Irrational Modernism–A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada

by Amelia Jones
The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004
336 pp., illus. 71 b/w, Trade $39.95
ISBN: 0-262-10102-5.

Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg

andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com

"The story will be embarrassingly personal," promises Amelia Jones as she describes her project of writing an alternative history of the New York avant-garde from about 1913 to 1923. Her aim is to trace the contours of the irrational in the modernist movement of this time. Unsurprisingly, Jones draws on Freud but also on the relatively unknown figure of the Baroness Elsa von Feytag-Loringhoven, a German expatriate living in New York, who mixed in the same circles as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

The Baroness was a poet, autobiographer, artist, artist’s model, and cultural provocateur who seemed to have terrified and threatened most of the white male artists and writers she met. For Jones, the Baroness is a figure whichfigure, which she hopes will allow her to identify the misogynistic, the irrational and the physical (bodily) aspects of the modernism of this time. This, in turn, is intended to lead to a new understanding of the avant-garde of this period and of radical artistic practice itself.

The project will be "embarrassingly personal" because Jones develops her own identification with the Baroness as the book progresses. Jones tells us that the Baroness is a neurasthenic and that she (Jones) has been clinically diagnosed as suffering from the "twenty-first-century version of neurasthenia: panic disorder". Author and subject are thus united by their neuroses whichneuroses, which, Jones maintains, disrupt rationality by propelling their subjects into a heightened state. . This culminates in Jones impersonating the voice of the Baroness, or "performing" her as Jones calls it, and writing a prose-poemprose poem in the voice of the Baroness.

The performance of the Baroness is meant to bring or incorporate the irrational and the subjective into what might otherwise be a conventional art historical account. This, in turn, is supposed to provide us with a new way of looking at New York Dada as the traditional demarcations between fact and fiction, author and subject, art history and story-telling are transgressed. Conflating author and subject, for example, is intended to demonstrate the ultimate unknowability of the subject. But, Jones’ impersonation of the voice of the Baroness does not actually do more than demonstrate that the Baroness was a bad writer. Moreover, because the Baroness bears most of the burden in this book for introducing the physical, the irrational, the subjective, and the disorderly, her figure simultaneously conjuressimultaneously conjures up and reinforces stereotypes of masculinity as rational and the feminine as irrational.

Jones suggests that her approach demonstrates a new way of ‘doing art history."’. In fact it is the application of many ideas which were introduced into the study of literatureideas, which were introduced into the study of literature, and the social sciences in the 1980’s and which, certainly in the social sciences, have largely been abandoned. The problems of subjectivity, ultimate meanings and the over-looked role of women remain with us still.