label himself an anti-Dadaist.66 For Tzara, this escape from the constricting artist archetypes of old can be achieved only by repudiating all that has traditionally been held to be of value by the institutional art world. Accordingly, he sets about attacking the validity of the humanist conception of civilization as a society that prizes logic and intelligence. In a particularly adroit employment of manifesto bombasticism, he declares: If I shout: Ideal, Ideal, Ideal Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom I have recorded fairly accurately Progress, Law, Morals, and all the other magnificent qualities that various very intelligent people have discussed in so many books . . . 67 Childishness and puerile humor are deployed with enthusiasm in an attack on the culturally promulgated glorification of logic, intelligence, and civilization.68 Privileging absurdity, incoherence, and disjunction, in

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Dada, “[e]verything happens in a completely idiotic way.” 69 In Comoedeia (1920), an anonymous contributor purporting to observe Dada from a putatively psychological standpoint surmises that Dada’s ecstatic embrace of novelty “reveals a tendency which is well-known in psychology and has been defined as: regression towards childhood.” 70 Tzara delighted in this critique of Dada as infantile and celebrated the fact that “[s]ome learned journalists see it as an art for babies.” 71 Rather than endeavoring to refute this perception, he delights in its dissemination. In response to “the state of the world in which fate had overtaken the determination of human plans,” 72 Dada invests chance with an unprecedented degree of potency. In a parody of Aristotelian poiesis, the artist’s role is thereby immediately minimized and de-reified. Concurrent with the turn away from logic and legibility, the Dada artist embraced the aleatory. Denigrating reasoning, Tzara counsels that “[t]hought is made in the mouth,” articulating a philosophy of impulsive and aleatory art-making that plays out across Dada art practice.73 Dada’s election of chance as the sole or collaborative agent of art-making was most successfully instituted in its selection and exhibition of found objects, readymades, and—as eloquently evidenced in Schwitters’s Merz project—waste. In their magazines and manifestos, we encounter the paradigmatic Dadaist persona as active, vigorous, and aggressive: “the completely active type, who lives only through action.” 74 As would later become so integral to the myth of Cravan, the Dadaist is a physically embodied, fleshly being, a virile (implicitly male) pugilistic challenger to the weakly muscled “men of the spirit” the Dadaists so derided.75 His ideological project is frequently framed as purgative physical activity: it is a “great, destructive, negative work. To sweep, to clean.” 76 Huelsenbeck’s model of the Dada archetype addresses himself to life and death with equal energy. He is urbane

and knowing but imbued with childlike enthusiasm: “The motley character of the world is welcome to him, but no source of surprise.” 77 Doubt, as corollary of chance, is athletically embraced by the Dadaist. Every aspect of the Dada artist’s practice and Weltanschauung must offer itself up to ambiguity. Nothing is knowable, fixed, or semantically stable. As “DADA doubts everything,” so must we “[b]eware of Dada.” 78 Reactive as fluorine and impossibly flexible, the Dadaist intellect is ductile, endlessly responsive to the rapid evolution of the modern urban environment; “A Dadaist is a man of chance.” 79 The Dada artist is resolutely amoral, his disregard for all enforced codes of behavior extending to include even the most basic and intuitive moral systems—“the good is for the Dadaist no ‘better’ than the ‘bad.’ An ‘atheist by instinct,’ for him there is no longer a ‘thou shalt’”; he is immune to the compulsion for spiritual improvement and “opposed to the idea of paradise in every form.” 80 Aspects of the everyday spurned by other artists—“advertisement . . . the street . . . bluff . . . the big transactions . . . life itself ”—are embraced by the Dadaist.81 Crucially, Dada proclaims that this identity is open to all: “[t]he bartender in the Manhattan Bar . . . The gentleman in the raincoat.” Indeed, “[e]veryone can be a Dadaist.” 82 Even, as Loy and others were to demonstrate, a woman! In parallel with the extension of this universal invitation, the credibility of (all or perhaps especially) the most prominent Dadaists was constantly undermined—very often by those artists themselves. In their writings, and especially in photomontage, lightly and impermanently, iconic Dada figures are demonized and heroized. A short note in 391 headed “Dr Serner’s Casebook” presents characteristically irreverent and glib résumés of nineteen artists: “BRAQUE sensitive, rather bohemian, Spanish looking, nice chap . . . MARCEL DUCHAMP intelligent, pays too much attention to women . . . Tristan TZARA very intelligent, insufficiently DADA . . . 83 Dire threats,

