barbara zabel - man ray and the machine (1989)

Man Ray and the Machine

Barbara Zabel

Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Vol. 3, No. 4. (Autumn, 1989), pp. 66-83.

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Man Ray and the Machine

Barbara Zabel Beginning in the 1910s, avant- garde artists-both in Europe and in America-recognized the new promirlerlce of the machine and attempted to comprehend it in their art. A key figure in the avant- garde, Man Ray (1890-1977) soon found in the machine a means to express the dilemmas of twentieth-century existence. Yet the role of the machine in the artist's work is only briefly discussed in most of the recent literature on Man Ray and his art, despite a re- vival of interest that has produced, in 1988 alone, a biography, a re- issue of his autobiography, and a major exhibition catalogue.'

In her recent book Shifting Gears, Cecelia Tichi examines how the dominant technology of modern America-a technology of such interconnected parts as gears, drive shafts, ball bearings, and pis- tons-provided not only a subject but also a language for interpreting the twentieth-century world. Placing her primary emphasis on literature, she discusses the poetry of Carl Sandburg, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams, and the prose of Ernest Heminway, John Dos Passos, Jack London, and Edna Ferber, among others. Although her main intent is to analyze these writers' attempts "to reinvigorate imaginative literature in accord- ance with the terms of a new world," she also looks at how the advertisements, building and bridge design, photographs, and popular literature of the time re-

sponded to machine technology.' Her cursory treatment of painting and sculpture, however, leaves a compelling topic open for discussion: how the artists of the time devised a visual language consonant with the machine environment.

Morton Schamberg (1881-1918) confronted the problem of the dominance of the machine by sticking a plumbing trap into a miter box and calling it God (ca. 1916, Philadelphia Museum of Art). In identifying the machine as the new religion of the modern world, he echoed the sentiments of Henry Adams, who, in the Hall of Machines at the Great Exposi- tion of 1900, "began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the C r o ~ s . " ~ Injecting his own work with a sense of dada irony, Schamberg suggested that the twentieth century had quite literally produced its "deus ex machina." When Man Ray substi- tuted a screw for the stem of an apple, he also conflated the theo- logical and the mechanical (fig. 1). This Edenic fruit inevitably evokes resonances of good and evil, and these resonances are further com- plicated by the apple's mechanical component: Does the Fall stem from the invention of the machine, or does man's invention of the machine reenact the Fall?

Here Man Ray and Schamberg probed the metaphysics of the machine: its capacity to affect human

Self-I'ortr~~t(cropped ut top), 1916 P/~'ltogt'uph of u.is~~t~~hluge

67 Srnithsorziarz Sttidies in Arntricutz Art

1 Untitled, 1929. Photograph

existence, particularly man's relationship to nature. God was, however, merely a one-shot dada ges- ture for Schamberg; indeed, it is now acknowledged that he was as- sisted in the creation of God by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, her- self very much a dada creation.* In most of his art, however, Schamberg adopted a more straightforward aesthetic stance regarding the machine; that is, his works featuring the machine cele- brate its precision and formal beauty. This was, in fact, the most characteristic attitude toward the machine among American artists of the postwar period. For example, in Double Akeley, New

York (1920), Paul Strand (1890- 1976) admiringly zeroed in on the parts of a movie camera. Indeed, the photographer was so im- pressed with his new movie camera that the first thing he did after purchasing it was to photograph its shiny, metallic compo- nents. "Visually, it was just a magnificent instrument," he re- marked.5 And in Watch (1924-25, Dallas Museum of Art), Gerald Murphy (1888-1964) exalted the stunning forms of a watch by enlarging its works to the mon- umental dimensions of 6 feet square. Strand's and Murphy's straightforward and simple pre- sentations made these devices very

68 Fall 1989

2 Marcel Duchamp with Large Glass, ca 19,30. Photograph

visible and understandable mechanisms, unlike Henry Adams's dy- namo and Man Ray's machine art.

