Article from Anarchy #50 - Man Ray and Dada
The Lemming
whose diverse career spans the formation of the New York Dada movement in
1917 through Parisian Surrealism and beyond: However, despite this
recognition, the remarkable paintings he produced before 1917 have long been
banished to obscurity under the rubric of "pre-Dada," with all the secondary
importance that term implies. Similarly Man Ray's often stated anarchism has
never been taken very seriously. Instead, his anarchist stance has been
explained away as an iconoclastic "attitude" which encouraged
experimentation, but had no real bearing on the substance of his art.
At the heart of Man Ray's early painting was the aesthetic doctrine of
Cosmism propounded by his close friend, the anarchist art critic John
Weichsel. Born in Poland in 1870, Weichsel had emigrated to America in the
early 1 890s, where he completed a doctorate in aesthetics and psychology
before taking up a position as head of the Department of Mechanics and
Drafting at the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York. Weichsel was a
regular visitor to Alfred Steiglitz's 291 art gallery, then one of the few
places where experimental art was exhibited in New York. He published
articles in Steiglitz's art magazine, Camera Worls and supported
impoverished modern artists in whatever way he could, including dinner
parties at his home where anarchism, revolution, and aesthetics were hotly
debated topics.
Man Ray's initial encounter with Weichsel remains undocumented, how-
ever they most likely met at New York's anarchist Ferrer Center sometime in
the winter of 1912-1913. The Ferrer Center featured an alternative
educational program known as the Modern School and, as part of its
pedagogical mission, sponsored an art class led by the anarchist artist,
Robert Henri. Here Weichsel gave regular lectures on "the principles of art"
in the winter of 1914-1915.
Like Weichsel, Man Ray's involvement in the Ferrer Center also dates to
1912. In 1911 Man Ray, who was working as a draftsman in a New York office,
began frequenting Steiglitz's gallery. From there he was led to Henri's
Ferrer Center class, where, in the winter of 1913, he began painting in the
most advanced styles of the day.
What, then, of Weichsel's theory of aesthetics during these years? Wilhelm
Worringer's 1908 publication Abstraction and Empathy was the key influence
on Weichsel, but the full impact of Worringer's thought, particularly in
Weichsel's essays for Camera Work, has not been explored. In fact, these
essays are a study in how Weichsel's anarchism informed his reading of
Worringer, and Worringer, his reading of modern art. However, before we
examine Weichsel's aesthetic theory, a brief overview of Abstraction and
Empathy is in order.
The book's subtitle, "A Contribution to the Psychology of Style," points to
Worringer's central concern-to distinguish between different types of art on
the basis of the psychological state of mind of the artist. Worringer argued
that a review of the art of different historical cultures revealed two
distinct responses to our being in the world.
Empathetic cultures with "a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence
between man and the phenomena of the external world," wrote Worringer,
produced art that tried to simulate the world around them.
Worringer singled out the naturalistic art of the Italian Renaissance and
ancient Greece and Rome, such as the Hellenist Terme 'Boxer, as exemplary
models of empathetic naturalism. The antithesis of naturalism was an art of
"style" produced in cultures that were driven, conversely, by a dread of the
phenomenal transience of the world. Whereas the empathizing artist accepted
the natural order of things, the abstracting artist, according to Worringer,
sought "to wrest the object out of the unending flux of being and to purify
it of. all its dependence on life," through artistic approximations of
abstract forms. Worringer wrote that the arts of Africa, the Orient, and the
ancient Near East were exemplary models of this abstraction. Art produced in
a quest for the inorganic, he argued, tended toward a condition of timeless
stasis in "abstract crystalline forms." The tomb sculptures of Egypt, for
example, reduced the body to a solid "cube-shaped mass." Similarly, the
monumental architecture of that culture, epitomized by the great pyramids,
was dedicated to the creation of abstract "lifeless" forms as far removed
from the organic as possible.
