translated from Spanish: Baroness Dada and Duchamp Urinal

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) was the queen of the Cultural and Artistic Movement Dada of New York during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
In this text we will walk with her through the streets of this city to know the life and work of this pioneer of the art of street performance. It was also a precursor to assembled sculpture or assamblages and readymade, that is, the use of everyday objects found, which a priori have no artistic value but are elevated to the category of art by the artist.
According to current studies, Elsa is the true author of “La Fuente” attributed to Marcel Duchamp.
What’s a work of art doing walking around New York?
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is also known as Baroness dandy, as Gloria G. Durán explains in her book Baroness dandy, Queen Dada. The title of Baroness was given to her by her third husband, the German Baron Leopold Freytag-Loringhoven, whom she met in New York in 1913. Since her arrival in this city in 1910, Elsa works as a model for artists and there she met Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp or Djuna Barnes, among others. It is then that she begins her total dedication to art, becoming a moving work herself.
The “I as Art”
He builds his own identity through a radical attitude and an extravagant dress with which he goes through and subverts normality: that’s why it’s a dandy or a “yo-like-art”, which surprises us… what would happen if we saw a woman walk naked through the streets of New York, with the face powdered bright yellow, the lips painted black and the head shaved and painted red?
A punk? A hypster? She’s the unclassifiable Elsa! Because watching her walk through the streets of New York in the early decades of the twentieth century was like seeing a sound puzzle exposed to be deciphered: from her ears hung spoons, her head was covered with a hat that was actually a bucket of zinc adorned with a ramillet (e) of parsley; as a bra, he had two empty cans of tomato.
Tribute to Baroness Dadá and her bodily objects, by Elia Torrecilla (baroness) and Gloria G. Durán. Miguel Molina Alarcón, provided AuthorHolder of an explicit and dressed sexuality as the queen of the streets, celebrates at every step the avant-garde modernity. In addition, sometimes an old, worn seal would stick on her cheek, and move from place to place as if it were a kind of woman-postal, displaying herself through her “spontaneous street performances.”
Baroness mop
All of it is an event in which she manages to turn any ordinary act into poetry. The “Queen Dada” walks along the margin and the ambiguous, attracted by those waste spaces that are the containers. From the garbage, he collected a series of objects that served him not only as body ornaments but also as raw material to build his assembled sculptures or assamblages.
That’s why we can think of her as a “baroness trapera” who picked junk squirts from the street and designed her elegant wardrobe, typical of her noble title. Thus we find in it a anteasant of the art of recycling, and an example of how waste and garbage are not incompatible with glamour, if we use them creatively.
Their first known assamblage came on the same day as their third wedding, in 1913. On the way to the celebration, an iron ring was found entitled “Enduring Ornament”, considered by its biographer Irene Gammel (2002) the first readymade: one of the most radical contributions to the art of the twentieth century and made two years before the arrival of Duchamp and Picabia. With this, the elegant neighborhood appropriates an everyday object and transforms it into an artistic piece, something that will be described by the author as an act of “daily modernity”. Elsa, the Dada queen, had the power to elevate to the art category any object found.
Elsa’s urinal?
Photograph of ‘Fountain’ published in ‘The blind man’ (Marcel Duchamp, 1917). MET’God’, sculpture by Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven photographed by Morton Schamberg (1917). The Museum of Fine Arts, HoustonFrom great forgotten to rescued: Is this woman the first who enlisted a urinal as a work of art?
All his contributions were left in the shadow of the great glow of the famous porcelain urinal that Duchamp presented for the exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists in New York. It is the first readymade or everyday object that for the first time is exhibited in a museum, causing a great scandal. But was it really Duchamp’s idea?
As part of her self-construction process, Baroness dandy adopted different pseudonyms. One of them was R. Mutt, as Marcel Duchamp explains in a letter that on April 11, 1917 writes to his sister Suzzane, also a plastic artist. In it, she comments that a friend of hers, who calls herself Richard Mutt, had sent her from Philadelphia a sculpture that was a urinal.
Interestingly, in 1917 the artist made her work God – considered the first work of the American Dada – a piece made with a twisted and erect urinal pipe, like a phallus that goes to the sky, located on a pedestal. All this suggests that the urinal seems consistent with Elsa’s artistic and vital trajectory and that, indeed, it would be she who ened a urinal as a sculpture. But, having been exhibited by Duchamp, art historians have ended up valuing him only. Yes, Elsa designed it, but it was not exposed by her on the official art circuit.
Thanks to new studies carried out from other perspectives, figures such as baroness are being rescued from oblivion and placed in their rightful place, questioning how unfair an artistic narrative is necessarily being revisited. For this reason, Baroness dandy and Queen Dada was considered by The Little Review magazine as “the only living person in the world who wears Dada, loves and lives Dada”.
Loneliness and forgetfulness
Pushing to the limit his motto “I am nobody’s”, he remained true to his essence and disappeared into the mists of new artistic movements, such as surrealism, until he fell into oblivion.
Alone and forgotten, one day she opened the gas key to her Paris apartment and, hugging her dog, decided to end her existence, without recognition of her way of understanding art through a life that escaped social conventions.
But his attitude lives on today, in the experimentation of art from one’s own body, which makes him creative by subverting the rules established by the socially correct. So, our best recognition for Elsa would be:
Let’s become a walking work of art!!
Elia Torrecilla, Professor Department of Art, Miguel Hernández University
This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original.

Original source in Spanish