"Arabesque Grotesque": Toward a Theory of Dada Ecopoetics

Upon honeysucklefists Arabesque grotesque Basks—drumming as it lists Beetle Thank God, nature is going to die. Yes, the great Pan is dead. Imagine this unique ecosystem in New York, 1918: in a cold-water tenement on Fourteenth Street near the Hudson River, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927), a German émigré Dada poet, cultivated an intensely close relationship with animals—living with several dogs and other assorted animals, refusing even to kill rats, insisting instead on feeding them.1 The menagerie was housed among her art objects, mostly objets trouvés collected from the streets of New York, relocated and repurposed within the apartment. The room was “crowded and reeking with the strange relics which she had purloined over a period of years from the New York gutters,” as the painter George Biddle recalls. “Old bits of ironware, automobile tires, gilded vegetables, a dozen starved dogs, celluloid paintings, ash cans, every conceivable horror, which to her tortured, yet highly sensitized perception, became objects of formal beauty” (140). A 1915 photograph of Baroness Elsa in her Greenwich Village studio shows a birdcage with her canary hanging from the ceiling (rpt. in Freytag-Loringhoven, Body Sweats 95, pl. 2.10), just as Duchamp hung his snow shovel from the ceiling as a readymade. As an originary “posthuman,” a concept that has emerged contemporaneous with the postmodern and phenomenological revisions to subjectivity, Baroness Elsa blends organic, artful, and technological materials to produce a new aesthetic and gendered sensibility, one that challenges the mechanomorphic machine images dominating New York Dada. Anticipating postmodern concerns, as Alex Goody writes, “Baroness Elsa's poetry parodies the omnipotence of an American technological teleology, [and] considers how the consumer products of a modern America confuse and blur the integrity of the human form” (116). Thus, she translated her “house” into a functional Dada-ecosystem, and lived according to ecological principles that she would also deploy throughout her poetry. Radically reconfiguring and expanding the notions of “nature” poetry and the lyrical subject, the Baroness's poetry presents a prescient anticipation of postmodern ecopoetics.

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