Worringer charted a tension over a vast swath of history between two types
of cultural systems: one which generated a mimetic art of empathy and a
second which generated an art of antimimetic abstraction. In his revision of
this thesis, Weichsel claimed that abstraction in art was the index, not of
a certain type of culture, but rather of the artist's anarchistic freedom
from socially-imposed aesthetic demands through the affirmation of his own'
expressive individualism.
We find this point amplified in Weichsel's article for the October, 1913
issue of Camera Work, entitled "The Rampant Zeitgeist," where he argued that
there was an ''incessant struggle going on in society between imposed and
inborn forces, between custom and nature." Weichsel associated natural
"inborn forces" with individual expression "freed from external sanctions.~~
"Imposed forces" and "custom," on the other hand, were associated with thc
artist's subservience to the social needs and fads of the contemporaiy
cultural "zeitgeist." In America, vulgar patrons insisted art be "mimetic"
and imitate photography, or state and church patronage demanded that artists
cater to the needs of social institutions. The challenge, Weichsel reasoned,
was to free the artist to tap his individuality, and thus, to attain an
"instinctual" expressive art attuned to humanity's universal essence.
The "Rampant Zeitgeist" assessed the contemporary power of the social forces
that were repressing the artist. In "Cosmism or Amorphism," published in
Camera Work's November, 1913 issue, Weichsel evaluated modernism's evolution
towards a Worringeresque art of liberated abstraction. Here he argued that
art such as the French avantgardist Francis Picabia's subjectless watercolor
impressions of New York, completed in 1913, and the Russian abstract painter
Wassily Kandinsky's Improvision Number 27 of 1912, dissolved the
"corporeality of things" into an amorphic "atmosphere." In doing so,
Picabia, Kandjnsky and others transformed the urge to abstract into an
intellectual exercise in which hostility to mimesis was turned into a
prejudice against any trace of "concreteness~~ in a desire for a ''pure~~
art of ideas.
Such cerebral art could never express the Cosmic universality of humanity's
most elemental "psychological" moods and feelings. An art worthy of the name
"Cosmism," Weichsel reasoned, needed to tap the abstractionist qualities
praised by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy. However in November, 1913
there were no Cosmic abstractionists
whom Weichsel could rally in opposition to "Amorphist" modernism: he could
only close his article urging America~s modernists on in the correct
direction, away from Amorphism, toward Cosmism.
Although Man Ray undoubtedly knew of Weichsel's theories, he did not develop
his work in a "Cosmic" direction until mid-1914. This development is
attributable, in part, to Man Ray's familiarity with yet another anarchist
strain of avant-gardism, namely English Vorticism. Vorticism was shaped by
Worringer's aesthetic precepts, and there is a case to be made that Man Ray
saw this movement as the European counterpart to Weichsel's Cosmism.
However, before discussing Vorticism's influence on Man Ray the history and
aesthetic of the movement needs to be addressed.
Vorticism was officially launched in London in July, 1914, with the
publication of a journal, Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex. Blast
featured poetry, a play, a short story, essays on art, and numerous examples
of Vorticist painting and sculpture. A second volume of Blast appeared in
July, 1915; and thereafter the journal ceased to exist. Apart from Blast,
the key English journals promoting the artists and aesthetic theories
associated with the movement were The Egoist and The New Age.
Vorticist aesthetic theory was primarily the creation of two critics and an
artist-the English art čritic T.E. Hulme, the American expatriate poet and
art critic Ezra Pound and the Eng-. lish painter Wyndham Lewis. Pound coined
the term "Vorticism" as a way of linking the work of the painters and
sculptors he supported to the Imagist movement in poetry, for which he was
the prime spokesperson. However Hulme, was the critic who engendered
Vorticism with its coherence during the formative period of early 1914.
Writing in the anarchist-leaning New Age journal, Hulme adopted Worringer's
abstractionist aesthetic and mapped its qualities onto the art of the
emerging Vorticist movement.
