In exploring the embodied performances of ?gures such as the Baroness and Cravan, we will, I suggest, not only come to a new understanding of New York Dada but develop a new view of the city and its avant-gardes
movement, or the cultural meanings of a particular time in a city’s history is by tracing the trajectory of artists’ bodies through urban space. Extending my interest in the irrational counterexpressions to the rationalizations of modernity and modernism explored in the ?rst three chapters of this book, here I focus almost exclusively on the Baroness and other creative ?gures who paralleled her mode of peripatetic self-performance, tracing new routes in the material and psychic spaces of World War I-era New York. There are many New Yorks, but it is a rare study that allows the irrational, confusing, transgressive aspects of the city to emerge; that encourages thinking not only about the gridded streets and skyscrapers, city leadership and celebrity luminaries, and the ins and outs of urban planning, but also about the ?gures who lurked at the margins of these rationalized material and conceptual spaces. There are few cultural histories of the city that highlight not the rational New York (the New York that, in Le Corbusier’s words, “lives by its clear checkerboard [such that] millions of beings act simply and easily within it . . . , oriented and [made] sure of [their] . . . course”) but the irrational one (identi?ed succinctly by Thomas Jefferson early on in its history through his description of the city as a “cloacina of all the depravities of human nature”).5 By focusing on those ?gures at its margins (on the irrational, excremental extrusions that muddied the rationalism of the grid), I hope to open the door to a new picture of the city and its avant-gardes from this period.