The Europeans Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Francis Picabia (1879-1953) provided the initial inspiration for Man Ray's fascination with the machine. Man Ray paid homage by producing several portrait studies of the two, including Marcel Ducbamp with Large Glass (fig. 2 ) , which shows Man Ray's contemporary posed behind a section of his large glass construction, and a photograph of Picabia seated behind the wheel of

one of his many fancy automo- biles. Indeed, Duchamp and Picabia were the first artists to explore America's machine environment. Rarely did they present the machine as a simple material object; instead, they used mechanical forms and ideas to raise philo- sophical questions about the complex interrelationship between man and machine. They came to America to explore this new subject matter, and it was in New York that their mechanical symbolism reached its highest expression. Of all contemporary Amer-

69 Smithsonian Studies in American Art

3 Untitled, 1913. Watercolor on paper, 7% x ~ ' V I ~ I in. P r i ~ a e collection

ican artists, Man Ray was perhaps the closest in sensibility to the Eu- ropeans, especially Ducharnp, with whom he was in close contact in New York from 1915 to 1921 and later in Paris. Man Ray's dialogue with Duchamp and Picabia and his unique contributions to New York Dada are perhaps best seen in his machine subjects, which are char- acterized by experimentation with technique, sexual symbolism, and word play.

Several works done by Man Ray prior to 1915 convey a shift in his

art and in his thinking from the naturalistic to the mechanical. Sparked, at least in part, by the Europeans, the initial stage of this transition can be seen in the subtle difference between an untitled watercolor of 1913 (fig. 3) and a series of oil works entitled Ramapo Hills (1914, private col- lections)-both quite reminiscent of Matisse with their fauve bursts of color. But while the 1913 watercolor represents a direct con- frontation with nature-really an awakening to its beauty (the artist

70 Fall 1989

4 Man Ray 1914, 1914. Oil on board, 7 x 5 in. Priz~ate collection, England

had just moved from New York City to lead a rather primitive rural existence in Ridgefield, New Jersey)-the other represents the beginning of his retreat from nature. He called this series of the Ramapo Hills his "imaginary land- scapes" to emphasize his move from nature to memory and invention." Diverging from his traditional, naturalistic approach, he began to develop a way of working that made him more aware of and susceptible to mechanical things. And indeed the

importance of invention increased as he explored Cubism in the aftermath of the Armory Show.

In the cubist works Porwait of Aped Stieglitz (1913, Yale Univer- sity Library, New Haven) and Man Ray 1914 (fig. 4) , he made an even more significant transforma- tion. With its recognizable portrait of Stieglitz and its references to Stieglitz's camera and his gallery and journal 291, the 1913 painting is a moderately straightforward image and a relatively tentative interpretation of Cubism. But Man

71 Srnithsonian Studies in A ~ e r i ~ n Art

5 Dance, 1915. Oil on canrlm, 36 x 28 in. Collection Andrew Crisp, New York

Ray 1914 is neither tentative nor straightforward. This modestly scaled work takes a more unorthodox stance by pushing the limits of traditional cubist princi- ples to produce a sign of the artist rather than his image. Eschewing the traditional or expected portrait image, the work becomes a kind of joke on self-portraiture. But, as Merry Foresta has pointed out, it also very seriously announces Man Ray as a Cubist.' The way he chose to paint his self-portrait is precisely the point: the manner in which the medium is manipulated becomes the message. He thus symbolically defined himself in

terms of a particular style. Al- though the work does not yet approach the mechanical-the letters aren't even stenciled to look as if they were machine made-Man Ray moved away from traditional art by expunging the traditional image from the portrait. Man Ray 1914 represents the beginning of a long sequence of unconventional autobiographical works.

By the summer of 1915, Man Ray had begun to have frequent contact with Duchamp. Inspired by the Frenchman's anarchistic spirit, Man Ray continued his rather unorthodox experiments with Cubism, as evident in Dance (fig. 5).