For example, in an article of late 1913 on the American expatriate sculptor
Jacob Epstein, Hulme drew on Worringer to argue that the West's
"Renaissance" world-view, with its mimetic artistic traditions, easy
optimism,
and faith in human progress, was breaking up. Epstein's abstracting works
were symptomatic of this development. Referring to the artist's pencil and
ink Study for the Rock Drill Sculpture reproduced in The New Age, Hulme
wrote that Epstein's genius and sincerity lay in his ability to create a
new, non-mimetic means of expression; hence the utterly unnatural features
of the Rock Drill drawing, with its angular forms and converging lines.
In early 1914 Hulme expanded on his discussion of abstraction and modernism.
Here he praised the emergence of a "new constructive geometrical art" with a
"hard, definite structure" that reflected an "intensified perception of
things." Over the next two months The New Age ran a series of "Contemporary
Drawings" illustrating the new geometric art. Vorticist works featured in
this series included David Bomberg's drawing of four figures, entitled
Chinnereth of 1914 and a 1914 study for the painting Dancers by William
Roberts.
While Hulme expounded his views on the new art in The New Age, Wyndham Lewis
and Ezra Pound argued in support of the same tendencies in a second
anarchist journal, The Egoist. This journal was founded in January 1914 as
the third in a succession of periodicals edited by Dora Marsden, England's
foremost advocate of Max Stirner's philosophy of anarchist individualism.
Marsden named her journal The Egoist to signal her allegiance to Stirner and
his book, The Ego and Its Own. In The Egoist Hulme's Worringer-inspired
celebration of modernist abstraction was given a heightened individualist
emphasis. In particular, Pound, who, like Marsden, was a partisan of Stirner
's anarchist-individualist credo, suggested the urge to abstract was
part-and-parcel of the artist's self-affirmation in the face of an
uncomprehending society dominated by the outworn values of aesthetic
mimesis.
In February 1914 Pound published an article in The Egoist which made clear
this correlation. Pound described Jacob Epstein and his Vorticist cohorts as
rebels in "general combat" against the culture-laden values of a "humanist"
society that had failed to recognize the artist's superior individualism.
These artists, Pound concluded, were "born to rule," not over society, but
in order to serve their own needs.
We can grasp the anarchist-individualist import of this last, seemingly
cryptic statement by referring to the following issue of The Egoist, dated
March 2, 1914, where Dora Marsden wrote that Stirnerist anarchism sought the
state's overthrow in order to unleash each individual's capacity for
self-rule. "We believe in rule," Marsden wrote; a rule in which "the self'
rejected all extra-individual social strictures in favor of an "uncultured"
"vulgar and simple satisfaction" attuned to its needs. Identifying
"self-rule" as the guiding motivation of Epstein and his fellow
abstractionists, Pound was, in effect, aligning the new art with the
militant anarchist individualism of The Egoist.
Vorticist expressionism had an anarchistic dimension as well. Drawing on
Stirner's conception of the sensate essence of the ego in a June, 1914
article in The Egoist on Wyndham Lewis, Pound wrote that works such as Lewis
' 1914 drawing, Timon of Athens evoked intense sensations of struggle in
acknowledgement "that the intellect cannot exist without the aid of the
body." And in a passage that echoed Stirner's analysis of the egoistic
nature of the working-classes' struggle against the state in The Ego and Its
Own, Pound asserted that the sole social correlate worthy of comparison with
Lewis' effort was the combative energy of "labor and anarchy" against
"capital and government."
These articles in The New Age and The Egoist contained the anarchistic
substance of the new art. By the time the richly illustrated Blast appeared
on June 20th, 1914, therefore, sympathetic readers of The New Age and The
Egoist-who undoubtedly noticed the large adds for The Blast that appeared in
The Egoist-were well-primed for the anarchist-individualist aesthetic
contained therein. "Blast presents an art of individuals," the opening
manifesto announced. In a closing essay, Pound reiterated the distinguishing
features of the Vorticist movement in a unitary statement on poetry,
painting, and sculpture. The Vorticist artist sought to achieve "the most
highly energized statement" a medium was capable of by
distilling "the primary pigment" of a given art for expressive purposes,
Pound wrote. Poetry's "primary pigment" was the Image; painting's was "color
in position;" and sculpture's was "form or design in three planes."