Artist-Vectors of the Dada Virus

scathing criticism, and scurrilous assertions are folded into Dada magazines without any anxiety about the potential consequences. As is readily attested to by the corpus of comical collage and photomontage portraits of Dada figures, they concertedly sought to present themselves as unorthodox and eccentric.84 In another very tangible distinction from the Futurist artists’ self-construction as geniuses, heroes, and saviors, the Dadaists most often presented themselves as fools and jesters, figures always open to, even welcoming of, ridicule. Those artists elected heroes of the movement were so chosen for the chaos they provoked.85 Saluting Cravan as “a kind of adoptive forbear of the American (and French) Dada movement,” Richter attributes his Dada canonization to the fact that “he pursued the destructive urge inherent in Dada to its ultimate conclusion: the destruction of himself,” whereas Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia suggests that the mythologization of Cravan as überdada was extrinsically rather than intrinsically achieved.86 Perhaps the most compelling feature of Dadaist identity is its chimerical malleability. In Dada, the identities of individual artists can be permeable and gender-negotiable. Futurism had already, as discussed in Part 1, proposed an everyman (butcher, baker, candlestick maker) artist. In Dada, this evolved into a notion of artistic identity that was not merely open to all but was transferable and fluid. The spirit of Dada can be ventriloquized; franchisable artist personae are shared between numerous Dada actors. The Dadaist identity is an avowedly constructed persona, utterly alienated from any Romanticist notion of the artist’s unique soul. Further de-reifying the individual artist’s ego, the Dada artist has no natural, authentic self. Instead, he or she assumes an artistic identity through which to channel the spirit of Dada. Illustrating this preoccupation with shifting identities and blurred boundaries, pseudonyms proliferate across Dada magazines. The practice was

particularly prevalent among the Berlin contingent: Heartfield became Monteur Dada; George Grosz: Marshall; Johannes Baader: Oberdada; Kurt Schwitters: Kurtchen; Wieland Herzfelde: Progress Dada; and Theo Van Doesburg signed as IK Bonsett. Picabia published as “Funny Guy” and as “Pharamousse.” Johannes Baargeld appears variously as “Zentrodada” and “Alfred Grünwald,” while Raoul Hausmann published as “Dadasopher” and Max Ernst as “Dadamax” and “Macchab.” Gender-crossing examples, most significantly Duchamp’s “Rrose Sélavy” and Ernst’s avian “Lop-lop,” also appear. Within this system, interchangeable identities parody the mechanisms of branding, corporate identity, and franchise management. The individual artistic ego is not subsumed into the collective but, rather, enthusiastically casts off any attachment to a monolithic self-image and delightedly hurls him- or herself into Dada’s maelstrom of mutability. Often these multiple, mediating identities operate as false doors into Dada publications. Appearing to present bibliographic fact, they instead obfuscate authorship and undermine ideas of truth. Later, André Breton would write stridently against such practices, claiming in Nadja: “I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.” 87 Echoing George Hugnet’s account of Zurich Dadaists amusing themselves “by sending false news items to the daily papers,” Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia recollects a similar penchant for promulgating hoax news stories in the early Barcelona-based days of 391.88 Dada group membership is an altogether less codified, and accordingly less contentious, issue than was ever the case with Futurism or Surrealism. Individuals were claimed as or for Dada not as a consequence of their having declared themselves as such or been signatories to official documents but because other Dadaists recognized them as being Dada. Artists who engaged in Dada activities were neither conscripted

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into the movement nor constricted in the subject matter or forms available to them. However, this trend away from forced absorption into a collective aesthetic does not connote reverence for the individual artist’s soul. Dada endorses independent thought but insists that the notion of an idealized, isolated, individual artistic subject is just as problematic and in need of de-reification as the institutional art world itself. The Dadaists shrink from the notion of factories of avant-garde production—“laboratories of formal ideas”—which, they claimed, drove the Futurists and Cubists to create instantly identifiable, ideologically synchronous, and formally indistinguishable contributions to a collective aesthetic effort.89 The art-maker is marked as Dadaist through the identification of the spirit motivating the art/anti-art practice rather than through any aesthetic evaluation of the object produced. In line with its consistently antagonistic position, Dada set itself in opposition to its art world counterparts. Although, in his “Lecture,” Tzara takes care to deny any reading of Dada as a simple reaction against other art movements, the Dadaists are not infrequently presented as the antitheses of the Futurists. Needling their ever-less-dynamic quasi-contemporaries, “Dada Excites Everything” asks, “The Futurist is dead. Of what?”—only to gleefully reply, “Of DADA.” And Picabia’s 1920 “DADA Manifesto” entertainingly attacks the popularity of Cubism, jeering: “They have cubed primitive art, cubed Negro sculpture, cubed violins, cubed guitars, cubed comics, cubed shit and cubed the profiles of young women. Now they want to cube money!!!” 90 This movement that had, from its first, celebrated heterogeneity of form, language, and nationality maintained an emphatic resistance to overarching collectivization. Individuals, groups, and urban conglomerations existed in networks and constellations of intertextual reference. The Berlin Dadaists’ practice of signing statements “Central Office of Dadaism” parodies the tendency