72 Fall 1989

"I changed my style completely," he later wrote, "reducing human figures to flat-patterned disarticulated forms." Even though Dance is a painting and not a collage, the forms look as if they were cut out with scissors and pasted on the canvas. In alluding to collage, Man Ray moved even further away from craftsmanlike, mimetic art. Having disarticulated the planar forms of the figure's arms and legs, Man Ray made the parts of the dancer appear prefab- ricated, separable, and manipulat- able. The idea that collage shared something in common with the machine began to emerge as Man Kay investigated the way in which mechanical means of production could complicate and enrich his art.'

This new approach became in- creasingly apparent in his collages of the following year, particularly the series of collages entitled 7'be Rajoluing Doors (1916-17). In one of these, The Meeting, Man Kay used collage to make a spe- cific reference to the machine-in this case, a centralized drill-like form, duplicated in a print done after the collage in 1926 (fig. 6). Man Ray's move from rural Ridge- field, New Jersey, to midtown Manhattan was one source of inspiration. As Man Ray later wrote,

The)) were building the Lexington Allenue subway and the racket of concrete mixers and steam drills u~asconstant. It was music to me and ezlen a source of inspiration-[ u~ho had been thinking o f turning aulaj! .from nature to man-made productions.

He said of his inventions, "The new subjects were of pseudo- mechanistic forms, more or less invented, but suggesting geometric contraptions that were neither logical nor scientific."' To him, collage had the potential of ex- pressing his revitalized relation to

the machine because of the medium's compatibility with the new environment.

Even so, the figure in Mime, another collage from Rez)oluing Doors, with its round head and rigid, outstretched arms, is more anthropomorphic than mechanical. Here it is not so much the work's subject as its method of production that refers to the mechanical. As an art of construction rather than replication, an art of design or assemblage made up of related parts, collage ideally reflected the world of machines, also con- structed with functionally interre- lated parts. These collages thus engaged this new technology; indeed, they can be seen as "visual enactments" of the machine world, to use Tichi's phrase.''

The manner that Man Ray devised to exhibit Revolving Doors also reinforced its machine allu- sions. He framed them individ- ually and attached all of them to a central rotatable pole, which the spectator could set into motion, much like revolving doors-hence the title. Perhaps Revolving Doors can thus be seen as one of the first kinetic works of art. Both in his method and in his presenta- tion, Man Ray encoded the dominant machine culture into his works. Indeed, his work demon- strates how the "first machine age," to use Reyner Banham's characterization of the period, was a revolution in language-here visual language-as well as in engineering."

This series, however, is not a simple glorification of the machine via collage. These collages began to suggest an interpenetra- tion between the biomorphic and the mechanical. Roger Shattuck has described the series as "geometric-anthropomorphic fantasies" and 7'be Meeting as "two carica- tured male and female cutouts [which] turn and maneuver as on

73 Smithsonian Studies in American AT?

6 The Meeting,from the series The Revolving Doors, 1926. Serr'graph on paper, 22 x 14% in. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

a carousel." The distinction between the mechanical and the human thus became blurred, a fu- sion that Picabia and Duchamp ex- pressed even more explicitly in their biomechanical works of this time. The new direction in Man Ray's art might well have been en- couraged by these works, as well as by Picabia's statements in the press. For instance, in 1915 Picabia proclaimed, "The machine has be- come more than a mere adjunct of human life. It is really part of human

life-perhaps its very soul."" In the next several years Man

Ray's machine aesthetic became more obvious. He not only de- picted imagery that was specifi- cally mechanical but also continued to formulate ways of working that derived even more directly from the machine. Shortly after settling in Paris in 1921, Man Ray developed, very much by chance, the unconventional technique that he called rayography. He placed various objects, often

