In her famed 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges,” science historian and feminist theorist Donna Haraway challenges the concept of objective universal knowledge and traditional approaches to science that claim a “god’s eye” lens of omniscience. Instead, she contends, all knowledge is constitutionally partial, subjective and multiple, and that only by piecing together such partial knowledges into “webs of connections” can true understanding ever be grasped.
Karla Kelsey doesn’t mention Haraway in her experimental book of biographical-poetry Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy, but to my mind, Transcendental Factory’s kaleidoscopic approach to biography feels similar in its conceit, and just as capacious—no life can be known by a single, objective lens; any existence is far too fractious, complex, and multiplicitous to be faithfully rendered in a linear story; moreover, in the case of Loy and most women in the annals of history, what we (think we) know about her has already been largely filtered, manipulated, discarded, and erased.
Instead, what we really need to begin to know the Promethean painter, assemblage-artist, lampshade designer, theorist and writer Mina Loy, and the multitudes she contained, is a web of partial, multiple, and subjective knowledges—unfixed, open-ended, and movable; only then, can we possibly begin to piece together a more authentic sense of her person and art. What’s more, we need a language that’s up to the task, indeterminate enough to allow for multiple voices, uncertainty, and impermanence—poetry, if you will.
Lucky for us, Kelsey has taken up the mantle. Transcendental Factory is a prismatic masterwork of evanescent, shifting lenses, vertiginously rendered in generous prose. Arranged non-chronologically by eleven chapters designated as eleven critical years of Loy’s life, Transcendental Factory is many things at once: a page-turning biography of one of Modernism’s most obscure(d) artists and writers; a meditation on historicity and truth; a feminist critique of the systems that stymied Loy’s (and other women artists’) output both while living and posthumously; a lyrical intervention of so-called objective knowledge; and an apologia for poetry as mode of archival inquiry. Good luck putting it down.
Those who are familiar with Kelsey’s poetry will be happy to know that she brings the same entrancing stretch of language and intellect, along with vivid architectures of image, to bear on her biographical-poetics. In many ways, Transcendental Factory expands on Blood Feather’s work of moving from “the self-as-object to the self-as-process”:
“Recently,” Mina turns to look into the mirror above the mantle, “I see most like a butterfly pinned to augur.”
What do we actually know about Loy? Not much. Take, for example, the image on Transcendental Factory’s cover; Loy you presume? Nope, that’s Evelyn Brent the actress, though the internet may tell you otherwise. It’s a bold move on Kelsey’s part, and draws attention not only to how little the trained “objective” gaze of history has attended to Loy, but also the extent to which that glancing gaze has been restricted to image by way of her relationships with men, as muse (such as in Man Ray and Stephen Haweis’ photographs) or as friend (flanked here or there by Duchamp, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, Brancusi, Tzara, etc.) whose lives are better documented, and whose work and words have been preserved.
Loy spent her life shifting and disintegrating into new patterns of self by way of both her limitless creative output as well as the unrelenting pressures of her existence as a woman in the first half of the twentieth century—war, men, children, poverty—only to be further obscured and abandoned by the lens of history. Kelsey punctuates the book with a lamentable log of erasures and omissions; here are a few:
Loy’s Jemima, thought to be a self-portrait and shown in London at the New English Art Club’s 1910 summer exhibition, will be lost. Also from circa 1910, Ladies at Tea is lost, Ladies Watching a Ballet is lost, Ladies Fishing is lost, Heart Shop is lost, The Little Carnival is lost, Voyageurs is lost. Lost, lost—
Portions of the (Phenomenon in American Art) essay are excerpted in Loy’s 1982 collected, but her larger art-historical argument (on the “sublime” versus “awe”) and social critique remains unpublished.
Studio visits. Gallery openings. Loy scouts, commissions, selects, and contracts work by Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Richard Oelze, Salvador Dalí, and others (in Paris, for her son-in-law Julien Levy in New York…) A November 1946 Harper’s Bazaar article claims, “This Year is the Surrealist’s Year,” interviewing Levy because “nobody in America knows more about surrealism than he does.”
Of course, Loy herself, ever itinerant and protean, did not approach art with much regard to longevity or preservation—her assemblages, or refusées, were literally made of garbage—, nor was she ever in a financial or housing position to store or keep her work long. Refusées, refused, refuged, refugee, Loy moved back and forth between New York, Paris, Florence, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and London, among other cities, in an exhausting hopscotch of compulsory transience.
