Reclaiming and reframing a trailblazing early 20th century female artist who has been largely forgotten by the history books, Dutch director Barbara Visser’s lightly experimental documentary Alreadymade examines the contested legacy of pioneering German-born Surrealist, poet and sculptor Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The topic may sound esoteric but Visser, a visual artist herself, makes it engagingly contemporary using a cutting-edge collage of digitally generated imagery, repurposed archive footage, playful speculation and journalistic investigation. Even if the style-hopping, post-modern mannerisms sometimes feel a little overloaded, the underlying story remains compelling.
It helps enormously that Baroness Elsa was such a gloriously flamboyant, irreverent, bohemian character. A globe-trotting proto-feminist and born rebel, she wore outlandish outfits and notched up many lovers, male and female. She was once arrested for wearing trousers and smoking in public. “She is not a futurist,” artist Marcel Duchamp once declared, “she is the future.” Duchamp’s creative relationship with Elsa shapes the main narrative mystery behind Alreadymade. But this is no ordinary fact-driven bio-documentary, more like a formally adventurous artwork in its own right.
Alreadymade world premieres this week at IDFA in Amsterdam, where Visser previously served as interim artistic director. A domestic release on both big and small screens is already scheduled. Further festivals will likely also see the appeal of mixing Duchamp, feminist themes and strikingly inventive visuals. It makes perfect sense that Visser is also creating an installation version to be shown in art galleries.
Duchamp’s infamous “readymade” sculpture Fountain, a urinal signed with the crytic alias R. Mutt, is the other main protagonist of Alreadymade. Now widely regarded as a landmark foundation stone of conceptual art, this prankish Dadaist statement was initially rejected from a New York exhibition in 1917. The original was apparently thrown away and lost, but Duchamp later cemented his reputation with a limited run of reproductions in 1964. As Visser shows, Fountain has since become a seminal pop culture icon, inspiring endless copycat tributes, parodies, online memes and even cheeky urination attacks by other artists, including Brian Eno. In 1999, one of the later copies sold for $1.7 million at Sotheby’s in New York. In 2004, the scupture was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 British experts. Without Duchamp, there would arguably be no Andy Warhol, no Jeff Koons, no Damien Hirst.
In Alreadymade, Visser digs deep into the controversial theory that the sculpture’s true uncredited creator was Baroness Elsa, who was living in Greenwich Village at the time it first surfaced. The Baroness certainly moved in the same circles as Duchamp, collaborating with him and Man Ray on an experimental film. Some say they were lovers. But her career took a very different path, and she ended her days in Paris, impoverished and obscure, dying in 1927 from a gas suffocation that may have been suicide. Very little of her artwork survives today.
Art-world rumours that Baroness Elsa was the true creator of Fountain has been circulating for years, inevitably proving contentious. The key piece of evidence is a vaguely worded letter from Duchamp to his sister in which he claims an unnamed female friend delivered the original urinal piece to the exhibition “under a masculine pseudonym”. This is backed up by vague stylistic similarities to some of Elsa’s other found-object sculptural collaborations around the same time. In fairness to Visser, she does include dissenting voices in Alreadymade who refute speculation that Elsa was the unsung creator behind history’s most famous toilet. But the director also builds an eccentric, wide-ranging case for the defence, including clips of speech analysts pointing out telltale signs of lying in interview footage of Duchamp discussing the origins of Fountain.
Among this dense, colourful, fast-moving collages of recycled archive material, Visser adds some cheeky fabrications and readymades of her own. Scratchy video and audio footage purports to be taken from an unfinished German TV drama about Baroness Elsa, which unravels into a bitter argument between female star and male director. Like much of Alreadymade, these flashback clips feel like artfully staged fakes, adding another post-modern layer to the film’s meta dissection of art-world gender politics. Visser also hosts a surreal online debate inside a virtual Starbucks, the guests all represented by digital avatars. Among them is author Siri Hustvedt, who put Elsa into her 2019 novel Memories of the Future. One participant calls Fountain “the world’s first great feminist anti-war work of art.” Another protests that Elsa “wasn’t written out out history, she was never written in it.”
While Alreadymade does not make a definitive case for Elsa being the secret mastermind behind Fountain, it does paint a rich and imaginative portrait of a groundbreaking female Dadaist and unfairly overlooked figure in the male-centric pantheon of 20th century art history. More than anything, this film underlines that the Baroness was a living artwork herself. Indeed, in her closing section, Visser recruits dancer-actress Rex Ellis to embody Elsa in motion-capture digital avatar form, picking her from a section of audition tapes, which she melds and intercuts here in a jump-cut montage. Boxy and clunky, these CGI dance sequences tell us little about the real Elsa, but they arguably pay symbolic homage to her free-spirited nature and vanishing artistic legacy. A lavish soundtrack features Ligeti, Bartok, Sibelius and others alongside more contemporary pieces, with recurring bursts of spiky jazz piano maintaining a background buzz of 20th century modernist energy.
Director: Barbara Visser
Cinematography: Gregor Meerman, Joost van Herwijnen
Editing: Tim Roza
Sound: Siebren Hodes
Producer: Monique Busman
Production company: Tomtit Film
World sales: CAT&Docs
Venue: IDFA (Signed)
In English, French, Dutch, German
87 minutes
