MAN RAY'S FORMATIVE PERIOD

par Ana Puyol Loscertales

June 21, 2016

INTRODUCTION

Thesis Summary, directed by Professor Agustin Sánchez Vidal, and by Amparo Martínez Herranz, Doctor in Art History, defended at the University of Zaragoza on September 18, 2015.

This doctoral thesis took as its starting point research conducted during my doctoral training at the University of Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, and coordinated by Patrick de Haas and Nicole Brenez, as well as all the information obtained after several research sessions in the various departments of the CNAC Georges Pompidou, with the agreement of Jean-Michel Bouhours and Alain Sayag, and thanks to the rich documentary, photographic, cinematographic and plastic arts funds of the center, related to Man Ray, to which I had access.

The establishment of conclusions as a result of the work period developed in Paris, constituted an incentive for me to shift the center of attention of this Thesis to the United States. Man Ray was born in Philadelphia, and his life and production took place on the North American East Coast, known for its great activity. When he arrived in Paris, at a mature age, the conceptual basis of his work was already configured and materialized in a set of masterpieces, true keys for reading his creations in all the fields he explored throughout his career.

Consequently, this Thesis analyzes the scope of what we call Man Ray's formative period, which occurred between his birth in 1890, and his move to Paris, in 1921. However, these dates do not impose themselves as limits, but as landmarks for the confluence of a series of constitutive elements of his artistic discourse: cultural and biographical history, ideological and philosophical context, and traces of an entire technical, scientific, and industrial revolution, taking place in a paradigmatic area like the East Coast of the American continent. In the convergence of all these reference points, lies the generating force point of this author's thought and artistic language.

The adoption of this point of view as a vector to value Man Ray's productions and creative personality imposed itself with a resounding necessity to situate this artist in the History of Art and Cinema, this being the main goal of this Thesis. To do this, it was necessary to go beyond the restriction to the field of photography, and its framework of action to the most programmatic and late Surrealism, two poles that have given rise to fragmented visions, without an integral perspective of his work, of which a unitary, overall vision was strongly lacking.

Man Ray always maintained his original identity as a Dada pioneer, a phenomenon that erupted in New York, animated by the precocious singularities of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, and even by Man Ray's first wife, the Belgian anarchist and intellectual Adon Lacroix (Donna Lecoeur), whose influence exerted on Man Ray is, as has been demonstrated, undeniable.

Moreover, it should be emphasized that the origin of this artist's indissoluble activity as a painter, poet, object builder, photographer, essayist, art theorist, or as a director of bad movies, took place in North America, whose fertile atmosphere had as one of its most significant particularities the intertwining of utopias of the possible with the pragmatism of technique.

CONCLUSIONS

Cultural History: Man Ray's identity is revealed in 1912, following the family's integration efforts in North America. His original identity (Emmanuel Radnitsky) is linked to his parents' journey, immigrants who arrived in America during the 1880s due to the agitation reigning in the Russian Empire. Biographical elements or literature by authors such as Dostoevsky or Evreinov mark the artist's cultural heritage and his reflection around chance, the latent power of objects, the process of unveiling or the value attributed to photography as a manifestation of the optical image.

The father's political condition, insubordinate and exiled, has a direct impact on Man Ray's ideologization process, who escapes military service and recruitment during the First World War. The father's flight to America is also motivated by the persecution he suffers due to his cultural and religious condition. Man Ray moreover reaffirms his Jewish origins through the bar mitzvah, and integrates his knowledge of doctrine, customs and sacred books into his artistic discourse.

The father's origins, Melach Radnitsky, determine the conditions of his arrival and establishment on the East Coast, like most immigrants from Eastern Europe to work in the textile sector. The works produced by Man Ray, or even his conception of cinema, reflect the fragmentation and serialization proper to the textile domain, as well as his familiarity with the figure of the mannequin, the uniform and the fabrication of appearances.

The crowding of immigrants in the factories of the New York coast leads to the consolidation of certain anarchist and far-left organizations. Man Ray grows up in an environment conducive to developing this type of ideologies. He joins these social movements from the first part of the 20th century through the Ferrer Center, which will play a primordial role in his artistic will. This episode brings a certain idiosyncrasy to his formative period that we had to analyze and relate to the first Dada movement, which shook New York in the 1910s and 1920s.

