Mina Loy’s ‘Collage Strategies’

Yasna Bozhkova’s In Between Worlds: Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries deploys a multifaceted array of references to read Loy’s work as a type of artistic, intellectual, and geographic collage. Loy’s ‘collage strategies’ (8) open up complex webs of association in her poetry and visual art, where no one meaning can be read but multiple possibilities exist. Approaching Loy’s work as ever-shifting, epigrammatic and elusive source material could run the risk of overwhelming. It is a relief, then, that the book takes a chronological approach to Loy’s multifaceted artistic and intellectual career, with each chapter organized around different periods, movements and geographic locations. Nodding to the book’s structure does little justice to the breadth that Bozhkova covers within each section, for a central premise of the book is to show how Loy’s ‘hybrid imagery constantly positions itself between disparate aesthetics’ (8). Loy, Bozhkova argues, had a singular ability to move ‘between worlds’ of different twentieth-century art movements, demonstrating a refusal to align with any one particular manifesto. Although the book trains its focus on Loy, what results is a richly hewn collage of Bozhkova’s own, with an astonishing number of references, practitioners, literature, and artworks all glued together with detailed close analysis of each source. Bozhkova remains alert to the ways that an artistic ‘ism’ might run the risk of becoming dogmatic. The book uses Loy’s ironic, playful, and destabilizing presence in Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism to dismantle each as a monolithic movement. In the opening chapters, Bozhkova positions Loy’s poetic sequence ‘Song to Joannes’ (1916–1917), published in Others, as a ‘collision between futurism and the fin de siècle’ (12). In Loy’s work, decadent influence becomes a radical stance that challenges Futurist rhetoric. Loy’s sequence has long been read as a record of her relationship with the two Futurist leaders—F. T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini. Although Loy references the ‘little rosy / Tongue of Dawn’ ‘licking the Yasna Bozhkova, In Between Worlds: Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries, Clemson University Press, 2022, 320 pp., £83.60 Hardback, 978-1949979-64-0