2. Masculine Legends

Mina Loy is not alone in her exile from avant-garde theories, histories, and anthologies. As Griselda Pollock observes, “women are generally missing from conventional stories of the avant-garde”—despite their active, formative participation as artists, writers, editors, patrons, and publishers.1 The gender ratio in the photo below—six women and nine men—provides evidence of women’s prominence in the Parisian avant-garde of 1923, and stands in marked contrast to the dominance of men and erasure of women in subsequent histories and theories of the historical avant-garde.

members of avant garde in Paris in 1920s
Six women and nine men associated with the historical avant-garde gather in front of The Jockey in Paris in 1923. Front row: Man Ray, Mina Loy, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau. Middle row: Kiki, Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, Ezra Pound Top row: Bill Bird on the left, Hilaire Hiler and Curtiss Moffit on the right.

Pollock argues that the “initial institutionalization of modernism not only failed to acknowledge the centrality of gender to both modernity and its modernisms; it actively fabricated a monogendered, selective narrative of modern art, even in the living presence of the women who defined their moment of modernity through their massive participation in all areas of culture” (Pollock 795). What results is a “heroic and exclusively masculine legend of the avant-garde.”

Italian Futurists Russolo, Boccioni, Severini, Marinetti,
Futurists Luigi Russolo, Carlo CarrĂ , Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini in front of Le Figaro, Paris, February 9, 1912.

This masculine legend has roots in three foundational theories of the historical avant-garde:

These theories are intelligent, insightful, influential—and almost exclusively based on white, male artists. To theorize the avant-garde is to construct a history and a canon: the theory arises from observations about a select canon of writers and artists, and then serves as grounds for ignoring those whose work does not conform to the theory.

With regard to questions of gender, studies of the vanguard have decisively remained in the rearguard.2

A brief overview will suffice to show how and why these seminal theories of the avant-garde do not adequately account for Loy’s avant-garde practices. By noting how Loy does not fit the mold, we may begin to see how other innovative artists and writers from the same period may also be marginalized by these theories.

Greenberg’s Formal Approach

cover of Partisan ReviewIn his influential 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg takes a formalist approach, arguing that the avant-garde “detaches” itself from society, turning its attention to its own medium.3 The resulting avant-garde art is characterized by reduction, abstraction, and purification of form. “Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cezanne, derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in,” Greenberg argues, noting that “poets like Rimbaud, MallarmĂ©, ValĂ©ry, Eluard, Pound, Hart Crane, Stevens, even Rilke and Yeats” similarly focus on the act of poetic creation. Note that all of these artists and writers are white men, and most of European origin.

Greenberg might have included Loy in his list of poets, as poems like “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” and “Joyce’s Ulysses” explicitly focus on acts of artistic and literary creation, and nearly all of her writing  in some way turns our attention to the structures of language itself. But for Loy, language is not a pure, abstract medium; it is deeply embedded in social and sexual contexts and conventions. Her poem “The Effectual Marriage,” a satire of a conventional marriage, is the antithesis of “reduction, abstraction, and purification of form.” Long, sprawling, and unstable, the poem is unable or unwilling to detach itself from its social context, as its concluding note attests:

(This narrative halted when I discovered that the house which inspired it was the home of a madwoman. —Forte dei Marmi).4

With this parenthetical, Loy shifts from her ironic, detached portrait of a fictional marriage and gestures toward an inescapable, real-world trap for women.

Poggioli’s Psychological Approach

Cover of Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-GardeRenato Poggioli’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968)—the first book-length study of the subject—takes a psycho-social approach that is better able to accommodate Loy’s complex psycho-social investigations. Whereas Greenberg defines the avant-garde as a structural position in which the artist distances himself from mass culture, Poggioli views it as a psychological condition—a social mentality characterized by alienation and opposition to mass culture.

Poggioli offers a taxonomy of avant-garde “moments” that encompasses a range of positions, attitudes, and strategies. Although they may last “only a morning,”5 these “moments” are more temperamental than temporal, closer to psychological phases than to spans of time:

  • activistic: “the sheer joy of dynamism”
  • antagonistic: “spirit of hostility and opposition”
  • nihilistic: pleasure in destruction
  • agonistic: welcoming self-destruction as a sacrifice to future generations

This array of psychological dispositions can better account for the various attitudes and postures Loy assumed in her varied career, but the detachment and alienation from mass culture both Greenberg and Poggioli see at the heart of avant-garde practice does not hold true for Loy. She went to New York seeking an audience for her work, her Dada experiments court the public, and her entrepreneurial designs reflect an ambition to succeed in the mass cultural marketplace. Poggioli’s taxonomy does not account for the constructive, transformative “moments” in Loy’s artistic practices—the ardent desire to expand individual minds and transform cultural values through art.

BĂŒrger’s Sociopolitical Approach

Cover of Theory of the Avant GardeIn reorienting the avant-garde toward mass culture, Peter BĂŒrger’s influential Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974, 1980, English translation 1984) seems to align better with these aspects of Loy’s avant-garde practice. Burger takes a sociopolitical approach, conceiving of the avant-garde as groups  committed to artistic experimentation and innovation and opposed to bourgeois society rather than to mass culture.6 The avant-garde rejects the bourgeois institution of art and its idealization of artistic autonomy because they effect a separation between art and everyday life. For Burger, the avant-garde attacks bourgeois institutions and values in an effort to reconnect art with everyday life and make it available and accessible to the masses. Marcel Duchamp exemplifies this stance. His “ready-mades” insert quotidian objects (an overturned urinal, a shovel, a bicycle wheel) into the hallowed realm of art, thereby subverting the bourgeois art institution’s pretensions to grandeur while expanding what art can be.

Some of Loy’s work resembles Duchamp’s, especially her 1917 contributions to the Dada little magazine The Blindman and her Constructions made from cast-off objects she collected while living in the Bowery in the 1940s and early 1950s. But other work, such as her celebrated 1923 poem “Apology of Genius,” revile the uncomprehending masses and elevate the artistic genius to a position of isolation and alienation. Loy’s stance toward mass culture and the democratic possibilities of art is thus inconsistent, changing throughout her career.

In addition, subverting the hallowed realm of art is a privilege available only to those who have access to art’s bourgeois institutions. While Loy gained access to cultural institutions primarily through her relationship to influential male figures, including  Carl Van Vechten, Ezra Pound, Julien Levy, and Marcel Duchamp, many women and artists of color were excluded from the galleries, museums, and publishing venues that gave recognition to artists and endowed their work with value. Moreover, as Stephen Ross points out, women often “had their work appropriated and displayed by men as their own,” and influential men like Ezra Pound “tried to destroy powerful female poets like Amy Lowell.”7


 

  1. Griselda Pollock,“Moments and Temporalities of the Avant-Garde ‘in, of, and from the feminine’,” New Literary History Vol. 41, No. 4 (Autumn 2010), 795-820.
  2. James Martin Harding,Cutting Performances : Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde, p.8, 1st pbk. ed., 1st pbk. ed., University of Michigan Press, 2012, Project Muse, Accessed 10 Mar. 2019.
  3. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review Vol. 6, No. 5 (Fall 1939) 34-49.
  4. Mina Loy,“The Effectual Marriage.” The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Edited by Roger L. Conover. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996. 36-39.
  5. Renato Poggioli,The Theory of the Avant-Garde, p.223, Translated from the Italian by Gerald Fitzgerald, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969.
  6. Peter BĂŒrger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Translated from the German by Michael Shaw, foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
  7. Hypothesis Annotation, 5 April 2019.