74 Fall 1989

7 Clock Wheels, 1925. Rqyograph. Yale Unitem9 Art Galley, GGift of Collection SociUtP Anoqme

mechanical in nature, on photo- graphic paper and exposed them to light. This process created white impressions-sometimes bold and hard-edged, sometimes mysterious and strangely three- dimensional-on the otherwise black print. To create Clock Wheels (fig. 7 ) , for instance, Man Ray dismantled a clock, a proce- dure that may have been inspired by Picabia's anarchistic act of dip- ping a clock's mechanisms into black ink and imprinting them on paper in Reueil Matin (1919). Man Ray's rayograph presents not only a figure-ground reversal but also a positive-negative reversal in technique. By applying ink to paper

via metal objects, Picabia implied their materialization. Man Ray, on the other hand, reversed the process: images of objects appeared because they prevented light rays from hitting the paper. After expo- sure to light, he removed the objects, and shadowy, white images appeared during the developing. In effect, he dematerialized the mechanical, suggesting only the objects' ghostly absence.

The interactions between dis- similar objects in some of Man Ray's rayographs-for example, a gyroscope performing an elegant dance before a magnifying lens or a drill penetrating the softened contour of a light bulb-allude to

75 Srnithsonian Studies in American Art

the human and often to the sexual (fig. 8). As in the works of Picabia and Duchamp, such intrusions of the mechanical into the realm of the biological convey an ambivalence toward the role of the machine in modern life-its potential in changing existence for the better as well as for the worse. And this ambivalence can be in- ferred from the technique itself.

With the rayograph, Man Ray discovered a means of making photographs without a machine, using light directly to imprint an image, thus reducing photography to its chemical effects. This was a dramatic departure from the traditional view of photography as a

mechanical substitution for perception (capturing what the eye sees) or for representation (taking over the painter's role of repli- cating reality)-in other words, as a technological version, or perversion, of a natural or aesthetic process. Man Ray turned the process inside out: instead of a mechanically produced image of nature (the photographer's traditional subject), he effected a naturally produced image of the machine. The opposite of the photograph, or more precisely, of the camera- produced image, Man Ray's rayograph is thus a kind of true photograph: light writing. The implica- tion is antitechnological or at least

76 Fall I989

ambivalent toward the machine, as the relation between the organic and the mechanical is inverted. In Clock Wheels, for example, the purely natural-light-literally ex-poses the machine's workings. This inversion of the natural and the mechanical is a theme that runs through Man Ray's art.

In the late teens, Man Ray de-veloped another unconventional technique, aerography, which in- volved the use of spray guns and stencils. In such work as Dangerl Dancer (1917, private collection, Paris), a machine dictates the content of the image as well as the process that produced it: the spray gun as a painting machine. Here Man Ray banished not only the human and the natural from the image but also the physical o r the tactile element from the process. Man Ray experimented with such unconventional techniques as ray-ography and aerography in part to free himself from the "aesthetic implications" of traditional painting. He wrote, "It was thrilling to paint a picture, hardly touching the surface-a purely cerebral act, as it were." He aligned himself with Duchamp, who, because of his disillusionment with his con- temporaries' reliance on technical aptitude, wanted to restore the in- tellect to art, to produce "something where the eye and the hand count for nothing." In his aero- graphs, Man Ray used the machine to produce a revolutionary new art. Under his direction, the machine helped to move art away from mere craftsmanship toward a process of intellectual conception.

The aerographic technique, in combination with the stencils he used, allowed the artist to achieve DangerlDancer's hard-edged mechanical feel, a machine aesthetic also found in the art of Picabia. But Picabia and Man Ray shared more than a similarity in style:

Smithsonian Studies in Anzerican Ari

both alluded to sexual activity as well. In ~Machine Tournez Vite (1916-17), for example, Picabia identified cog No. 1 as "Femme" and No. 2 as "Homme." Similarly, Man Ray described Dangerl Dancer as "an airbrush composition of gear wheels, which had been inspired by the gyrations of a Spanish dancer I had seen in a musical play. The title was lettered into the composition: it could be read either DAVCER or DANGER."" The work signifies both things: the swirling motion of the dancer as well as the danger she represents. But Man Ray gave the image an ironic twist by depicting three in- terlocked gears, incapable of ro- tating. Indeed, L'lmpossibilite has been used as an alternate title.