of artistic movements, however egalitarian their ideals, to tend toward factionalization and dictatorship. Meanwhile, as Mileaf and Witkovsky argue, the various strains of Dada activity operating in Paris were united by their shared concern with “the status of artists—singly and collectively—in an era of proliferating avant-gardes . . . [and] art’s relation to the public, or put more broadly its place in society.” 91 These issues were being interrogated in every Dada center. However, it was in Paris—due perhaps to Breton’s burgeoning dominance—that the nature of Dada solidarity and the tensions between individual and group interests were debated with especial vigor. Unfathomably prolific and inflammatorily energetic, the figure of Tristan Tzara most closely approximates the model of avant-garde Svengalism embodied by Marinetti; however, Tzara’s commitment to artistic autonomy sets him absolutely at odds with his Italian counterpart.92 “I don’t want to convince, and I have no right to drag others in my wake, I’m not compelling anyone to follow me . . . Thus DADA was born*, out of a need for independence, out of mistrust for the community. People who join us keep their freedom.” 93 Although Tzara conceived of his opportunistic leadership style as inherently democratic, ideological resistance to the notion of hegemonic leadership did not preclude a number of Dada artists from proposing themselves—more or less obliquely—as potential leaders. However, not one figure among them achieved, at any point, any kind of international Dada mandate. All attempts at imposing a single leader (as Breton learned, to his chagrin and the dissolution of Paris Dada in 1922) were inherently doomed by Dada itself. In the absence of any such official figurehead, inter-artist conflict, and the splitting and fragmentation it produced, were cultivated as integral features of, rather than threats to, the movement. Recognizing the conflicts that were often apparent not only between but within publications, Georges Hugnet writes that in

Artist-Vectors of the Dada Virus

Picabia’s infamously vitriolic and vengeful Le Pilhaou Thibaou, “the decadence of Dada reaches us through a film of personal dissensions and squabbles.” 94 Tzara also recognized this constant, seemingly indefatigable culture of antimony and fragmentation, advising that “[a]nother characteristic of Dada is the continuous breaking off of our friends. They are always breaking off and resigning.” 95 Questionnaires that posed deliberately divisive questions about art practice to Dada members were disseminated, contend Mileaf and Witkovsky, “to delineate areas of dissension . . . not to promote easy solidarity but to make participants uncomfortable.” 96 Dickran Tashjian proposes that Tzara’s conception of the avant-garde replaces “the underlying idea of progress with conflict as the driving

force of the avant-garde.”97 Tzara’s model of a movement, then, “is intrinsically volatile and threatens the very sense of community that it fosters.” 98 Indeed, if we consider Tzara’s contention that “the true dadas are against dada,” we might read willful misdirection as to Dada’s true or real nature as the most significant component of the Dadaists’ attempts at telling their truth.99 The feuds and infighting that characterize Dada activity are exposed, even celebrated, as testaments to their lack of any traditionalist regard for the notion of art as pure, serious, or transcendent.100 The essential import of Dada’s construction of artisthood is determined by the very variegate nature of the multiplicity Dada contains; it rejoices in a vitiating inherent ambiguity, in conflicts that it strives never to resolve.

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| Dadaist Virginology

L

oy arrived in New York aboard the Duca d’Aosta on October 14, 1916. Warned, as she recalled, by “cultured Americans browsing in Italy,” to expect nothing of New York but “the final negation of the idyllic,” she found the city rich with personal and artistic possibilities.1 From Frances Simpson Stevens she got help to find an apartment and, soon thereafter, an introduction to the Arensberg salon at 33 West Sixty-Seventh Street.2 There, a nightly pan-national gathering hosted Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Jean Crotti, Albert Gleizes, Edgard Varèse, Henri-Pierre Roché, Man Ray, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Charles Demuth, Katherine Dreier, William Carlos Williams, Alfred Kreymborg, Beatrice Wood, Isadora Duncan, Amy Lowell, and others.3 Newly liberated from the cares of family and the entanglements of a war-torn Florence in which art was no longer the principal battleground, Loy was ready to throw herself into the intellectual and artistic crosscurrents whose paper traces she had long been chasing. A polyglot polymath whose arrival had been preceded by her textual envoys out of Italy, Loy was eagerly welcomed into that uproarious scene. “Giovanni Franchi” appeared in Rogue in October 1916.4 In early December she appeared on stage as “The Wife” to William Carlos Williams’s “The Husband” in the Provincetown

Players’ production of Alfred Kreymborg’s “Conventional Scherzo” Lima Beans. Recognized in the New York Evening Sun as the epitome of modern womanhood,5 she began work on “The Pamperers” and established a lampshade workshop within which to develop her designs.6 In the spring of 1917, she submitted Making Lampshades to the infamous unjuried exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists (April 10–May 6), preparations for which were busily afoot in the Arensberg salon. At the opening, she met Arthur Cravan, whose photograph she had already seen in The Soil.7 On April 18, she took part in a public poetry reading, promoted as a “Chance to See Live Poets,” at Grand Central Palace alongside Williams, Norton, and Wood.8 The following day, the same venue saw Cravan arrested as he attempted to give a lecture, organized by Duchamp and Picabia. The event ended “in a scandalized uproar,” but he and Loy both made it to the Independents Ball on April 20.9 Eight days earlier, her “In . . . Formation” was published in the Blind Man. In April 1917, “Songs to Joannes” was published in an issue of Others entirely given over to the sequence that incited the world to appraise her anew as “so frightfully immoral.”10 A month later, the second and last issue of the Blind Men carried “Pas de Commentaires! Louis M. Eilshemius” and “O Marcel—Otherwise I Also Have 73

