MAN RAY: THE HOMONYMIC PUN AND AMERICAN VERNACULAR
BEFORE A CRITIQUE OF THIS first (and tardy) Man Ray retrospective in New York it is useful to propose an abbreviated chronological scheme. Roughly speaking, Man Ray’s career may be broken into three main phases. The first runs to about 1915 when Man Ray establishes his lifelong friendship with Marcel Duchamp. The painting of this early phase is marked by the then-fashionable modernist options, Expressionism and Cubism, with generally unimpressive results. In the directness of his stylistic adaptations, however, these paintings reveal the bedrock attitude upon which Man Ray will subsequently build a career. In 1913, he and his first wife Adon Lacroix, joined by the poet Alfred Kreymborg, were living simply in a kind of artists’ commune in Ridgefield, New Jersey. An odd bibliographic souvenir of these early happy days are the issues of The Ridgefield Gazook of 1915, punning anarchic reviews which portend the scarcely transient New York Dada broadsides, The Blindman and Rongwrong of 1917. These magazines are marked far more by Duchamp’s tentative adoption of American ways than by Man Ray’s rawer ebullience. While a knowledge of Man Ray’s work only partially assists our understanding of Duchamp’s art, the contrast between the two is essential to a grasp of Man Ray’s work. Duchamp’s mind was both aristocratic and encyclopedic; Man Ray’s art derives from vernacular culture and a concomitant journeyman outlook.
Man Ray’s friendship with Duchamp ushers in the long second phase of his career which extends from the period of America’s still neutral role in the First World War to the moments prior to the occupation of Paris by the Nazis in 1940. Despite the transatlantic and international character of Dadaism after the First World War, it is in the period 1915–17 that New York Dadaism, as distinct from European manifestations of the style, is formed with a character that each of its particular contributors—notably Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia—will differently inflect. Despite peculiar emphases, their signal collective achievement will be the legitimization of the Mechanomorph—the machine as a human being—as a profound and complex element of modernist iconography.
Man Ray’s last phase is marked by his return to the United States, to Hollywood, where he remains for the duration of the war, and again his return to Paris in 1951, where he has lived ever since. This still-continuing period coincides with the recent recognition of the importance of New York Dadaism and, as a function of this awareness, the prestige accruing to Man Ray’s work, corroborated by the reissue in editions—as were several of Duchamp’s early works—of many of the objects and photographs of his second phase.
New York Dada counted among its own only a few artists, those already mentioned, and in varying degrees of allegiance, some members of the Stieglitz and Arensberg circles such as Marius De Zayas, Paul Haviland, Arthur Dove, John Covert and Morton Schamberg. By contrast, European Dada encompassed a broader range of painters and poets, most of whom were later absorbed into the Surrealist movement. Ernst and Arp are prime examples of this smooth transition, as opposed to Schwitters or Tzara who never really joined the Surrealists. Man Ray and Kurt Schwitters appear similar in their attitudes toward the vitality of brute matter, their rejection of a hierarchic attitude toward materials, and in their direct, simple methodologies. Man Ray was stauncher in these attitudes than the Hanoverian. After all, Schwitters’s greatest work, the now-destroyed first Merzbau of 1924–37, was titled the Kathedral of Erotic Misery. Man Ray’s use of materials precludes even the vestigial talismanic undertone still evoked by certain organic substances in Schwitters’s range of material which included, among other elements, a stuffed guinea pig and human urine.
The attitudes of the New York Dada group, .many here in exile during the First World War, stem largely from Symbolism, from the self-referential and conscious elitism of Mallarmé and Raymond Roussel. European Dada, emerging in Zurich in 1916, some three years later than the American manifestations, is socially oriented, and ultimately derives from Marx and French utopian political theorists as well as Italian Futurist activism. It confounds, as does so much of the history of modern art, modernist expressionism with social change. The New York Dadaists cared far less about society in general, and made “inside art” that appealed rather to members of their own set. Of the big three of New York Dada, only Man Ray was native born (in Philadelphia in 1890). Duchamp came from the provincial French intellectual bourgeoisie, though finally he became a naturalized American; Picabia was also an international figure—French bred, of wealthy Cuban origin.
