Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (née Else Hildegard Plötz; 12 July 1874 – 14 December 1927) was a German avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada.

[3] In her art, she related the ways that political structures promote masculine authority in family settings, maintaining the state's patriarchal societal order.

They had an "open relationship", and in 1902 she became romantically involved with a friend of Endell, the minor poet and translator Felix Paul Greve (who later went by the name Frederick Philip Grove).

In New York City, Freytag-Loringhoven supported herself by working in a cigarette factory and by posing as a model for artists such as Louis Bouché, George Biddle, and Theresa Bernstein.

She was an early female pioneer of sound poetry,[13] but also made creative use of the dash,[14] while many of her portmanteau compositions, such as "Kissambushed" and "Phalluspistol,"[15] present miniature poems.

The Baroness was known to construct elaborate costumes from found objects, creating a "kind of living collage" that erased the boundaries between life and art.

[18][19] Scholar Eliza Jane Reilly argues that the Baroness's elaborate costumes both critiqued and challenged the bourgeoisie notions of feminine beauty and economic worth.

[3] The Baroness's 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.

[3] 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.

This performance was not only a public proclamation of her romantic feelings for duChamp at that time, but transformative due to this act turning the working artist-model into an artist in her own right.

[20] This sculpture, God, involved a cast iron plumbing trap and a wooden mitre box, assembled in a phallic-like manner.

[22] Her concept behind the shape and choice of materials is indicative of her commentary on the worship and love that Americans have for plumbing that trumps all else; additionally, it is revealing of the Baroness's rejection of technology.

"[25] The speculation is largely based on a letter written by Marcel Duchamp to his sister Suzanne (dated April 11, 1917) where he refers to the famous ready-made: "One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.

In 1923, Freytag-Loringhoven went back to Berlin, expecting better opportunities to make money, but instead found an economically devastated post-World War I Germany.

[citation needed] Several friends in the expatriate community, in particular Bryher, Djuna Barnes, Berenice Abbott, and Peggy Guggenheim, provided emotional and financial support.

It shows the Baroness breaking every erotic boundary, reveling in anarchic performance, but the biography also presents her as Elsa's friend Emily Coleman saw her, "not as a saint or a madwoman, but as a woman of genius, alone in the world, frantic.

The film premiered at Copenhagen International Documentary Festival[41] and was described as a, "playful and chaotic experiment that posits a return to a grand collective narrative via the postqueer populism of YouTube and crowdsourcing,"[42] by Art Forum.