Attention to one's medium and the art work's self~sufficiency, Pound
concluded, were the hallmarks of Vorticist art.
Man Ray's exposure to the ideas of Pound and the Vorticists can be traced to
his relocation from New York to nearby Ridgefield, New Jersey in the summer
of 1913. Here he shared a cottage with the American poet Alfred Kreymborg
until he moved into an adjacent building with his lover, the Belgian
anarchist poet Adon Lacroix. In the summer of 1913 Man Ray and Kreymborg
resolved to launch a literary magazine in Ridgefield, entitled The Glebe.
Soliciting Imagist material they contacted Pound, who mailed them an
anthology of Imagist poetry for the magazine. Thus Man Ray's familiarity
with the poetic wing of Vorticism in the latter half of 1913 is certain.
What, then, of Vorticist art and aesthetics? As we have seen, the English
New Age, Egoist, and Blast journals
were filled with reproductions and art criticism extolling the new art. What
is less well-known is that these journals were all distributed in New York
and familiar in the anarchist movement. Apart from the Ferrer Center, a
second focus of anarchist activity in New York was the Washington Square
Bookstore operated by Charles and Albert Boni in Greenwich Village. This
establishment was connected by a passageway to the Manhattan Liberal Club
and served as the club's unofficial lending library; the basement of the
complex also featured a popular restaurant run by two anarchists-Hippolyte
Havel and Polly Holiday.
In his memoir Kreyniborg wrote that the Washington Square bookstore carried
a large collection of the "latest magazines from London" including The
Egoist, and it is known that The New Age was then circulating in anarchist
circles. Over the course of 1914, therefore, Man Ray could have familiarized
himself with Vorticist art and aesthetics through these magazines, and this
knowledge would have encouraged him to search out the richly illustrated
Blast journal when it was published simultaneously in London, New York, and
Toronto in June, 1914.
We can date Man Ray's adoption of Vorticist aesthetics to the late summer
and early fall of 1914, when he completed his first large-scale canvas,
entitled War (AD MCMXIV). War marks a decisive development on Man Ray's part
toward a new concern with the integrity of the canvas two-dimensionality. In
his autobiography, Man Ray recalled that at the time he painted War he had
"been reading about Paolo Uccello" and studying reproductions of the Italian
master's 15th-century three-panel work, The Battle of San Romano (1438-40).
Uccello was one of Renaissance Italy's great innovators in the development
of perspective. Man Ray tells us this work interested him because it
represented a way-station in the creation of three-dimensional
representation on a two-dimensional surface, and hence suggested thai
painting could be composed in full consciousness of the two-dimensionality
of the medium as a factor in the work's creation. While painting War, Man
Ray wrote, "I never forgot that I was working on a two-dimensional surface
which for tile sake of a new reality I would not violate." Photography did
the job of representing and this liberated painting from an obligation to
achieve mimesis.
Where did Man Ray read about Uccello and how did he come to associate the
Battle with anti-mimesis, twodimensionality, and the creation of a "new
reality" apart from nature? To answer this question we need look no further
than Ezra Pound's appreeiation of the Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth,
published in the August 15, 1914, issue of The Egoist. Pound's article,
written shortly after the appearance of Blast, opened with a celebration of
Vorticism as "a movement of individuals, for individuals, for the protection
of individuality." He then devoted his discussion to the work of Wadsworth,
whose painting, Short Flight of 1914, was among the feature illustrations in
Blast. Wadsworth's paintings, wrote Pound, were exercises in "pure form"
whose artistic effect depended upon "the arrangement of spaces and lines, on
the primary media of his art." In this respect, the resulting "fine
organization of forms" bore comparison with Uccello's battle scenes. The
quality of organization in Wadsworth's paintings, Pound stressed, resembled
Uccello's 'for the same reason [Pound's emphasisl:" struggling to create a
new three-dimensional effect, the Italian had painted with the same
heightened awareness of his medium that drove the Vorticist Wadsworth to
create his own expressive abstractions.
