From 28 November 2019 to 11 January 2020
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
In 1917, America had just entered the war against Germany. A noble and most eccentric Germanic stork, or was it a crane, often arrested for bathing in public fountains, devised a hoax to pester* the art of those males of the Society of Independent Artists in New York.
She sent the salon a urinal, which she signed R. Mutt. She did not send a bidet, originally intended for intimate ablutions in brothels. She did not send a WC bowl open to all sexes. No, she had a urinal sent from Philadelphia, one bound to the male member. The urinal was refused and was not exhibited.
A sly fox crossed with a handsome pig appropriated the object, sting and all. The muttation and the stroke of genius did their work. The object was consecrated, and in consecrated there is sacred.
The fable is no bed of roses for the rare bird. “C’est la vie”, some will say. But every fable has a moral: the fountain-woman has only one name! “Dada Baroness”!
And in this story, art history gets it in the backside!
24 December 2018
Canuler: to pester
Mutatis mutandis: adverbial phrase (Latin, changing what must be changed; making the necessary changes).
THE BARONESS IN BED
The baroness in bed sleeps naked. In her dream she strokes her tail like a big brush with which she paints. The baroness does not paint with a donkey’s tail (the baroness in bed is not Boronali1); she paints a bidet with her ponytail on the canvases of her sheets.
If Dada Baroness 2 dreams that she paints a horse with her hair, it is because the baroness shaves, shaves, shaves in bed, shaves her scalp.
The baroness also shaves her pubic hair3. She shaves and shaves because she is bored, and a hundred nights is a long time, and without night you lose your head, especially a shaven one.
22 December 2018, on waking
1. Boronali was Lolo, the donkey belonging to Père Frédé, owner of the Lapin Agile. The animal’s tail had painted the picture Et le soleil s’endormit sur l’Adriatique, which caused a scandal in 1910. The donkey was turned into the painter Joachim-Raphaël Boronali, an anagram of Aliboron…
2. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was nicknamed Dada Baroness in avant-garde New York. Her eccentricities (dresses covered in spoons, shaved head, black lips, stamps stuck on her cheeks…) were famous. She collected stray dogs. Her fountain was in fact meant to be shown where the dogs of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show paraded. In English, mutt means a mongrel (of mixed breed) but also the backside. In one of her poems she calls Marcel Duchamp, with whom she was madly in love, “my arse”. R. Mutt, pronounced “armutt” in German, means wretched, poor in spirit. Of course Mutt also suggests Mutter, her mother, who died of the effects of syphilis, from which she too would suffer, a disease perhaps transmitted by an abusive father.
3. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray made the film The Baroness Shaves Her Pubic Hair, a film now lost.
In a letter made public in 1983, Marcel Duchamp wrote to his sister: “Tell this detail to the family: the Independents have opened here with great success. One of my female friends, under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture. It was not at all indecent, no reason for refusing it…”
Marcel Duchamp said of “Dada Baroness”: “The baroness is not futurist. She is the future.” 102 years later, it is time to celebrate the originality of this vogelfrei artist, an exceptional outlaw. Part of the exhibition Muttatis Muttandis evokes the richness of her personality. The day has come to render unto Elsa what belonged to Marcel.
Artist: Lou Dubois