5. Loy Baedeker Roadmap

Navigating Loy Online

Stellectric signs
“Wing shows on Starway”
“Zodiac carrousel”
– Mina Loy, “Lunar Baedeker”

In 2014, Andrew Pilsch launched Mina Loy Online, a digital collection of Loy’s Futurist works, formatted to preserve line breaks and spacing. Three years later, the Beinecke Library announced “that the Mina Loy Papers have been digitized in their entirety.” These developments are tremendous boons for Loy scholars and enthusiasts. Four important Futurist works, plus hundreds of letters, manuscripts, drawings, sketches, designs for inventions, portraits, lampshades, and more can now be freely accessed online.

Online access is a vital and necessary step toward making Loy’s work more accessible, but it is not sufficient on its own. We need to frame the open-access, digital archive with open-access, narrative interpretations and explanations. In other words, we need to develop a Baedeker for Loy’s career that provides access to and interpretation of her archive—a scholarly travel guide that helps users navigate Loy’s body of work including archival sources, artwork, and artifacts. As William G. Thomas, founding Director of UVA’s Virginia Center for Digital History, argues, the most pressing need in digital humanities today is for digital narratives, which he defines as “multimodal, user-directed, hyper-textual” narratives that change with each encounter and “situate evidence, interpretation, and arguments in ways that allow readers to understand the scholarly project”.1 When narratives change with each encounter, it means that users have been able to navigate the material according to their own interests and questions, and participate in the process of meaning making.

The Mina Loy Baedeker: A Scholarly Book for Digital Travelers offers a collection of scholarly digital narratives that contextualize and interpret Loy’s relationship to the avant-garde, offering contextualized readings of her poetry, prose, letters, artwork, designs, and related artifacts. These essays invite “user-directed” inquiry, allowing users to chart their own course through Loy’s career and to interact with archival materials, artwork, maps, and other artifacts.

The chapters are organized chronologically and geographically, following Loy’s movements through time and space. Select chapters from the carousel below, or read on for chapter summaries and links.

Theory

Theories of the Avant-Garde & En Dehors Garde

In this chapter, Suzanne Churchill, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum provide an introduction to theories of the avant-garde, beginning with definitions and a review of several seminal theories of the avant-garde that have helped entrench a masculine mythos. We then consider feminist and race-based critiques of the avant-garde, including Loy’s critique.

Recognizing the insufficiency of existing theories of the avant-garde to account for the work of women writers like Loy, we propose the term en dehors garde: rather than being at the forefront (“avant”) of artistic and literary culture, women and artists of color often worked from the outside and turned away from the center (“en dehors”), to which they frequently lacked access.

We not only propose a new theory of the en dehors garde, but in Summer 2018 orchestrated a digital flash mob to invite users to theorize with us. This chapter includes the original invitation to participate, along with the post(card)s we received, which you can select and rearrange to form your own theory of the en dehors garde.

Italy 1907-1916

Baedeker map of Florence

Loy’s Italian Baedeker: Mapping a Feminist En Dehors Garde

In this chapter, Linda Kinnahan takes readers on a guided, visual and textual tour of Italian sites significant to Loy, discussing how place — including geographic, visual specificities – informs Loy’s feminist en dehors garde in its early development. Mapping the Italian poems’ geography of gender, the chapter tours locations in Florence, Rome, and retreats such as Vallombrosa, Forte Dei Marmi, and Bagni di Lucca to distinguish how Loy’s writing and artwork of this period realigns our thinking about the historic avant-garde and invites us to theorize a feminist en dehors garde.  

Courting an Audience: Loy’s Plays

In this chapter, Suzanne Churchill explores Loy’s engagement with Italian Futurism through her plays—witty, experimental dramas that have received very little critical attention. These plays show that Loy wasn’t just critical of the Futurists’ misogyny; she also resisted their arrogant attitude toward the public. Rejecting the Futurists’ combative approach to audience, Loy blends popular traditions with experimental techniques in order to cajole, amuse, and involve her audiences in the drama. She adopts en dehors garde poses and strategies to humorously critique the very systems of which she is a part, gaining critical distance even as she acknowledges her complicity. Loy’s plays are important not only because they reveal her thinking about audiences, but also because they serve as a laboratory for her emergent theories of the avant-garde and gender performance. 

