JOANA MASÓ + ÉRIC FASSINThe Body of Elsa von Freytag-Loringoven: A Critique of Duchamp’s Urinal

The German artist and writer Else von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), exiled in the New York avant-garde during the second half of the 1910s, elaborated a conception of art as a form of embodiment. She wrote an autobiography dedicated to her search for orgasm to introduce a collection of her poems, which proved impossible to publish. With her body, sometimes naked, she carried out critical actions in galleries and studios, as well as performances before they became known on the streets of New York. She also reinvented model work as an emancipated artistic practice; at the end of her life, she went so far as to open a school without teachers or students, of which she was the artist-model. Not having signed any object during her lifetime, she produced, above all, art without artwork or author. From her practices, now rediscovered, we can conceive a feminist critique of the male avant-garde that allows us to rethink Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, Fountain, recently attributed by some critics to Else von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Éric Fassin is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Paris 8. He is a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has contributed to several exhibition catalogues (elles@centrepompidou, Chercher le garçon, Rachel Rose, Brognon-Rollin). He has just published, together with Joana Masó, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. La artista que dio cuerpo a la vanguardia and Misère de l'anti-intellectualisme. Du procès en wokisme au chantage à l'antisémitisme.

Joana Masóis professor of French literature at the University of Barcelona and researcher at the UNESCO Chair “Women, Development and Cultures”. She has co-edited in several languages Jacques Derrida’s writings on aesthetics and architecture, and Hélène Cixous’s writings on art. She has also published Tosquelles. Curar las instituciones and, together with Éric Fassin, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. La artista que dio cuerpo a la vanguardia.

Thought-images

Thought-images gives the title to this cycle of conferences opening a space in Sismógrafo’s program to think images and through images. The purpose of these conferences is to unite the discursive and the image, to confront them, to recognize the potential of an image, of a fragment, rescuing vital experiences threatened in an uncertain present. This age, a turbulent and disturbing age, an age of pandemic, ecological, financial, political and social crises, these times of “post-truth” and "alternative facts” are "interesting times", to use the expression popularized by Eric Hobsbawm. Interesting times especially for thinking. Thinking is already contributing to a change. This cycle calls for a cooperation between the expressive strength of art and the precision of philosophy. Without a language that embraces images, images can blind us or say nothing. With these conferences, Sismógrafo seeks to take care of what Alexander Kluge calls a “garden of cooperation”, a place that preserves the moments when word and image converge in order to produce something new, a space for discrepancy and cooperation in the face of cacophonies of information, in the face of industrial manipulation and enslavement of feelings. In difficult times, times of divisions and segregations, cooperation presents itself as an antidote to tribalism (Richard Sennett). To open this garden, this space for debate and polyphony in the city, Sismógrafo has invited speakers linked to philosophy, aesthetics, art criticism, fine arts and cinema who, at different times and from different perspectives, will try to present a diagnosis of the present.