The Brooklyn Rail

The New York branch of Luxembourg + Co. is presenting an idiosyncratic, but most provocative, selection of Man Ray’s so-called “Objects.” The exhibition has been organized to explore and hopefully to justify his approved proliferation of his unprecedented plastic Dada poems (none surviving in its original version) as replicas and multiples. Do these later versions provide commentaries on the lost originals? Or did the artist intend them to express his disregard of any chronological priority or rarity as insignificant, and for art to be enjoyed as widely as possible? With multiple brief expert texts, the exhibition’s catalogue provides fascinating information and insights into Man Ray’s complex practice, so fundamental to the rapid evolution of modern art in the first decades of the twentieth century.

It is difficult to overstate the immediate widespread influence of Man Ray’s experimental photographs (such as those reproduced in the 1922 Champs Délicieux album); or of his films. Such vanguard projects quickly superseded his extraordinary activity as a maker of Dada objects during the previous five or six years, very much in response to Marcel Duchamp, his lifelong friend and colleague. Although closely related to Duchamp’s so-called “readymades,” mostly single objects transposed from pedestrian reality to an art display context (such as his Hat Rack (1916/1964), portrayed in Man Ray’s painting, The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows (1916), Man Ray’s objects are nonsensical combinations of objects, for example, tacks glued to the pressing surface of an iron, useless in any practical way as a result of the merge. Anticipating the philosophically mismatched items in the art of René Magritte, Man Ray’s odd combinations took inspiration from the acclaimed reference to a chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table in Les Chants de Maldoror by the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont, the dark 1869 text so venerated among post–World War I writers and artists in Paris. Indeed the Luxembourg exhibition includes an artist-authorized replica of Man Ray’s 1920 object purporting to realize and comment on that specific literary source.

Each of the objects in this exhibition documents a work with considerable significance for the history of modern sculpture and/or the pre-history of surrealism (as do many other Man Ray objects with equivalent appeal and historic significance that are not included). After seeing the show I was most keenly interested in the latter of two objects entitled New York (1920/1973), where they were made before he relocated to Paris late the following year. Commenting on this work in his 1963 memoir, Man Ray compared the tall glass jar filled with small steel balls to a jar of olive lookalikes. When I discussed the work with my friend Mary Ann Caws, she immediately pointed out how it was somehow Man Ray’s response to Wallace Stevens’s wonderful poem, “Anecdote of the Jar,” first published in Poetry magazine in October 1919. (No doubt about it! Both men had submitted poems to Others: An Anthology of New Verse, published in 1916.) Myself, I wondered whether the reflective surfaces of the steel balls might be a response to the revolutionary highly polished bronze surfaces integral to so many of Brâncuși’s sculptures designed as early as 1912 to incorporate the image of surrounding space into the experience of these works. If so, with New York Man Ray proposed something like a sculpture with the space outside itself inside itself, fulfilling, even expanding, the jar’s raison d’être as a container.

But most of all, along with another exhibition highlight, replicas of Man Ray’s Obstruction (1920/1961) consisting of sixty-three clothes hangers hanging from one another and so foreshadowing Calder’s famous mobiles in the history of sculpture, New York anticipates one of the most widespread forms of “sculpture” since 1959, when artists began to make so-called accumulations—works of art consisting of piles of anything from tires to wrapped candies. Surely in the 1960s when Man Ray authorized editions of his lost early masterpieces of plastic poetry, he reminded younger artists just how far ahead of his time he was.

1. Now available on Youtube, the adult education class I presented in 2018 at the Santa Barbara Museum “Art Matters” series entitled “Piling On” was an attempt to measure the scope of such accumulation art by so many contemporary artists who, knowingly or not, are standing on Man Ray’s shoulders.