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Been to Louise’s.” In 1917, Alfred Kreymborg included “At the Door of the House,” “Human Cylinders,” “The Effectual Marriage/or/The Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni” in Others: An Anthology of New Verse.11 On May 25, the Blind Man’s Ball took place at Webster Hall in Greenwich Village. August saw her once again framed as an icon of avant-garde New York, as Clara Tice numbered her among the “Who’s Who in Manhattan.”12 Called in mid-June to report to the draft board, Cravan departed for Mexico via Canada in September 1917, and Loy’s divorce was finally granted a month later.13 In December, Cravan arrived in Mexico. Loy elected to join him there, arriving around New Year’s 1918.14 In January they were married, and within just a few months, Cravan was gone, never to be found again.15 The span 1915–1921 (or some portion thereof) is ordinarily attributed to New York Dada’s Poggiolian morning, but critics differ as to the exact dates of its beginning and end. Attempts to determine the duration of New York Dada are complicated by the fact that, as Rudolf Kuenzli has observed, it predates Dada’s manifestations elsewhere. What’s more, the artists involved “were not interested in adopting the label until 1921, and then only for a brief period.” 16 While Loy was physically present for just a fraction of that brief period, she continued to intercede in print long beyond the date of her premature departure—with “The Black Virginity” appearing in Others in December 1918 and “The Pamperers” in The Dial in July 1920.17 Marisa Januzzi suggests that while “Dada may have been old hat in New York by 1920, it was vibrantly outliving its immediate usefulness in the writings of Mina Loy through 1925, at least.” 18 If we look at Loy’s late assemblages in terms of the incorporation of everyday objects, we could extend Januzzi’s timeline much further. The sixth issue of Dada, “Bulletin Dada” (May 1920), boasted a list headed “Quelques Présidents et Présidentes” that enumerated seventy-five internationally sourced and largely unwitting purported presidents

of the movement.19 It includes Mina Loy, in an anachronistically titled appearance as Mina Lloyd. If, as Perloff argues, even “Duchamp’s New York works do not belong to any of the generic Dada categories discussed by [Hans] Richter,” then we cannot presume that Loy’s will prove any more ductile.20 Even “O Marcel,” as I will go on to argue, is not the collaborative collage work it purports to be. My claim, in the readings that follow, is not so much that Loy was writing Dada texts but that she was engaged with Dada notions of what the artist ought to be about. Dada opened to Loy a mode of making that could be playful, provocative, and even political all at once. Or perhaps the Dada spirit was always in her anyway, a case of infection sui generis, and New York merely provided the optimum conditions for “culturing” and transmission. This chapter first seeks to demonstrate how Loy exploits a Dadaderived license for play, parody, and social critique to construct her case for reevaluating sex and gender role attribution by concertedly denaturing virginity. The following chapter then sets out to read “Pas de Commentaires!” as a text that is in dialogue with Duchamp—his ideas and his burgeoning status as icon—and through which Loy examines the notion of outsider art, the Dada artist’s love of absurdity and provocation, and the Duchampian posture of indifference. Finally, I propose “O Marcel” as a pseudo-collage of found speech, into which Loy condenses a surreptitiously elucidative portrait of New York Dada artisthood. Dadaist Virginology Written in December 1914, “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” predates the arrivals in New York of both Loy and, at least according to art historical wisdom, Dada itself. Notwithstanding this temporal mismatch, I want to set the poem within the fertile, if paradoxically chaste, context of New York Dada virginology, positing the virgin as currency of an exchange between traditional and avant-garde thinking about society, sex, and the body.

Dadaist Virginology

Prefacing my reading of “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” with an overview of her other representations of virginity, this chapter proposes Loy’s critique of idealized virginity as the central focus of her gender theory— and that of Dada. “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” was first published in Louise and Allen Norton’s Rogue 2, no. 1 on August 15, 1915.21 Combining modernist poetics, liberal politics, and witty predictions about future directions for fashionable hemlines, Rogue promised critical engagement with the latest art world developments, leavened by irreverent commentary. Churchill terms it “a decadent, witty, Beardsleyesque journal with an aristocratic air,” characterized by a “bantering . . . tone of sophisticated innuendo and daring,” while Burstein writes that Rogue “took blatant pleasure in irony and contradiction, marketing itself upon the logic of paradox,” typifying its editorial strategy as one of “serial contradiction.” 22 For Loy, and perhaps especially for this poem, Rogue was an ideal match. Loy was committed to rendering visible, and even viscerally present, the phenomenology of human— and particularly female—sexuality. However, and as we have already seen, notwithstanding the appeals she made for a more gender-equal society, Loy’s writings register a profound ambivalence toward her sex.23 The opening address to her 1914 “Feminist Manifesto” attacks the “feminist movement as at present instituted.” 24 In a radical attack on gender binarism and the marriage economy, she rails against the categorization of women according to their reproductive function and enumerates “Parasitism, & Prostitution—or Negation” as the choices available to her female contemporaries. Having established this uncompromising position, Loy then makes her infamously radical call for “the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty—.” 25 As this chapter will demonstrate, Loy was deeply, vociferously opposed