*Political and ideological foundations: Man Ray arrives at the Ferrer Center following a double political and artistic impetus, in an indissociable manner. The political aspect is linked to his family history, and translates into a model of thought associating his pronounced individualism with his will for social and vital transformation.

The artistic aspect is intimately linked to these aspirations. These links are reinforced by anarchist artists such as Georges Bellows or Robert Henri, who leave an indelible mark on his reflection, his permanent questioning, the negation of a univocal reality, the rejection of mimesis, and his sympathy for individualist anarchism.

This positioning of Man Ray around the arts arises from his early experience at the Ferrer Center, whose alma mater, Emma Goldman, displays herself against isms and in favor of the symbiosis between art and life. The theories of Stirner, Kropotkin, Whitman or Thoreau, Emma Goldman or Adolf Wolff strongly influence his philosophical and literary learning, as well as his interest in the exaltation of freedom and the power of desire advocated by the Marquis de Sade, point of union between thought, art and ideology.

The Ferrer Center constitutes the epicenter of an entire critical reflection around the development of the machine and technique, which is linked to Man Ray's and his family's socio-economic situation. Against the negative impact of mechanization on daily life, the theories spread in the center's entourage, exemplified by Kropotkin, redirect it towards a positive and creative vision, guarantor of freedom, through its integration with man. This reasoning is found in New York Dada, which bets on breaking the limits of the machine and the explosion of its possibilities. The liberation of the possible in the technical universe and of the object, as material of a new revolutionary art, aims on the social ground to surpass a given reality to construct others. Man Ray, thanks to his connection with American pragmatism, and his vision of utopia as a chain of potentialities, arising from his culture and ideology, plays a fundamental role that it was a priority to define, because he will personify this tendency within Dada.

Man Ray takes part in the artistic colony created by anarchists in Ridgefield, in order to conceive new frameworks, free, self-managed and in harmony with nature. An explosion of alternatives generating new proposals, linked to Dada's objective of regeneration of ideas and the construction of other-realities, both at the aesthetic and cultural level and at the level of social or political reality. This is the true meaning of the tabula rasa. Man Ray supports this libertarian practice, and it is in this context that his theory of the arts progresses, both on the ideological and aesthetic ground, against art conceived as a representation, favoring the support as a place of gestation of alternative realities.

In his utopian perspective, Man Ray links reason and poetry, pragmatism and desire, social ideal and creative practice, towards the acceptance of a new individual. In his case, it corresponds to his family history, his ideology, the reality of a technicized country, strongly influencing his plastic and cinematographic work. The influence on the artist of certain authors of projected or imaginary utopias, political militants, and pseudo-scientific and anticipation literature, of creators of poetic and linguistic universes such as Alfred Jarry or Raymond Roussel prove to be of great influence.

*Technique and machine: Man Ray elaborates a language that exposes the insertion of the machine in life, in the imaginary, configuring a new aesthetics integrated into the artistic process through aerography or rayography, which reveal associations of ideas in new contexts. The artist thus places the machine at the very center of creation, which manifests itself particularly in his cinematographic work. In this equation, man reappropriates his surroundings and the status of creator, a parody of the divine generative function, an imitation of the inventor, the Great Watchmaker, thus surpassing the machine. The works of Man Ray and early Dada are philosophical and conceptual reflections of great richness, whose content and form, mixing sarcasm and ingenuity, always give more identity to the critique of his reason for being in the world, surpassing simple re-presentation, in order to envisage the production of universes governed by different laws as the main activity. This dynamic is linked to a poetic construction of reality beyond logic, only possible from artistic creation, where man can regain his place after having been displaced, transformed and fragmented by various techniques. This process was materialized thanks to the creation of bachelor machines. The machine, this daughter born without a mother, is liberated from its utilitarian and productive servitude, in the infinite domains of chance, just like man who has become its slave. Thus, the fragmentation connatural to the productive objective of the assembly line becomes an imaginative finality with assemblage, collage and film editing. This essential proposition is welcomed within Dada with caution. Man Ray, the only American-born of the New York hard core, will play a primordial role in the conceptualization of this tendency.

