The Baroness would, for example, fashion found objects into art, as in her piece Enduring Ornament (1913), a rusted industrial metal ring that she found on the street on her way to her wedding with the Baron (hence its optimistic title; ?g
The notion of mining industrial or everyday culture for material is also central to the Baroness’s practice, but the case of the Baroness-because of her capacity (and seemingly even desire) to lose control-makes an interesting contrast to that of Duchamp. 3.8). In strong distinction to Duchamp, who elaborately choreographed future appearances of his readymades and other works in art museums (and thus, resolutely, contextualized them as “art”), the Baroness’s readymade and assembled objects either selfdestructed or very slowly percolated out into the world (in the case of Enduring Ornament, in an eight-decade-long journey before their rediscovery by an art institution). 1918–1920, known only through its reproduction in Arturo Schwarz’s Almanacco Dada-have been destroyed or lost.59 Enduring Ornament was one of four objects that the Baroness gave to her friends Pavel Tchelitchew and Allen Tanner while they were living in Berlin in the 1920s. Almost lost forever to art history (they only recently resurfaced in a New York collection),60 these objects hardly served to con?rm the Baroness’s artistic authority (as Duchamp’s readymades did for him) nor to position her within canonical narratives of historical avant-gardism. The Baroness’s Enduring Ornament functioned less as a commentary on the circuits of exchange within the art world, then, than as part of the continuum of ephemeral, performative urban engagements and textual interventions that constituted her lived Dadaism (a “lived” Dadaism that thus, like all living things, contained within itself a built-in threat of mortality). Continue reading “Many of her legendary objects and works-such as the fabulous hanging object covered with buttons and urban detritus from c”