Instead of Picabia's uncompli- cated meshing and meaning, Man Ray's work finds a closer parallel in Duchamp's Large Glass, in which, on one level at least, Duchamp creates a metaphor for frustrated physical love: the implied sequential action is never completed, and union becomes an impossibility. Danger/Dancer, Ma-chine Tournez Vite, and Large Glass recognize the machine as a new kind of beauty and a new resource for artistic expression but also suggest a strong ambivalence toward machine technology By endowing machines with human qualities, Man Ray, Picabia, and Duchamp were, in effect, asserting their power over the material world. As Paul Haviland noted in a well-known quote appearing in Stieglitz's 291 in 1915, "Man made the machine in his own image."Ii Yet these artists also realized that the dominion of man over machine was compromised by the machine's threat of impoverishing human experience and individual uniqueness.

The juxtaposition of the erotic and the mechanical reappears in Man Ray's later works, perhaps

9 ~ r o t i ~ u e VoilOe, 19-33, Photograph publ&ed in Minotaure, no. 5 11934-

10 L'Hornn~e, 1918. Photograph

most obviously in a series of photographs taken in 1933 of the surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim posed with a printing press (fig. 9). Man Ray set up striking con- trasts, playing off the sensual vul- nerability of the nude against the metallic strength of the machine, the soft against the hard, and the perishable against the imperish- able. Oppenheim is not simply nude but inked and in danger of being run through the press- yet another reference to the machine's beauty and strength on the one hand and its domination and control on the other. The female nude's mechanical counterpart can be read as a male form and the theme as male domination-a reversal of the theme of Danger/ Dancer. As in the earlier Dan@ Dancer, Man Ray extended human

functions to the machine as a commentary on its ambiguous role in our lives.

Unquestionably, Man Ray's most powerful and ambivalent combination of the human and the mechanical appears in Object to Be Destroyed, a metronome with a photograph of a human eye attached to its arm. First conceived in 1923, the work represents Man Ray's commentary on how the machine had come to set the tempo in twentieth-century life. just as the metronome mechanically sets the tempo in the production of music. By attaching the eye, the artist not only reinforced the no- tion of mechanical control but also gave the machine a seemingly human, though demonic, consciousness, like the all-seeing cy- clops. The effect of the unyielding

stare of the eye as it relentlessly measures time is maddeningly dis- concerting, and its intense psycho- logical reverberations mark this as a thoroughly surrealist object. In- deed, it rivals Meret Oppenheim's Fur-Lined Teacup (1936, The Mu- seum of Modern Art) as the surrealist object par excellence.

Man Ray and other Dadaists also introduced mechanical symbolism into the realm of portraiture, most significantly self-portraiture. Their self-portraits often included or even became mechanical objects, attesting to the impact of mechanization on these artists' self-consciousness. In 1915 Picabia initiated a series of machine portraits that included Le Saint des Saints, a characterization of himself as an automobile horn. Two years later Man Ray turned a photograph of an egg beater into a self-portrait by entitling it L'Homme (fig. 10). (While in his rayographs he made a pun on his last name, here he played on his first.) Both Picabia and Man Ray identified with the essence, or the function, of the objects they repre- sented-Picabia with the horn's capacity for making noise (and indeed, he was quite flamboyant) and Man Ray with the egg beater's ability to stir things up, attesting to the artist's anarchistic spirit. By taking the machine out of its useful context, both artists evoked great irony: it is not clear whether either artist presented the machine as an extension of self or self as an extension of the machine.

