SORRY ELSA
Being Duchamp Becoming Elsa, 2021. Remastered 2023.
Silent movie, accompanied by sound available at the time of viewing 10:00.
Still frame. Being Duchamp Becoming Elsa, Silent movie 2021. Remastered 2023. 10:00.
Playing Dead, 2021. Performing Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s death mask.
STL still image from 3D model. Printed object 42 x 59.4 x 15cm.
(Detail) Installation view: Flexible Tenderness Web, 2021.
3D printed Death Mask, Sail-Makers Needle and originating filament. Dimensions variable.
Photo © Debbie Sears.
That The Living May Know The Features of Your Face, Cromwell Place 2021.
Photo © Debbie Sears.
That The Living May Know The Features of Your Face, Cromwell Place 2021.
Documentation of live performance with Palestinian singer Emmal Baker, singing أحمد العربي (Ahmad Al-Arabi), an Arabic song about occupation, love and longing. Accompanied by digital film 10:00.
White Lies, 2023.
Archival Giclée Print on Platinum Etching 42 x 59.4 cm. Available to order.
That The Living May Know The Features of Your Face, Mimosa House, London 2022.
Part of The Baroness group exhibition dedicated to Dada artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
Documentary photograph.
That The Living May Know The Features of Your Face 2023. Petitou, Peckham.
Documentary photograph.
What would it mean if arguably the most important artwork of 20th century, that changed the way we view art and what we think about the world, was made by a woman? And stolen by a man?
Art history and history, would be very different, were artist, poet and magical thinker, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, or E vF. as my protagonist signed her name, to be acknowledged as the originator of the infamous urinal – the readymade sculpture Fountain.
This many-faceted project reveals the fact behind the fiction. The cross-dressing, gender-bending narrative explores how, in the absence of any evidence to contradict the myth, Duchamp, the man who lived down the hall, comes to claim Elsa’s oeuvre as his own.
Why didn’t Elsa claim Fountain as her own? She didn’t have the chance and most likely lost track of it. She didn’t sell her art, and was constantly moving around and frequently in jail.
She was watching him. And he was watching her. Research leads me to believe that so intellectually enamoured with the strangely beguiling Elsa, Duchamp in his propensity for cross-dressing, literally becomes her. Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp’s female alter ego, bears a striking likeness to the Baroness. Some say, Rrose Sélavy is a partial anagram of Sorry Elsa.
Various sources, including the artist Alfred Stieglitz, who photographed the large porcelain urinal on a pedestal on its arrival at the salon, confirm that it was a woman that sent it to the show. Was it Rrose? Or Elsa? It couldn’t have been Duchamp.
Pulling apart the tangle of little white lies, the only piece of evidence that needs considering is Duchamp’s letter to his sister, discovered in 1982, and dated 11th April 1917.
My dear Suzanne – Impossible to write – I heard from Crotti that you were working hard. Tell me what you are making and if it’s not too difficult to send. Perhaps, I could have a show of your work in the month of October or November-next-here. But tell me what you are making – Tell this detail to the family: The Independents have opened here with immense 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. The committee has decided to refuse to show this thing. I have handed in my resignation, and it will be a bit of gossip of some value in New York – I would like to have a special exhibition of the people who were refused at the Independents – but that would be a redundancy! And the urinal would have been lonely- See you soon, Affect. Marcel
A Readymade Photostory, 2021.
Research compiled with images. Riso print on 100% recycled paper, 29.7 x 21 cm. Edition of 400.
This zine follows Fountain from its arrival at The Armoury Show in 1917, Elsa and Duchamp’s brief liaison and lengthy talks into the night, Elsa’s early death in poverty, to surrealist Andre Breton’s erroneous attribution of the lost urinal to Duchamp, who in not denying it, stepped into the shoes of the originator conceptual art.
Inspired by Dr Glyn Thompson’s rigorous search for the truth.