Shifting Spotlights

he emphasis that Dr. Irene Gammel places on suggests that you ought to hang off each. Her 2002 biography of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the New York Dada artist whose probable hand in the authorship of Marcel Duchamp’s (1917)—a controversial theory first proposed by Gammel, who is also responsible for publishing von Freytag-Loringhoven’s’s archives. Given that von Freytag-Loringhoven’s art is regularly concerned with sex, trash, fashion and scatology ( being a notable example), and that she is now regarded as a pioneering figure in performance art, I might have expected that her biographer would be similarly zany. When she spoke about von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gammel reminded me of a mystic: given to an air of kooky otherworldliness that historians, who live in the past, and mystics, who live in the future, both possess.