Bard College Berlin News
Modernism, feminism, and artistic communities: Prof. Dr. Laura Scuriatti discusses Mina Loy’s modernist poetics in Paris
Scuriatti says, “This was the largest and most important Loy conference in a long time, closely associated with the important work done by the organizers and curators of the first monographic exhibition of Loy's artworks at Bowdoin College in Maine. The conference and the exhibition, the many new publications on Loy, as well as the rich and informative website Mina Loy - Navigating the Avant-Garde all testify for a growing and thriving community of Loy scholars.” Scuriatti contributed to these scholarly efforts with her 2019 book Mina Loy's Critical Modernism.
Interest in Mina Loy is currently at its apex, not only in the academic world. As Scuriatti explains, “one of Loy's artworks has recently been shown at the 59th Biennale dell'arte in Venice, and her poetry and essays have been translated or retranslated into Italian, Spanish, and French; she is less known in Germany, even though she lived in Berlin for a year in the 1920s, and her name was recently mentioned in the wonderful exhibition Paris Magnétique 1905-1940 at the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin.”
Scuriatti explains that one of the reasons for this renewed interest in Loy is the relevance of some themes in Loy’s works to contemporary concerns. One of these themes, discussed at the recent Paris conference, is the notion of community and networks in poetry and artistic practice. In addition, Loy’s work includes reflections on motherhood and feminism, and attention to poverty in urban environments, which are still poignant to 21st century audiences. Scuriatti says, “Living in poverty herself, Loy created poetry and assemblages made of discarded objects found on the streets of the Bowery in New York, that reflected on the extreme consequences of the Great Depression and the inequality created by the economy of mass production and consumption.” As for Loy’s feminism, Scuriatti participates in a project in the US that will stage some of Loy's feminist plays, which present a “forceful and hilarious satire of Futurism and its patriarchal chauvinism, and unfortunately resonate with some contemporary situations.”
More than just an analysis of one particular artist, Scuriatti sees research on Mina Loy as a relevant tool for studying the complexity of modernism. She notes, “Loy is still considered a rather marginal author, but the more we study her work as a poet, visual artist, and thinker, the better we understand how fundamentally it intersects with and even helps us reconsider the aesthetics of more canonical modernists.”
In Scuriatti’s courses at BCB, students can analyze Loy’s work for themselves. She says that “students are intrigued, surprised, as well as critical when confronted with the complexity and content of Loy’s writing, and this makes for very engaging class discussions.” Scuriatti explains that “Loy seems like our contemporary in that she represents a variety of feminism that continues to challenge and surprise us: her views were radical and controversial to her contemporaries, and to some extent her perspective remains difficult to understand and accept in the 21st century. Loy's positions are at times contradictory, and this forces readers to reject the wish to simplify, prompting us instead to investigate the task of dealing with complexity.”
Scuriatti, who has been at BCB since 2003, notes that teaching students about modernist literature and art has changed over the past 20 years. She says, “Modernism has been receding in time at great speed, and to the current generation of students the label ‘modernism’ may appear confusing, as the focus on the ‘modern’ clearly is bound to a specific notion of this concept, which is only valid to a limited extent today.” BCB has responded to these changes by adopting a more global, inclusive, and contemporary perspective in courses on modernism.
By: Sophia Paudel, Bard College Berlin Communications
Post Date: 09-29-2023