Pound's article inspired Man Ray to consult Uccello. And in all likelihood
it also led him, while painting War, to study the hard-edged abstractionism
favored by the Vorticists. In War, the gradations in color which give Man
Ray's figures their volumetric effect are replicated in a cacophony of
abstractions massed in the "background," thus undermining any appeal to
three-dimensional illusionism in favor of forms arranged on a flat surface.
Spatial indeterminacy, a sharp delineation of forms and the resulting
claustrophobic crowding of figurations on a two-dimensional surface so
evident in War, were characteristic of Vorticist painting.
Moreover the aesthetic principles that
guided Man Ray while painting War also echo those of the Vorticists~ Man Ray
's desire to denaturalize his painting in favor of a "new reality," for
example, recalls the Vorticists' argument that an art object was a new
creation that existed apart from nature; a "non-life" as Lewis put it in
Blast. On a similar note, his belief that honoring the canvas' inherent
properties was the means of achieving this "new reality" resembles nothing
other than Pound's praise in Blast for the "primary pigment" of the art
object-in the case of painting, "color in position."
Finally, we have Weichsel's influence. Man Ray's adherence to his canvas'
two-dimensional qualities not oniy signalled his awareness of Yorticism, it
fulfilled Weichsel's precepts for the creation of a new Cosmic art outlined
a year earlier in Camera Work. Suitably, in the fall of 1914 Man Ray
dedicated a sketch of his painting "to Dr. Weichsel."
But no assessment of the anarchist foundations of Man Ray's new aesthetic is
complete without addressing War's subject. In his autobiography Man Ray
recalled that he and Lacroix were horrified and traumatized by the outbreak
of war in Europe and the profiteering response of American capitalism.
Lacroix was from Belgium, a country which had been transformed into a battle
zone by the German invasion. At the time she had no idea what had happened
to her parents and would not
. know for many months afterwards. In August 1914 she wrote a poem entitled
"War," which Man Ray later published and illustrated with a drawing of his
painting. Her poem is a vivid protest against the authoritarian
destructiveness of warring nationalism. War, she wrote, was a death-mill,
"flag-speckled with the blood of nations," and presided over by ruthless
"superiors" who force-marched their conscripts into the "fires of hell." Man
Ray recorded his own revulsion in two anti-war illustrations for the August
and September issues of Emma Goldman's MotherEarth journal. The first
depicted the dual-headed beast of "capitalism" and "government" ripping
"humanity" apart with its jaws. The second mocked the American flag under
which war resisters were destined to be imprisoned while more thoroughly
indoctrinated patriots perished on the battlefield in the service of the
state. The coldly mechanized soldiers and barren landscape of War,
therefore, reflect Man Ray's conviction that wars were the dehumanizing
progeny of the modern state and the capitalist economic system it sustained.
Pressing the point home, the invading soldiers attack a pleading mother
whose fallen child lies in the right foreground of the painting, left for
dead amidst the carnage. Here, in the crucible of the anarchist movement,
the expressive power of Cosmic abstraction melded with an equally powerful
politics of protest:
intent on destruction, Man Ray's soldiers trample on all humanity.
Thanks to his own inventory of his work, we know that over the duration of
1914 Man Ray produced seven more Cosmist figural paintings, including Five
Figures (1914) and The Lovers (1914). In the new year, however, he ceased
modelling his forms, substituting flat-patterned figurations in work such as
Invention-Dance which is typical of his production in 1915-16. Fortunately,
on the eve of his first one-man show at the Daniel Gallery in November,
1915, he explained his motivations to his mentor, Weichsel. Man Ray's
statement appeared in Weichsel's hitherto unknown article, "New Art and Man
Ray," published in the journal East and West. In a letter written to
Weichsel on November 3, 1915, he described this article as a "stimulating"
and "helpful" assessment of his place in the ranks of contemporary
modernism.
