Man Ray's writings about art and being an artist are little known. Jennifer Mundy (head of collection research, Tate, UK) attributes the lack of scholarly work to the fact that Man Ray's writings are ...widely dispersed or difficult to access. The one published account is in Italian and consequently not widely known, particularly among ¿Anglophones.
In one room, Hans Richter's 1943-44 "Stalingrad," a horizontal scroll covered with newsprint and other materials that gives a poetic and visual account of a turning point in World War II, is seen ...near Alexander Calder's 1944 whimsical "Fish," assembled from metal rods, plastic, wood, glass and ceramic fragments.
Baker talks about Man Ray's Unconcerned Photographs, one of the works featured in The Sense of Abstraction, an exhibit showing the relationship between photography and abstract art in under ten years ...at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1960. For the exhibit, Man Ray sent MoMA a group of Polaroids produced by swinging the camera around on its strap in his Paris studio. He indicated very minimal cropping instructions and suggested that they be reproduced as gelatin-silver prints. It's interesting, however, to reflect on the fact that both the process and title of Man Ray's contribution ran counter to the prevailing values of most of the photographers celebrated in The Sense of Abstraction, for whom painstaking composition and exceptional printing were de rigueur.
Anything Goes Collings, Matthew
Time Canada,
03/2008, Volume:
171, Issue:
10
Magazine Article
If "anything goes" then skill, craft, sensuous handling, emotions, the artist's personal expression and artistic originality are all optional-"art" can be any object untransformed, just presented in ...a gallery and given a title. Andy Warhol ran with this idea in the 19605, and so do Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst today. Art students are in awe of it. It was Marcel Duchamp who invented this concept, and his friends Ray and Francis Picabia remained fascinated by it all their lives, even if they didn't wholly practice it; Ray used a lot of different materials, from photography to collage, and Picabia was always a painter, if a weird one. OF THE THREE ARTISTS, PICABIA WAS THE oldest by eight years. He was 32 when he met Duchamp in 1911. (Duchamp later said he was impressed both by Picabia's high standing in the Paris art world and by his daily intake of opium.) Ray and Duchamp were friends by 1916, when they both started working for an avant-garde art gallery in New York City; Ray was 26, Duchamp 29. Picabia was born into a wealthy family, inherited a fortune and lived the life of a playboy. Duchamp, the son of a notary, was brought up in an arty but provincial middle-class family. He would be poor, thanks to his decision to remain in the shadows and not exploit his early celebrity as an artist. Ray (real name Emmanuel Radnitzky) was born in Philadelphia, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He made money as a fashion photographer. They were geniuses of not caring. When Duchamp died in 1968 it was discovered that he'd been secretly working for two decades on a complicated installation with sparkling light, an invisible motor and a nude woman made of plaster casts of body parts covered in calfskin. (She was modeled on the wife of a Brazilian diplomat in New York, with whom he'd had a long, clandestine love affair.) But for years, Duchamp, who lived in a modest, $40-a-month apartment in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, told his friends he'd given art up for chess and philosophical writing. He said he believed in "masterly inactivity." Indeed, he, Picabia and Ray shared a talent for cerebral sloth. They all thought up endless word games that boil down to jokes about sex. This too was art. The Tate Modern exhibition is dense with doodles, and scraps full of dark joie de vivre.
