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rel: Arthur Cravan - The Disappearing Dadaist
Why I’m reading
I read this last year but came upon an article after reading through Dada & Surrealist Art by William S. Rubin which outlined Mina in more detail.
I’m combining the two, and leafing through this volume again.
Widespread rumors claimed the person in question was not a woman but an illusion, a surrealist invention, a hoax concocted by the critics. Then, one night, a lithe, elegantly dressed stranger with striking patrician features and an inexplicable look in her eyes appeared as if from nowhere; the room went silent as she opened her mouth and said: “I assure you I am indeed a live being.”
Loy was born in 1882 in a suburb of London but spend her life in Paris, Florence, New York and Mexico City.
The effervescent web of Loy’s expression hung on what many identified as her “cerebral” nature.
Samuel French Morse: “The originality of Mina Loy is not merely a matter of typography or syn- tactical eccentricity; it seems to derive from a peculiar combination of fantasy and savagery … a relentless attack on the ready-made explanations of human wastefulness.”
This scene is artistically noteworthy for Loy’s innovative introduction of time into the composition depicting the central character as a woman at various stages of womanhood; an adult in the changing tent, a girl coming of age, add a teenager.
Auto-Facial-Construction
Loy’s invention, a proposal for self-induced physiognomic reconstruction.
Years of specialized interest in physiognomy as an artist have brought me an understanding of the human face, which has made it possible for me to find the basic principal of facial integrity, its conservation, and when necessary, reconstruction.
She believed the face communicates true personality to others and it must be wielded with consideration.
She was a Christian Scientist and numerologist. In her poems she sometimes identified herself as Imna Oly, Nima lyo, Anim Yol and Mi and Lo, Ova and Gina.
It must have further deepened Mina Loy’s belief in the mysterious and predictive power of names when she discovered that the “real” name of the man she knew as Arthur Cravan who would become her next husband (and love of her life) was Fabian Lloyd. Long before they even knew of one another’s existence, the three spare letters of the sur- name she invented glistened like a jewel between the extreme consonants of the surname he abandoned: L LOY D.
Mina Loy would sometimes predate her paintings, postdate her writings, and play with her signature.
Cravan
In Cravan Loy found an intellectual and spiritual connection she had never felt with any other human being.
Lamps
- Lily Lamp
- Tulip Lamp
- Floral Shade
Futurists
Exposure to Futurist ideas galvanized her thinking about politics, the position of women, and the expression of modernity. But it was in words that her response to Futurism flourished. Apart from the unpublished “Feminist Manifesto,” in January 1914 Alfred Stieglitz published her “Aphorisms on Futurism” in Camera Work
Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Futurism,