Until recently Man Ray has tended to run third in this hierarchy. New critical interests, particularly in film and photography—that is, in nonmanual esthetic techniques—while not dislodging Duchamp from his preeminence, have forced a situation wherein Man Ray now rivals if not supplants Picabia as the second figure of New York Dada. Certainly Man Ray’s work is a far more unified achievement than is Picabia’s, whose expressionist, automatist and quasi-representational last phase—perhaps most everything after 1926—is of doubtful interest.
But to say that Man Ray’s work is a unified achievement is to recognize that it assumes an essentially disjunctive production. His work has unity because all of it is consciously disunified. This passage from Self Portrait (1963), Man Ray’s autobiography, illustrates what I mean:
. . . I wasn’t as interested in painting itself as in the development of ideas, and had resorted to the graphic arts as the most direct presentation of them; each new approach demanded its particular technique which had to be invented on the spot. Whatever the variations and contradictions, one or rather two motives directed my efforts: the pursuit of liberty, and the pursuit of pleasure. I was terribly afraid of being recognized by a fixed style to which I would be obliged to adhere. Painting would become a bore. Wasn’t it sufficient that I signed my name to all my works, as had so many other painters who had also varied their styles through the years?
At first Man Ray wanted to be a painter, and throughout his autobiography, despite occasional pro forma disclaimers, he promotes the notion of the primacy of painting in his career. He is mistaken in this equivocation because to be a painter in the sense that the word is commonly used is to be fundamentally committed to the notion of a continual and consistent evolution of the manual act of painting. In this sense a painter may get better. It is clear from examining this broad survey that includes some 68 oil paintings from all periods that Man Ray’s painting, which he intermittently deserted and resumed, never can be said to improve, and much of it as “painting” is downright poor.
Like Duchamp and Picabia, Man Ray’s early painting synthesizes a range of Cubist, Futurist, Impressionist and Expressionist options. Painting as an activity engaging brush, paint, principles of illusionism, manual dexterity, and style is perhaps at last competently realized in Man Ray’s two 1940 portraits of the Marquis de Sade. Even here the diffidence of touch suggests an awkward imitation of the more successful stony illusionism of Magritte while reviving motifs from Giorgio de Chirico’s 1910–20 paintings. In fact, de Chirico lurks behind much of Man Ray’s painting, most obviously in the oppressive series of Shakespearian Equations (1948), abstract portraits of geometrical and algebraic formulas. Apart from Man Ray’s obvious debt to de Chirico (they are as awkwardly painted versions of de Chirico as those de Chirico himself was—and is—painting in the manner of his early work), there is in these later paintings, perhaps, a certain awareness of the mathematically linked sculpture of Cabo and Pevsner from the late ’30s on.
Another illusionistic painting, A l’heure de l’observatoire — les amoureux of 1932–34, with its celebrated image of the lips of Lee Miller, later Lady Penrose (early seen as Fate in Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet), levitated over the horizon of the landscape, still looks like an awkwardly executed Magritte. Man Ray’s most successful painting as “painting” is of course The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself With Her Shadows (1916). Apart from its near one-to-one relationship to Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), Man Ray succeeds here because there is no illusionism to conquer. The Rope Dancer interlocks flat templatelike shapes—the Shadows—similar to garment cutters’ patterns. These shapes parallel the sociological referents of Duchamp’s Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries (1914) which became in turn the Nine Malic Molds (1914–15). Such patternlike shapes may also be more inherently natural to the American vernacular tradition from which I believe Man Ray derives.