*Aesthetic bases: Man Ray gradually introduces himself into the domain of plastic creation following his intellectual exploration of the link between art and life, the questioning of mimesis, and the scope of the phenomenon of vision.

In 1913, the author moves away from naturalist presuppositions, and abandons the concept of reality-model, orienting himself towards a fully conceptual art. He then makes reality an ingredient of his works, by integrating reflective papers into his collages. He goes beyond cubist propositions by including the surrounding and dynamic reality in his work. He subsequently includes objects of an industrial nature, products of the machine deprived of function, in accordance with the technicized environment and his project of symbiosis between art and technique. But the connection with life itself is revealed through scientific phenomena such as electromagnetism, the fourth dimension, the development of optics or studies of movement analysis, in fusion with properly artistic materials. Thus, pseudo-scientific and anticipation literature find a remarkable echo in Man Ray's works, whose production is indissociable from the literary contents that will serve as his philosophical and critical framework, from American authors, as well as the most progressive literary works by European authors such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Ducasse or Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, whom he discovers thanks to Adon Lacroix in 1914.

The incorporation of mechanisms leads to the creation of artistic works by means of machines, from the aerograph to photography or cinema devices, of which he even manages to do without. With rayography, Man Ray conceives optical images without intermediaries, the object prints its presence by means of the light beam, like an act of thought. These are potential images, traces of presences, possible universes.

The art gallery managed by Alfred Stieglitz allows the artist to enrich his philosophical discourse around photography and the image. The theorists accustomed to the place become referents for Man Ray, notably Benjamin de Casseres, Marius de Zayas or Alvin Langdon Coburn, who also find a remarkable echo within American Dada.

The automatism of the image produced by the camera, its non-decorative status, and the mental nature of his achievements, in a country where the scope of the machine and technique is imperative, constitute a pillar of the early questioning of the arts in Man Ray. Photography reinforces his revolutionary vision of the object as the materialization by the image of these liberated alternative universes, which he erects against the crisis of the world and the crisis of objects, a burning reflection among historical avant-gardists.

Man Ray is part of those who could be qualified as inventors of marvelous machines, domains of the possible, ideas conceived as portraits of the spirit. He fuses literary, scientific and artistic domains, giving impetus to concepts so that they reach the surface, to make them feasible possibilities. He confers on them a status of reality by their impact on the support, or their dynamic cinematographic manifestation.

*Cinema and concept: Cinema implies an important progress towards the conception of images by mechanical means, whose finality is a poetic creation. This is why Man Ray introduces into his films the artistic works proper to his universe, projected continuously, thus making them eternal. He reaffirms his filmography as a global work of art, integrating photographic techniques to treat the film, in an interdisciplinary contamination of media that give impetus to his artistic theory. For Man Ray, cinema will constitute an instrument of research around the status of vision, according to an aesthetics of the concept using materialization in the form of optical image, as the essence of an intellectual process.

His films gather all his literary, cultural, ideological referents, as well as the association of disparate elements from Lautréamont, the language games of Jarry or Roussel, the technical game of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and the structures of Sadean narrative. Poetic essence thus manifests itself in the form of a thought evolving in the domain of the possible.

Finally, his cinematographic work creates an intellectual space, seat of new universes in the form of utopias populated by optical images, which attempt at the representative and imitative void. Cinema acts as a locus where utopia transforms into reality by means of technique. Through it, Man Ray will envisage utopia as an autonomous and independent possibility, however neglecting the dependence on the real.

The artist reaches this genre in the United States, like Duchamp, as a device to conduct research around the optical, non-retinal nature of images, the fourth dimension and the machinery of desire as language. He will continue in this direction in Paris. With cinematography, Man Ray establishes himself as a first-rate creator who knew how to translate the lines of action of early Dada.

Man Ray's transcendence in the History of Art and Cinema must be understood and analyzed from his formative period in the United States, because it includes the gears that give meaning to the complexity of an author for whom a new analysis proved imperative. This new perspective is based on the importance of the universe of ideas (as ideology and reflection) in symbiosis with the creative framework (both at the level of his individual research and the confluence with original Dada), in order to create the conceptual framework that constitutes the foundation of his production.