User:Cypress.soomka/sandbox

The Baroness' elaborate costumes both critiqued and challenged the bourgeoisie notions of feminine beauty and economic worth. She adorned herself with utilitarian objects like spoons, tin cans, and curtain rings, as well as street debris that she came across.

The Baroness' use of her own body as a medium was deliberate, to transform herself into a specific type of spectacle—one that women who complied to the constraints of femininity of the time would be humiliated to embody. By doing so, she controlled and established agency over the visual access to her own nudity, unhinged the presentational expectations of femininity by appearing androgynous, drew upon ideas of women's selfhood and sexual politics, and provided emphasis on her anti-consumerism and anti-aestheticism outlooks. She included her bodily smells, bodily leakages, and perceived imperfections in her body art. The placement of her raw, true personal body/self in a public space by her own means could not be better explained than as Irrational Modernism. The Baroness' body art was not only a sculpture and living collage, but also a form of dadaist performance art and activism.

In a performance of these ideals sometime between 1915-1916, von Freytag-Loringhoven took a gifted newspaper clipping of Marcel duChamp's Nude Descending a Staircase to rub over her own nude body while reciting a love poem as an ode to the artist of the original painting. This performance was not only a public proclamation of her romantic feelings for duChamp, but transformative due to this act turning the working artist-model into an artist in her own right.