to the pernicious effects of “virginity as an ideology,” identifying the global reification of virginity as source of, and ongoing fuel for, the subjugation of women.26 Virginity, she argued, is woman’s sole attribute, a finite resource harvested by her husband and exchanged for the “ridiculously ample” advantages of marriage.27 In “Esau Penfold,” the author writes of her childhood as a time in which “Through the machinations of her parents and governesses known as a bringing-up, the incubus of virginity fastened itself upon her soul.” 28 Born into a world that perversely renders “the magic spring of life at once our most superb inspiration and a cloaque d’immondice,” she was, as she sees it, “presented with a universe in terms of virginity.” 29 So vividly does the narrator imagine this tragic fate that she comes, in childhood, to personify it “as a repudiated head-hanging female, creeping alone forever in the shameful shadow of a rainy wall, on the outside of the human confines.” 30 Some years later, waking in Esau Penfold’s apartment in the aftermath of her rape, she is revisited by a “stricken apparition of a lost virginity slinking along the shadow of the studio wall.” 31 Whereas Loy’s proposal, in the “Feminist Manifesto,” to do away—shockingly and surgically—with virginity has generated copious commentary, rather less attention has been paid to her equally radical (albeit rather less sensational) campaign to demand dignity for those women who, by failing to conceive of a “lost virginity” as “a lost infinity,” go “down through the social oubliette” of social shame.32 Crucially, in her descriptions of the dread “trap-door of ostracism,” Loy specifically identifies the censors as fellow women. The operators of this mechanism by which women are cast out of society are “wholesome sisters” who, “through whispers and withdrawing of skirts,” seek to distance themselves from the taint of a fallen woman.33 Perhaps it is here, in this punitive performance of purity, that we can locate the germ of her gynophobia. The virgin-marriage economy not

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only denaturalizes the relationships between men and women, but—and this, she seems to suggest, is worse yet—it renders near impossible the easy congress of women. In “Brontolivido” and “The Sacred Prostitute,” Loy had already highlighted the cultivation of jealousy among women by patriarchal insinuation.34 The short story “Transfiguration” most likely “draws on Loy’s 1917 journey from New York to Mexico to meet Arthur Cravan.” 35 It centers on an encounter with a fellow passenger whose sexual shame is so great that it sours, and ultimately truncates, their brief acquaintance. Indicting this woman for her complicity in promoting a patriarchal idealization of chastity, the narrator describes the tendering of a “conversational passport of her chastity” as the entrance requirement for any new female friendship.36 The idiocy of this convention appalls her—“so does the thin-lipped specter of dishonor drive her buffoons before her even to the end of the earth.” 37 In “Mi & Lo,” Loy identifies the tabooing of “the amatory passion” as “the paradox of morality,” arguing that it is the “sole passion that is not destruction—the only passion that can do no harm to anybody—the only passion that can disseminate comfort and consolatory relationship.” 38 Those who subscribe to this outlawed impulse are, as she puts it in “History of Religion and Eros,” submitting themselves to “demoniacal tortures [. . .] in the guise of religious correction.” 39 The often-overlooked poem “The Black Virginity” was composed circa 1915 and published in Others 5/1 (December 1918). In this mocking portrait of “Baby Priests” as “salvation’s seedlings,” celibate seminarians are presented as risible victims of absurd institutionalization, vanity, weakness, and misplaced faith. If Loy’s disdain for female virgins is tempered by her condemnation of the patriarchal society that has so construed and constricted them, her portrait of these “Baby Priests” admits no such displacement of blame. Although she figures these male virgins as similarly silly,

the quotient of potency, power, and social capital that was their birthright effectively makes them culpable for its loss. Born into that half of the population whose sex immediately confers upon them a basic measure of autonomy, they have—or so she implies—consigned themselves to a stunted existence. Sexed powerful, they have castrated themselves into a soft, fat, and luxuriously appointed life of effective eunuchhood. To a woman whose cosmogony was firmly based in a belief that “There is nothing impure about sex,” this fastidious clerical renunciation of bodily pleasure confers no glory upon the practitioners of prudery.40 “Baby Priests,” they are at once vulnerable infants and figures of an authority that is (indomitably) doubled— being both patriarchal and divine. As infant dictators, they are defenseless and decadent. The portrayal is lent an extra edge by the aura of malignancy with which Loy commonly taints infants. Just as, in “Babies in Hospital,” physical immaturity does not necessarily connote innocence, so here too artificially extended, greenhousecultivated babyhood does not protect the apprentice priests from the speaker’s ire. In her introduction to Picabia’s Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, Gabrielle Buffet writes: “Religious concern is no more than a sort of shell that you have been forced to choose.” 41 Slug-like invertebrates, the clerics of “The Black Virginity” seek form and shelter within the global exoskeleton of Catholicism. In this poem, material luxury, suggestions of sensuousness, and carceral and choreographic imagery are intermixed to strange effect. Sibilance draws to the surface a haptic imaginary of luxuriant softness. The proximity of “Uniform” and “Union” (11–12) serves to imply that their comm-unity is rooted in nothing more profound than shared sartorial splendor. Amply upholstered with delicate baby flesh, and arrayed in silks and beaver fur, the priests dance a “rhythm of redemption” (6) upon a “green sward” (3) cultivated by an unseen cohort of ancillaries. The cumulative effect evokes

