‘Puppet of skeletal escapade’: Dance Dialogues in Mina Loy and Carl Van Vechten

In an undated letter, likely composed in late 1914, Mina Loy reflected on the recent aesthetic experiences that had greatly affected her, writing that the ‘things that have made [her] gasp were a few Picassos, Windham [ sic] Lewis, Nijinski dancing – perfection is infrequent’. The letter was addressed to her American agent Carl Van Vechten, a dance and music critic at the New York Times, who played a highly influential role in shaping discourses around ballet and modern dance both in the US and internationally. This article conjoins Loy and Van Vechten's modernist oeuvres – crossing genres including poetry, novels, newspaper reviews, and photography – in order to reveal the importance of dance to their shifting aesthetic commitments and shared interest in the expressive capacities of the human form. Dancing bodies, moving fluently across the work of this modernist pair, variously transcribe Futurist satires, Decadent revivals, and a primitivist fascination with the erotic aspects of dance, crystallising in Loy and Van Vechten's responses to the Harlem Renaissance.

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown’s ‘reading machine’ and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change. Reading Machines argues that transatlantic avant-gardes deployed ‘techno-bathetic’ strategies to contest the dominance of the technological sublime. This major but hidden cultural narrative engaged with the messy particulars and unintended consequences of technology’s transduction in society. Techno-bathetic vanguardists including Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, post-Harlem Renaissance radicals and American Super-realists proposed new, non-servile ways of reading and doing technology. The books reveals how these formations contested the entrenched hierarchies of both the transatlantic Machine Age and technological sublime.

Re-Reading the Machine Age: The ‘Audacious Modernity’ of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes

Chapter 2 explores how the proto-Dada artists of New York City proposed new ways of reading Machine Age America. Rather than invoking the power and efficiency of its machines and infrastructure, it argues that these vanguardists emphasised their delicacy, intricacy and fragility. Sections one and two detail the divergent aesthetics of two key modernist formations: the technological sublime of Alfred Stieglitz and his ‘Young American’ literary acolytes (including Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford); and the techno-bathetic proto-Dadaists of the magazine 291, exemplified by Francis Picabia. The third section analyses the techno-bathetic practices of Marcel Duchamp in his New York Dada phase, as well as crucial responses to that work by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams. The fourth section focuses on the work of the Baroness, who interrogated the implications of socio-technics for problems of sex, gender and nationality. Finally, section five focuses on Loy’s poetry, fashion designs, inventions, and technicities; for the first time, it unveils her invention ‘verrovoile’, a translucent thermoplastic she profiled in a previously unknown 1929 newspaper article. The chapter argues that, through her poetry and inventions, Loy helped introduce the concept of the artist-engineer to transatlantic discourse in the mid-1920s.

Dynamic Form

This book traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, the book examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as the book states, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, the book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. It thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.

Protean Form

This chapter focuses on Mina Loy, a writer enmeshed in the avant-garde conversation about abstraction and invested in identifying a purity of form in the work of those she admires. Responding to her contemporaries, friends, and lovers, Loy lauds recognizably mainstream aspects of abstract form—the particulate core, the fundamental element, the essential shape—in the service of surprising ends, most notably an emphasis on the body and emotional intimacy. Thus, poems such as the autobiographical Songs to Joannes (1917) and the ekphrastic “Brancusi's Golden Bird” (1922), among several others, encourage one to reframe the interarts notion of pure form as something other than entirely sterile, since Loy's work consistently demonstrates how abstraction can coincide with affect and sexuality. Loy asks one to revel in the erotics of formal purity found in the denuded body and self, text and art object; her protean forms are always on the verge of merging with other forms or generating new forms. Loy's ardent futurity accordingly represents a strain of maximalist abstraction that counters the colder modernism of F. T. Marinetti, Ezra Pound, and others.