New York 1916-1921

Baedeker map of New York

Pas de Deux: Mina Loy & Alfred Stieglitz Dance Dada

This chapter on Loy’s migration from Italian Futurism to New York Dada by focusing on her unlikely pairing with Alfred Stieglitz in the little magazine Blind Man. In the magazine, Loy is playful, irreverent, and experimental, while Stieglitz is earnest and serious, yet both manifest the spirit of New York Dada. Suzanne Churchill argues that Loy’s shift from Italian Futurism to New York Dada was motivated, in part, by her critique of the Futurist’s combative relationship to the public and her own search for a more amiable, even amorous relationship to audiences who might understand and appreciate her unconventional work. New York Dada offered a new playground in which Loy could stage her en dehors garde experiments.

Paris 1923-1936

Baedeker map of Paris

Surreal Scene: Paris, 1923-1936

In this chapter, Susan Rosenbaum discusses Loy’s relationship to the Surrealist movement in Paris and her role in Surrealism’s trans-Atlantic crossing, including her work as Paris agent for the Julien Levy Gallery. Rosenbaum addresses how Loy’s poetry, fiction, visual art, objects, and designs from the 1920s and early 30s respond to and transform Surrealist ideas and techniques from the perspective of the en dehors garde. Contextualizing Loy’s work through analysis of the Surrealist movement’s treatment and representation of women, gender, and sexuality, the chapter explores connections between Loy’s work and the art and writing of other women from this era who engaged Surrealism from the movement’s margins.

New York 1937-1953

Map of Lower East Side in Manhattan

Surrealism on the Move: New York, 1937-1953

Building on her previous chapter, Susan Rosenbaum considers transformations in Loy’s relationship to Dada and Surrealism when she moved to New York City for the second time.  This chapter does not approach Loy’s late work as a falling off from an earlier European “avant-garde” moment, but as an active working through of ideas and techniques Loy had absorbed from Dada and Surrealism, which she would continue to critique and transform during her years in New York.  Loy’s struggles with aging and poverty coupled with her experience living near the Bowery and friendship with “American Surrealist” Joseph Cornell would inflect her poetry and visual art of this time with ethical vigor and spiritual reflection. This chapter considers Loy’s 1950’s collections — the publication of Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables (1958) and the Bodley Gallery Exhibition of Loy’s Constructions (1959) — in the context of the post-1945 American avant-garde and its histories.

Scholarly Guide for Digital Travelers

Like a traditional print volume of scholarly essays, Mina Loy Baedeker: Scholarly Guide for Digital Travelers has been peer reviewed by experts in the field of Loy studies to ensure quality and accuracy. We have partnered with ModNets, submitting the project to their vetting process for blind peer review. We have also worked with the developers of the web annotation tool, Hypothes.is, asking our Advisory Board to test this tool as a means of offering public peer review of the platform. Although there are professional risks involved in working outside traditional vetting processes for print scholarly publication, the principal faculty architects of this project have tenure at our respective institutions, so were willing to test alternative processes for assessing the quality and value of digital scholarship in ways that might eventually benefit untenured scholars and help transform institutional standards for hiring, tenure, and promotion.

Unlike a print book of scholarly essays, the chapters in the Mina Loy Baedeker are not self-contained in a single, bound volume, but exist within the framework of a larger project to reimagine humanities scholarship for the digital age, a project co-created by students, librarians, programmers, designers, instructional technologists, and you, our readers. 



Lunar Baedeker (Contact, 1923) – LB23
Lunar Baedeker & Timetables (Jonathan Williams, 1958) – LBT58
Last Lunar Baedeker (Jargon, 1982) – LLB82
Insel (Black Sparrow Press , 1991) – Insel
Lost Lunar Baedeker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996) – LLB96
Stories & Essays (Dalkey Archive, 2011) – SE

  1. William G. Thomas, “Plenary Address.” Digital Humanities Symposium, UGA DigiLab, Athens, GA. April 17, 2015.