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Picabia’s reference to “Priests freaks desserts of lusts.” 42 Though flamboyant, they are contained, their sensual pleasures bounded by a presentiment of mortality. That “green sward” is “Yew-closed” (4): arboreally circumscribed with funereal associations. In an inversion of the curious closing line of “Photo after Pogrom,” “Corpses are virgin,” “The Black Virginity” implies that virgin flesh is, in life, necrotic.43 The “rhythm of redemption” that they dance upon this enclosed lawn is enriched by an accompaniment of revue hall props. The breeze-blown “fluttering of breviaries” (7) might incapacitate actual study of the scriptures therein contained, but it does enhance the audiovisual spectacle. Whatever femininity we might read into their opulent attire is only augmented by this fluttering motion that (though attributed to their prayer books rather than their persons) is nonetheless inherently coded as girlish and associated with display. Loy mischievously depicts the seminarians as a troupe of exotic dancers performing in a theologically themed cabaret. Nietzsche, in The Anti-Christ, depicts Christianity as “a return to childishness in the spiritual domain. The occurrence of retarded puberty.” 44 In Loy’s cognate image of “Truncated juvenility” (10), the church is charged with both cutting short and, paradoxically, artificially extending their childishness—albeit in specific surroundings within a particular context. In dynamism-driven prewar Italy, Loy’s image of these “Ebony statues training for immobility” (16) figures as an allegation of illogical waste. Energy that might otherwise act upon the world is (mis)directed toward preparing the baby priests for a rigid life of static indolence and philosophical stagnancy. Beyond the obvious color connotations and implication of woodenness, in this, the moment of modernism’s embrace of primitivism, the image of “Ebony statues” also evokes the African statuary it prized. The ironic edge beneath her selection of this particular image referent manifests in the disparity

between these indulged bodies and the models of martial athleticism often celebrated in such sculptures. In place of a body poised for flight or momentarily at rest—pregnant with the capacity for the movement that will soon animate it—these priests-in-stasis are instead learning to be ever more still. They aspire to a state of utter fixity— an arrest of spiritual and physical velocity (velocità). Loy fortifies her condemnation of their willed physical obsolescence in her construction of them as “Anaemic-jawed” (17). Whatever the unlikelihood of iron deficiency striking a discrete portion of the body, the phrase efficiently summons an unflattering host of consanguineous diagnoses. We see them as weak-chinned, slack-jawed, bloodless, and pale. Though not designated toothless, these men have effectively been rendered dentally impotent by the insufficient supports in which their teeth are set. The blessings they so “prettily” (19) practice are useless: charms without any transformative purchase on reality. Notwithstanding, or rather in faithful ignorance of, their inefficacy, the priestlings still play, on the lawns, at bestowing benedictions. Like children practicing for a concert, they conscientiously mime out the actions they have learned, eagerly anticipating the day when they will be ushered (in appropriately marvelous costume) onto the sacred stage. Religious orders were also on the mind of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who in 1917 had attached a plumbing trap to a carpenter’s miter box and called it God.45 Her poem “Holy Skirts” appeared in The Little Review in 1920. Declaring that “nuns / have wheels,” it depicts them with ribald, distinctly Dadaist humor: Undisputedly! Since—beneath skirts—they are not human! Kept carefully empty cars—running over religious track— local—express—to velocity of holiness through pious steam—up to heaven!46

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In the much later poem, “Portrait of a Nun,” Loy reprises her early focus on the holy body: its drives—“The nostril: arched for incense—” and its material wrappings—“The mourning and the starching / of her body’s concealing: / a cloth coffin.” The tone overall, however, is much less scathing about (the wearers of) those Holy Skirts.47 Where the baby priests of “The Black Virginity” are scorned for their self-limiting exemption from the world of flesh, life, and movement, “Portrait of a Nun” (presumably written in the same period as “Aid of the Madonna” and “Compensations of Poverty”) depicts the myopic nun who sees “no one / save Jesus / being gentle to us” without any of that Dada-era ire.48 An apparently biographical anecdote in “Islands in the Air” offers a fantastic visual analog to Loy’s literary refutations of the sanctity of the virgin. When she is chosen, in her art school adolescence, as the “ideal madonna” for the Lebendige Bilder at the Munich Frauen-Verein, the lamp tied to her waist catches fire—with the result that she bursts, appropriately, into the flames of eternal damnation. Playing the virgin, Loy spontaneously combusts. The irony of this apparent smiting cannot have escaped her notice.49 Mina Loy and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven were not alone in judging the interwar moment as ripe for the problematizing of virginity as sacred concept. Nascent discourses of sexology, avant-gardist fantasies of androgynesis, pro-natalist state propaganda, and the struggle for reproductive rights conspired to inspire artist and writers, including Lawrence, de Gourmont, Crotti, Stevens, Man Ray, and Rodker, to think about virginity. Geographically dispersed and formally disparate, modernist depictions of virgins—variously realized as machines, monsters, ink splashes, saints, and dolls— were born of a cultural milieu interfused with the writings of Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, Stopes, Sanger, Marsden, and Freud. Modernist virginity was at stake in the sex reform debates between Dora Marsden’s “New

