I invited the artist Meg Mosley, with whom I had collaborated on several projects, to make a femmage with me to the extraordinary artist Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven on the anniversary of her birth, 12th July.

Elsa was a provocative and enthralling visual artist and poet who terrorised the streets of New York with her confrontational costumes and performances, living on a heightened edge, admired by many. She was described as a ‘terrifying midtown Medusa, parading through the streets with a pack of half-starved dogs on gilded harness, head shaved and shellacked in high vermillion, her body rattling with an assortment of tin cans, toy soldiers, and teaspoon… sometimes wrapped only in a Mexican blanket or brandishing a plaster cast penis’

I had been struck by the fact that the only way people had heard of Elsa was by claims that she had created Duchamp’s Fountain(1917), a urinal signed “R. Mutt” that was first exhibited at the 1917 Society of Independent Artists’ Salon in New York. Research makes it unlikely that she did create this work.

I made a badge many years ago, which said ‘yourinal’ making the point that Elsa didn’t need, nor probably desire this Duchamp connection. She was a wild, thoughtful, innovative, inspiring spirit whose work challenged and stimulated many. Her collaborative 1917 sculpture God is a cast iron plumbing trap turned upside down and mounted on a wooden mitre box. Elsa never gave thought to selling her art and lived her entire life in extreme poverty but constantly created unique original work.

I liked the fact that even the photo used in the triptych which is credited, in many diverse sources, as Elsa is unlikely to be her, so Meg and I think of the images as ‘Else a,’ opening it to a more universal femmage as well as a further questioning of ownership.

I wrote onto the triptych of Meg, Elsa and myself, words from Elsa’s poem Perpetuity 1924/25, which begins:

Electric Heart—
Panicky soul
Carrionfeeding spiritcannibal
Gory roisterer

And ends:

To
Act
Perpetual
Why?