If I have an unenthusiastic view of Man Ray as a painter, at least in conventional terms, then why am I interested in his work? Unexpectedly, Man Ray’s work is a function of American folk art—I mean his work connects up to the pragmatic here-and-now eccentricity of tinkering, carpentry, and the independent journeyman. As an illusionistic painter Man Ray is at best an aspiring naïf. Since his painting cannot “improve” beyond a certain point, what remains as interesting in his work is his self-reliant openness to media other than paint which allow him instantaneous but nonmanual results, for example the sheerly happy Rayographs, the air-brush silhouettes, and the capricious spontaneity of many of the objects, Man Ray’s term for what Duchamp called Readymades.
In a sense the objects defer to Duchamp, but at times they have an abrupt immediacy that is unthinkable in the latter. Just as Man Ray’s hand cannot be said to have developed beyond a certain point, so too does his gift for the pun—the central organizing principle of Duchamp’s art—aim for a Certain middle level, not bad, not good, not outrageous or dull, just there. You can look at a career in painting and in some sense measure the idea of manual evolution; but it is hard to look at a career and say that the punning has evolved. It’s not part of our normal experience to regard art in terms of its linguistic correlations, and even less to draw a critical evaluation from the formal and linguistic overlap. That, however, is what I’m trying to do.
Let’s take Man Ray’s famous blue bread, the Pain Peint of 1960. In French, the word for bread, pain, and for painted, peint, sound alike so that illogically one is making an odd brief sound that duplicates itself, a sound that could mean “bread bread” or “painted painted.” Logically, the homonyms mean “painted bread,” that is a loaf of French bread painted blue. In itself a loaf of French bread, a baguette, painted blue may be strange, but its relationship to homonymic punning makes it that much more arresting. It may be that Man Ray’s sensitivity to the sameness of sounds in Pain Peint was clued by the common French usage train-train, our “humdrum,” the daily routine events of life. The referents of Pain Peint to Christ are underscored by substance and color—bread as the transubstantive body of Christ, blue the color of heaven. Originally women masquerading as nuns on roller skates purveyed the blue breads. Man Ray’s point (as in so many of Bunuel’s films) is comedically anticlerical rather than pious or religious. We have Dali’s breads for that. (Pain Peint may also relate to Gino Severini’s famous lost Futurist canvas The “Pan Pan” at the Monico [1911], a title which is not pronounced quite the same as Pain Peint, but which is not that dissimilar either; Futurism is a central source of Dadaism.)
Man Ray’s punning, incidentally, demands no more than high school French. It is direct and unsubtle, the joshing of a person who speaks a second language nicely. The situation is reversed in Duchamp’s case. His elaborate punning is that of an arch intellectual supremely at ease in the written and auditory elements of a mother tongue. His English efforts are modest indeed.
Following Duchamp’s lead, Man Ray exploited his own name as a source for art in Main Ray (1935).1 In this object, an articulated mannikin hand holds a ball. Man Ray’s first name corresponds to the French word for hand (main). The ray in the title is ambiguous unless the pun is incomplete. The object might more properly be titled Main Rayé, “striped” or “grooved hand,” insofar as the grooves in the articulated hand suggest, as it were, stripes.
Another object of 1956/71 is titled the Ballet Français, which means “French ballet,” but which sounds like it means “French broom” (balai français). Like Pain Peint, what’s interesting is not the object itself, a mounted and painted bronze broom, but the linguistic correlatives which connect the notion of sweeping gestures with a choreographic idea, and conversely deflate balletic pretensions into something homely. Much of the meaning of the works, then, lies not in the objects themselves but in the overlay between language and object that they embody.
