Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood

Hayden, Sarah (2018) Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (Recencies: Research & Recovery in Twentieth-Century American Poetics), Albuquerque. University of New Mexico Press, 360pp.

Abstract

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism exploded the idea of what it meant to be an artist. ‘Degenerate Art’ made artisthood a charged, political identity and prepared the ground for America’s self-ordination as champion of postwar cultural freedom. These reconceptualizations of artistic identity were creatively processed by the cross-media modernist, Mina Loy. Moving between cosmopolitan artscenes, she understood, as operator and surveyor, the mechanics of the transatlantic artworld, and was manifestly fascinated by how these movements constructed themselves as public entities. Her theorization of the artistic avant-garde was arrived at, and delivered, through the practice of a literary avant-gardism pursued across myriad forms. Foregrounding her critical interrogation of Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist and 'Degenerate' artisthood, Curious Disciplines presents Loy for the first time as arch-theorist of avant-garde artist identity and interprets anew the significance—for Loy, for American poetry and for modernist studies—of her coruscating analytical regard.

Using the primary texts produced by those movements themselves—their manifestos, magazines, pamphlets, catalogues and speeches—this book conducts close readings of Loy’s poetry, prose, polemics and unpublished writings to uncover her response, as interlocutor, to how these movements wrote themselves, collectively, into being. Mina Loy’s writing is important not alone to the history of modernism, but to its continuing, ‘unfinishing’ development. After considering Loy's responses to evolution of the modern artworld, this book then turns to examine her own legacies for 21st-century American poetics, through readings of a trio of contemporary poets: Susana Gardner, Judith Goldman and Laura Moriarty. Hayden re-positions Mina Loy’s cross-disciplinary corpus as a body of work that is of value both as an exemplar of the transnational avant-gardism of the last century and as a conscious and critical camera lucida that works through and on those curious disciplines.

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