More complex is Man Ray's Self-Portrait, his first machine assemblage, consisting of two real electric bells, a push button, and the artist's signature, a hand print (fig. 11). In Man Ray's words, it "made people furious. They pushed the electric button and nothing hap- pened. They thought if you push the button the bell should ring. It

Smitbsonian Stzldies in American Art

didn't."I6 As in his Danger/Dancer of the following year, he con- founded the viewer's expectation that machines must do something. Instead, Man Ray presented himself as an anarchistic machine failing to perform as programmed or expected. This is precisely why the work is irritating. It invites the viewer to participate in an inter- active situation adopted from real life, yet it uses a malfunctioning doorbell to dismiss the viewer's presence and, most importantly, his significance. Perhaps Man Ray's intent was to enable the viewer to sense the problems and paradoxes of self-representation. Perhaps, too, this anarchistic machine was a reaction to the criticism his works provoked in New York at the time. In Man Ray's words, "With one or two exceptions, the art critics' re- actions to my first one-man show [November 19151 were depreca- t o n or outrightly hostile."17 Ac- cordingly, he directed his art to an audience that had not sufficiently acknowledged his presence.

Rebus further elaborates on the complexities of self-portraiture (fig. 12). The work is, as the title points out, a rebus-a puzzle consisting of pictures of objects or signs whose names suggest words. Insofar as the object (a section of a rifle) resembles a seated man, the photograph makes a pun on the artist's name, becoming, as Francis Naumann notes, a kind of self-portrait. The visual/verbal pun also depends on the viewer's perception of the found object as an African sculpture. Like Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Georges Braque (1882-1963), and other artists who had, earlier in the century, discovered an entirely new formal language in African art, Man Ray was fascinated with African art. But for Man Ray and other Dadaists, the mechanical as well as the primitive inspired a new language of form that was

uniquely suited to the twentieth century."

By means of his verbal and visual puns, Man Ray conflated two seemingly opposed phenomena: the primitive and the mechanical. Duchamp's Fountain can also be understood in terms of this con- flation-that is, as a reference to primitivism as well as to technology.19 Certain features of Foun- tain-the object's roughly oval shape, sunken cheeks, and pro- truding tubelike mouth-resemble those found in African masks.

When read anthropomorphically, Rebus and Fountain play on the similarity between a machine- made object and a hand-crafted primitive object. Both Man Ray and Duchamp thus embraced a kind of technological primitivism-a primitivism at once fu- turistic and atavistic. Furthermore, in conflating these opposed phenomena-the mechanical and the primitive-the artists demon- strated the complementary nature of these opposites. In some sense, it is the technological that creates

80 Fall I989

the primitive, since only technological cultures see others as primitive. And in these works, it is the awareness of the primitive that enables the viewer to read the machine parts as human figures. Thus, in a witty way, Rebus and Fountain suggest the redemption of the machine.

This connection between the primitive and the technological refers back to the original inquiry into the machine's role in the Fall. In Man Ray's Cin4sketch: Adam and Eve, a photograph of Marcel Duchamp and Brogna Perlmutter- Clair in a performance directed by Picabia, Eve offers the infamous apple to Adam, initiating the Fall

and a life of labor (fig. 13). Tech- nology, as a labor-saving pursuit, could then be viewed as a con- sequence of the Fall and the machine as evidence of sin. However, the machine can just as easily be seen as an attempt to compensate for or repair the Fall. Technolog- ical progress thus represents an attempt to get back to the garden, to a simpler life, a primal existence divorced from hard labor. Many of Man Ray's works repre- sent both outlooks, embodying an ambivalence toward machine technology. They not only portray Man Ray as a technological primitive in the twentieth century, but also present avant-garde art as the aes-

81 Smithsonian Studies in Amerrerran Art

13 Cine-sketch: Adam and Eve, 1924. Photograph

thetic vantage point from which hlly meet the challenge of the modern man will most resource- machine.

Notes This article began as a short paper presented in a panel on Man Ray at the Avant- Garde Art and Literature Conference held at Hofstra University in November 1985.

1 Neil Baldwin, Man Ray: Amenenan Art- bt (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1988); Man Ray, SelfPomait, with foreword by Merry A. Foresta and afterword by Juliet Man Ray (1963; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, a New York Graphic Society Book, 1988); and Pepetuul Motif: 7 7 ~ Art of Man Ray, with an introduction by

Merry Foresta and essays by Foresta, Stephen C. Foster. Billy Kliiver, Julie Martin, Francis Naumann, Sandra S . Phillips, Roger Shattuck, and Elizabeth Hutton Turner (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988 ).