Still, as language-object puns, Man Ray’s later works are tepid or thin compared to his high punning of the1920s when his connections to Duchamp were strongest. A major work from this period is the 1924 photograph of Kiki of Montparnasse (a celebrated model and friend of artists), called Violon d’Ingres. In this photograph, Kiki is seen from the rear, and the scroll-shaped apertures of a violin are marked across her back. Violon d’Ingres in French literally means “Ingres’s violin.” Idiomatically it means a hobby (a “dada” or “hobby horse” if you like), so committed was the 19th-century painter to playing the violin. Kiki’s headdress refers back to the turbaned odalisques of Ingres’s paintings—and, seen from the rear as she is, The Valpinçon Bather of 1808 is almost specifically alluded to. In Man Ray’s photograph these levels of information absorb one another and are capped by the similarity of shape between the curvature of a female back and the scalloped shape of a violin. (Violon d’Ingres, with its minimal indication of the cleft of the buttocks, seems to have been the model for Man Ray’s more abstract and Weston-like photograph of 1930, the erotic La Prière. The kneeling figure in this photograph may refer to the praying communicant idea subsumed in Duchamp’s late etching of The Bride Stripped Bare.) The odalisque, the harem inmate passively attending the attentions of her master, further enriches the erotic level of Violon d’Ingres. Man Ray has literally transformed her into the “sounding box” of that fascination—a notion reasonably linked to the American slang term for vagina, a “box.” She was both instrument and object of sexual attraction. Surely this last link is not foreign to Man Ray’s love of women as erotic icons, a sexism guilelessly disclosed throughout the autobiography.
This discussion is not intended to promote the doctrinaire position that there is a fixed content to Man Ray’s objects—that to explicate their linguistic and formal interchanges somehow explains their ability to capture our interest. These are separate questions. With the tightly clamped stack of metal called New York 17 (1917–66), for example, one is at best dealing with a set of loose conundrums; the disparity, for instance, between an organic clue (a wood clamp) and an inert one (the citified, Art Deco layers of metal which infer the gleaming stylishness of later Constructivism). The object also puns with a novelistic cliché, that is, “a city in the clutches of . . . .” Because of the multivalency of clues in Man Ray’s objects, one cannot claim that their fascination lies exclusively in language/ form overlaps. We return to the old riddle. Is there an intrinsic formal value to these objects (in fact to any object) which is tangible and invisible but impervious to exegesis, or are these objects interesting because they function in larger iconographic or esthetic systems? I suspect the latter, but am forced to let the riddle hang in abeyance. In fact the problem is so deep-rooted in criticism as to be almost an academic question.
Man Ray’s photographs are more like his objects in that they display a directness that gives them a presence lacking in his paintings. This is because he didn’t have to paint them. The brush is an infelicitous tool for Man Ray. He is more at ease with the implements of shop and darkroom, with pottering around. The French would say he was un bricoleur; we, a jack-of-all-trades. Man Ray’s eminence as a 20th-century photographer is linked to the fact that for him portrait photography is an instantaneous and mechanical act rather than a manual task. Apart from a rare and arch period mannerism such as solarization, Man Ray’s portrait photographs (of Tzara, Duchamp, Breton, Brancusi, Braque, Tanguy, Ernst, and dozens of other equally celebrated sitters) are marvelously unpretentious. This point is real when one compares Man Ray’s photographs with the arty ones taken by Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst or Hoyningen-Huene of many of these same sitters.
This retrospective has clarified Man Ray’s particularly American inflection in the Dada movement. His bluntness is all the more striking as his work embraces one of the most convoluted art movements of our century. Man Ray establishes Dadaism’s naïve pole; Duchamp its sophisticated one. The unforeseen irony in this is that Man Ray engages issues that are larger than his art; Duchamp, issues that are smaller.
—Robert Pincus-Witten
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NOTES
1. It is egregious to note again that Marcel Duchamp derived the character of the Bride from the first three letters of his first name (MARieé) and the Bachelors from the last three letters (CELibataires) with staggering results for subsequent art. Similarly, his collected writings were published in 1958 under the title Marchand du Sel, a transposition of the four syllables of his name and a pun meaning “the salt seller” (and “the salt cellar”, i.e., the container of salt), which, through an exiguous argument may be alchemically referential. Again the writings of Rrose Sélavy, i.e., Marcel Duchamp, published in 1939, is a collection of exquisite and often elaborate puns amassed during a lifetime.