Morality” and Christabel Pankhurst’s “Social Purity” movements. It haunted Anthony Comstock’s censorship crusade and, in a very different way, the reproductive rights campaigns championed by Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes. For modernists from Catholic cultures, the Virgin Mary loomed large as a potent, problematic feminine ideal.50 Once women were out from under the yoke of her example, the virginal state was no longer necessarily precious. As that other fierce woman of New York Dada put it, “To adore virginity as an essential property (instead of as a preparatory state only—and then—why adore it? Everybody has it—even a kidgoat!) is the most flagrant illogic possible!” 51 A host of new virgin types emerge from this cross-fertilized modernist conversation. However, within the New York Dada scene of 1910– 1920, the concept exerted an especial appeal. Dada’s fascination with unsettling identity categories made it an ideal environment within which to interrogate and productively attack ideas of biologically determined gender identity.52 In what follows, I hope to demonstrate how “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” can be reappraised in the context of a corpus of Dada-spirited plastic works demonstrating contiguous, contemporaneous constructions of the female body and of virginity. These works exist in a critically neglected but ideologically significant dialogue with Loy’s campaign to desacralize the popular and literary-artistic conception of virginity and to liberate women from the tyranny of the “cult of virginity.” 53 Marcel Duchamp’s series of mechanomorphic works—Vierge I and II, Le Passage de la vierge à la mariée, and Mariée—completed in Munich between July and August 1912, register the onset of the artist’s nascent preoccupation with virginity and deflowerment. These themes were to remain central concerns throughout the eight-year execution of his The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass) (1915–1923) and beyond his death to the posthumously exhibited scandal of Étant donnés (1946–1966).54 Linda Dalrymple

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Henderson suggests that the sealed bulb of the 1919 Air de Paris might be read as representative of the Virgin Mary’s “wholeness.” 55 William Camfield proposes that Stieglitz’s 1917 photo-portrait of the urinal frames it as a blasphemous image of the Holy Virgin, her veil drawn in by the urinal’s shadow.56 Tracing Duchamp’s reaction to Catholic dogma, from the 1908–1909 Pour le Menu de diner de première communion de Simone Delacour to the 1959 Torture Morte, Hopkins reads the Étant donnés as a three-dimensional diorama representing the hortus conclusus of the biblical “Song of Songs.” 57 Effectively bridging two of his major works, the Virgin-Bride series presents the mechanomorphic machine parts now so familiar from Large Glass in the Section d’Or-style ocherbrown Cubist palette of Nude Descending. However, as Tomkins observes, in spite of the rather salacious promise of their titles, “there is nothing particularly sexual or even sensual” about the figures represented therein.58 He asserts that they incite us to look “into a mental image of virginity,” an invitation also extended, or rather pressed upon us, by “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots.” Throughout the Munich Virgin-Bride sequence, in a multiply blasphemous affront to God and science—a “mock-scientific probing of sexual plumbing”—the blossoming virgin is remade as a complex construction of multiple pipes and ineffable curvilinear forms.59 Her passage from virgin to bride is denaturalized—rendered artificial, mechanical, and ultimately incomprehensible. In a 1956 interview Duchamp explained, “It was better to do it with machines than people.” 60 In his alienating translation of female bodies into machinery, we can divine a critique of the inexplicable, inorganic social systems that process, categorize, and ultimately imprison women throughout their lives. David Hopkins elegantly traces a line from the late-nineteenth-century appetite for depicting “the sexual and spiritual lives of women . . . in threefold format” to Duchamp’s preoccupation with simulating “the

cinematic blossoming” of the virgin, citing Munch’s Dance of Life (1899–1900) and Jan Toorop’s The Three Brides (1893) as examples.61 Munch’s painting figures the passage from virgin to bride and inevitable devolution into withered crone in the form of a dance, portraying this closed circuit with a gusto that is also evident and similarly articulated in The Three Ages of Women, painted five years later by his contemporary and colleague Gustav Klimt. Toorop demonstrates a sympathetic strain of misogyny in his tripartite presentation of virginity, sanctioned bridal (subordinated) sexuality—“ignorant desire. blank desire (with a touch of malice)”—and destructive sexual voracity embodied in a trio of female figures.62 Whereas the Symbolist painters appear to be untroubled by this disturbingly absolute subdivision of female types, reinscribing these categories with a problematic and often prurient enthusiasm, Duchamp and Picabia engaged with these social mechanisms for regulating (and indeed relegating) women in critical, if characteristically playful, terms. Executed contemporaneously with “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” and out of a Duchampian welter of interartist dialogue, Picabia’s mechanomorphic female figures delineate his preoccupation with the New American Woman and the more physically embodied, brave, and liberated female sexuality she promised.63 Over three years, in painting and poetry, Picabia variously depicts la jeune fille américaine as a tangle of electrical wires and sockets (I see again in memory my dear Udnie, 1914), spark plugs (Nude Portrait of a Young American Girl, 1915), and lightbulbs (Américaine, 1917).64 In contrast to this technical machine aesthetic, Picabia’s Holy Virgin (1920) and Jeune Fille (1920) are controversial by virtue of their very simplicity. Holy Virgin appeared on the page following Duchamp’s L. H. O. O. Q. in 391 12. A gesture of supreme Dada iconoclasm, it consists of a splash of spattered ink on white ground, adorned only with its title and the name of its maker.65 An allusion to