Kelsey matches Loy’s kaleidoscopic existence (collapsing, rebirthing, expanding, collapsing) with her own abundant and shifting lenses of inquiry. Two of these can be identified by literal names. Throughout the text, when Kelsey writes “Loy,” she is relaying “factual” accounts of Loy’s life, either from the archives or the wider art-historical literature; “Mina” is the Loy that Kelsey imagines, the Loy who fills in the blanks of her life, who remembers, for example, detailed afternoons with Dora Maar or Djuana Barnes, what talk was in the air, how many sugar cubes they liked in their tea. “Mina” is also Kelsey’s nod to the subjectiveness of biography—the socio-historically silenced, feminized, ever-inventive but struggling artist and writer she also sees in herself:
“The scared self—concealed inside the egg,” Isadora (Duncan) says without breaking her pose, “is a soft machine that’s part sea creature, one eye edged with the longest lashes. A single organ, much like a stomach that has turned itself, in turns, inside out and outside in.” She is talking to Mina. She is talking to me.
Are they the same, the self and what is said of the self? The self and alternate planes of the self? The self after the dissolution of “I” and “my” and “me”?
But even when Kelsey peers through historical lenses of so-called facticity, she does so through an ever shifting cast of observers. We hear William Carlos Williams describe Loy as “Pregnant on the shore, (as she) watched the small ship move steadily away into the distance,” after her second husband Arthur Cravan disappears off the coast of Mexico, though in truth she had already boarded a hospital ship bound for Valparaíso. We hear her first husband Stephen Haweis suggest to a friend that Loy had left her son’s letters unanswered, “If you see Mina, tell her he lived finely and died bravely”—true or the slanderous fruits of resentment? Kelsey leaves it open. Moreover, all italicized language in the book is Loy’s own; stitched seamlessly in with Kelsey’s, along with quotes by scholars, friends, and observers. The subjective lens is partial, but also necessarily multiple to piece together what may or may not be about a life.
Another critical lens in Transcendental Factory, what you might call the wider lens, involves a litany of historical facts that punctuate each chapter and pertain to the year in question. In a kind of inverse biographizing, these inundations of “knowns” serve not only to remind us of how little we actually know about Loy, but to steep us in the same forces of time and place that shaped her. The effect is an oblique sketching of everything else around Loy, like one of those drawings that never draws the shape itself but simply shades in everything else around it:
In 1905 Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle began serialization in the American socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, and in London Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, banned in 1892, has its first UK staging for a private audience at the Bijou Theater. “When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky,” says Matisse, painting at the border between illusion and pure materiality, and is dubbed a “Fauve,” wild beast, along with the other artists exhibiting in Room 7 at the 1905 Salon d’Automne. Picasso ends his Blue Period and begins his Rose Period, and Albert Einstein publishes a paper that explains the photoelectric effect and describes light as quanta, discrete packets of energy.
And yet Transcendental Factory is not organized chronologically. In the same way that a field of facts shades in the forces and realities working on and around Loy’s life, a field of time does the same. Kelsey stitches the years together not by chronology but by experiences, relationships and people. For example, an anecdote about one of Loy’s daughters as a young child will slide into that same child as an adult and then turn to something else altogether by way of an old photograph, and so forth and so on. In other words, the architecture of the book is one of poetry, and its chronology, palimpsestic, as indeed space-time is.
Whether or not Loy was thinking about concepts of impermanence or non-linearity when she devised her section marker —o—O—o— is anyone’s guess, although it certainly seems possible if The Last Lunar Baedeker is any indication; either way, I think we can safely assume that Kelsey is, having usurped the symbol to divide her own sections of Transcendental Factory. In Transcendental Factory, Kelsey pieces together partial, fractious and incomplete lenses that taken together still shape a very empty center—the porous, uncertain and impermanent existence of a woman polymath born under the relentless forces of her time and place:
The self is a decomposition of the whole—the whole—the composite origin of our experience, Loy scrawls on a scrap of paper. Let us meditate on the nature of our experience.
Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy, by Karla Kelsey. Brooklyn, New York: Winter Editions, November 2024. 144 pages. $20.00, paper.
Elizabeth Zuba is an art writer, poet, and translator. You can find books by or translated by her at Conduit Books, Granary Books, Printed Matter, Siglio Press, Splitlevel Texts, The Song Cave, and Ugly Duckling Presse.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 