2 Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gear.$: Tech- nologv, Literature, Culture in Mod- ernist America (Chapel Hill: Universih of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. xv.

3 hen^ Adams, The Education of Henry Adam (1907; reprint, New York: The Modern Library, 1931 ), p. 380.

82 Fall 1989

Francis Naumann, interview with au- thor, Hempstead, N.Y., November 1985. See Robert Reiss, "'My Bar- oness': Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven," Dadulsuwealism,no. 14 (1985): 88.

Paul Strand to Milton Brown. No- vember 1971, Strand Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsoman Institu- tion, Washington, D.C.

Man Ray, SelfPortrait,p. 52

Foresta, "Introduction" in Perpetual Motif, p. 12.

Quoted in Man Ray, Self Pomait, p. 52. As noted by Francis Naumann, Man Ray first saw examples of collage in the Plcasso/Braque exhibition at 291 held 9 December 1914 through 11 January 1915. Francis Naumann, "Man Ray, 1908-1921: From an Artist in Two Dimensions to the Higher Dimensions of Ideas" in Pqetual Motif, p. 67.

Man Ray, SelfPortrait,p. 59.

Tichi's discussion of literature suggested this connection between collage and the machine:

Art became recognizable as designed assemblies of component parts . . . aien art about flowers or fding . . . could enact the defining technology in its t~evyfom. The authork role in this technology was to design, aJen engi- new, the arts of the written word.

Tichi, Shifting Gears, p. 16

Reyner Banham. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York: Praeger, 1960).

12 Shattuck, "Candor and Perversion in No-Man's Land" in Pqetual Motif, pp. 314. 330; Picabia, "French Artist5 Spur on an American Art," New York Tvihune (24 October 19151, sec. 4, p. 2, as reprinted in Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ed.. "New York Dada," DadulSuwe-alism, no. 14 (1985): 131.

13 May Ray, SelfPortrait,pp. 73, 67. Duchamp is quoted in Walter Pach, Queer Thing, Painting (New York: Harper & Bros., 1938), p. 162.

14 Man Ray, Self Portrait, p. 79

15 Paul Haviland, 291, no. 7-8 (Sep-tember-October 1915): n.p.

16 Quoted in Man Ray and Arturo Schwarz, "An Interview with Man Ray, 'This Is Not for America,' " Arts Maga- zine 51 (May 1977): 119.

17 Man Ray, SelfPomait, p. 56

18 Francis Naumann, "Cryptography and the Arensberg Circle," Arts Magazine 51 (May 1977): 131. For a further discussion of the complex relationship between primitivism and technology see Dickran Tashjian, "New York Dada and Primitivism" in Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, ed. Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Mad- ison, Wis.: Coda Press; Iowa City: Uni- versity of Iowa, 1979), pp. 115-44; and Judith Zilczer, "Primitivism and New York Dada," Arts Magazine (May 1977): 140-42.

19 Recent research on Duchamp has played down the idea of randomness in Duchamp's selection of his "ready- mades." William A. Camfield shows that the idea of Fountain as "an object of anti-art or aesthetic indifference'' has dominated critical opinion only since the late 1950s and argues that such a view has obscured its originally intended anthropomorphic associa- tions (among other things it was lik- ened to a seated Buddha). "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917," DadulSuwealism, no. 16 (1987): 64- 94. And in a recent paper Wanda Corn argues that the anist deliberately se- lected a urinal as a means of suggesting what an should look like in such a technological, future-oriented culture like America's. "An Icon Revis- ited: Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' " (Paper delivered at the Sevenv-sev- enth College Art Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, Cal., 16 Feb- ruary 1989).

83 Smithsonian Studies in American Art

barbara zabel - man ray and the machine (1989)

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