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biblical trials by bed linen—rituals of postnuptial certification of bridal virginity—it has been read by its most eloquent critic as alluding “in a succinct melding of antiart and blasphemy to precisely what did not happen to the Blessed Virgin.” 66 Within a Picabian corpus in which troubling representations of the feminine proliferate, Holy Virgin stands as an intertext to Duchamp’s visually antithetical, but ideologically coterminous, Virgin series. Our apprehension of the disparity at the level of process—oil painting and inkblot—is adumbrated by the knowledge that Duchamp’s Bride, like the Blessed Virgin, was, Picabia claimed, executed “with his fingers.” 67 Thus the male artist physically intervenes in both deflowerings, with very different outcomes. Another unmediated evocation of virginal bloodletting, and carrying a similarly violent charge, the 1920 Jeune Fille consisted of only a round hole puncturing the page.68 In the course of his extended interviews with Duchamp, Pierre Cabanne charges his subject with espousing “a well-known antifeminist attitude,” to which Duchamp responds:

marriage as a state of mutual misery that incarcerates both its victims, so Loy, in “Ladies in the Aviary,” satirically portrays marriage as effecting a “cruel metamorphosis” of the “too lovely” caged, sugar-hungry virgin.72 Satirically identifying with the man disappointed with his prize, she describes the bride as “driven from her couch of roses to receive him on a burst mattress.”73 No longer trailing “their lacy bustles among the azaleas,” with marriage, the once “amphoral” “doll” is thereby “yoked . . . to the same irksome harness as himself.”74 Later in the same interview, a dogged Cabanne refers to Michel Carrouges’s contention that Duchamp’s work manifests a “negation of women,” to which Duchamp replies:

No, antimarriage, but not antifeminist . . . [Anticonjugal?] Yes, anti all that. There was a budgetary question that came into it, and a very logical bit of reasoning; I had to choose painting, or something else. To be a man of art, or to marry, have children, a country house. 69

His opening remarks speak of an anti-conjugal opposition to the social system that makes of women only virgins, wives, and mothers. These overtures of social critique very quickly shade into a justification of his own life choices, a refusal of female fertility and a preoccupation with other pragmatic concerns common to makers of (avant-garde) art. Thus, to the inevitable frustration of critics, who strive to label him either a great misogynist or an even greater feminist, grand ideals become confused with his desire for adequate space within which to pursue his work and his distaste for domesticity. As Hopkins observes:

Hopkins observes that “it has been established that, as a young man, Duchamp was wholly averse to the socially prescribed equation of the female with marriage and children.”70 Calvin Tomkins makes a similar argument, suggesting that we look to a very early drawing, Dimanches (1909), “which shows a soberly dressed suburban couple, the husband pushing a baby carriage, the wife heavily pregnant, both looking terminally miserable,” as proof of this long-held antipathy.71 Just as Duchamp figures

It’s above all a negation of woman in the social sense of the word, that is to say, the woman-wife, the mother, the children, etc. I carefully avoided all that, until I was sixty-seven. Then I married a woman who, because of her age, couldn’t have children. I personally never wanted to have any, simply to keep expenses down.75

It is by no means sufficient [. . .] to claim that Duchamp was a woman-hater. More precisely, we should look at how he invoked the principle of

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dissection/investigation, not so much as an expression of misogyny, but rather as a self-reflexive deconstruction of misogyny as it is culturally inscribed in relation to femininity.76 This statement might just as easily be applied to Mina Loy. As has been discussed in the preceding analyses of “The Effectual Marriage” and “One O’Clock at Night,” Loy was wont to portray women she deemed to have acquiesced to the socially prescribed model of feminine identity in excessively critical terms. Her depiction of the virgins in “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” is without compassion or any intimation of solidarity. Though she considers their fate unjust, the speaker does not count herself among their number. She agitates for the explosion of culturally inscribed gender roles but is scathing in her representations of those who have accepted them. Like Duchamp, she attacked the concept of marriage, and like him she married twice. Neither her polemical nor poetic writing seeks to elevate or eulogize the feminine. Instead, she undermines the ideologies that have reduced women to the subjugated state in which she perceives them. Like that of Duchamp, Loy’s ire is directed at the self-perpetuating, poisonous structures of patriarchal society. In fact, since both Duchamp’s 1912 Bride and Loy’s 1914 “Parturition” offer unflinching expositions of the female reproductive body as a powerful, alien subject, performing a denaturing of female reproduction in a politicized attempt to cleave the feminine from the social segregation of the female as virgin/ bride/mother/whore/crone, these works demand to be read against each other. Through their various, often disquieting, disquisitions on virginity—and on the blossoming that marks its transformation—Loy and her Dada counterparts engage with the putatively liberated, resexualized New Woman in a heretofore unacknowledged dialogue.

“Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” Turning to “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” a signed and dated manuscript identifies the moment of composition as December 3, 1914.77 In an editorial effort either to point up the poem’s freshness or to place Loy’s radically feminist argument at a flatteringly prescient point in the century, this date, in full, is commemorated at the end of the poem. Where Marinetti had promoted the “use of mathematical signs: + - × : = >