Weichsel wrote that Man Ray was participating in a general trend toward a
"new art" that negated the old practice of mimesis in favor of the notion
that the artist created his own "reality." Updating his argument in "Cosmism
or Amorphism," he distinguished between the Amorphist "soul-expression" of
Kandinsky and-the Cosmic art of Man Ray, who was intent on introducing "the
material mediums of art into its creative laws," in order to affirm the
objective fact of the art object. Fusing his own temperament with the "cold
logic" that rigorous attention to his medium entailed, Weichsel wrote that
Man Ray had accomplished this goal. He closed his article on a suitably
"Cosmic" note, writing:
Notwithstanding numerous affiliations in his work, Man Ray is distinctly
himself. His deepest self will eventually furnish a wholly personal
manifestation for his strong feeling of form and poetry in color. It is this
inherent proclivity towards inner balance that will point out his road. Each
true personality is destined to travel by his own road even when parallel to
those of his contemporaries. Each one of us has his own orbit in mankind's
constellation.
As previously mentioned, on the occasion of this article Man Ray wrote an
artist's statement which Weichsel reproduced in full. Man Ray's essay
marshalled an argument that all the "expressive arts" contained, latent in
their essential character, "parallels to life" which the artist's creative
powers "condensed" in a quest for "unlimited self-expression." He based his
case on the notion that the expressive arts combined in different degrees
"dynamic" elements and "static" elements and, thus, could be fully equated
to phenomena in the natural world.
We can gain an understanding of how Man Ray combined the dynamic and static
in a single art form by examining his exposition of this process in
painting, an art whose static elements outweighed its dynamic components. To
master nature's myriad sensations, Man Ray~ wrote, he focussed his attention
on recreating a segment of experience in an expressive idiom. Painting was a
process of condensing and intensifying in which the dynamic elements of
"time and space" taken from nature were simplified and united on a
two-dimensional surface. The medium's essential element-the color and
texture of pigment preserved on a flat plane-necessitated that the
imaginative parallel to life brought into existence by the artist be
arrested in stasis, rather than dynamic form. "Comprehensible from one point
of view" by virtue of its two-dimensionality, painting also subdued nature's
spatial indeterminacy.
In "New Art and Man Ray" Man Ray offered Still Life in Two Dimensions of
1915 as an illustration of his theories. In the Still Life, three objects
are traced in outline and simplified
down to their most basic forms. Devoid of the modelling that figures so
prominently in War and other works from late 1914, these forms are
arbitrarily divided into areas of color demarcating lines that continue into
other elements of the picture, fusing the "background" and the "foreground"
so as to heighten the "Cosmic" two-dimensionality of the
picture plane.
Further evidence of Weichsel's enduring impact is found in Man Ray's artist'
s statement for the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters, held in
New York's Anderson Galleries in March, 1916. This exhibit brought sixteen
of America's most modern artists together in a single show intended to
highlight the latest developments in American modernism. Man Ray contributed
nine works, including the Still Life and Invention-Dance. Each artist wrote
a brief statement for the catalogue and Man Ray's remarks are worth quoting
in full. Read in light of
my discussion, his essay follows the trajectory of Weichsel's thought from
"The Rampant Zeitgeist," where the anarchist art critic condemned the artist
's subservience to social institutions, to the "New Art and Man Ray" where
he praised the liberated individualism of Man Ray's Cosmism. Man Ray wrote:
"Throughout time painting has alternatively been put to the service of the
church, the state, arms, individual patronage, nature appreciation,
scientific phenomena, anecdote, and decoration. But all the marvelous works
that have been painted, whatever the sources of inspiration, still live for
us because of absolute qualities they possess in common. The Creative force
and the expressiveness of painting reside materially in the color and
texture of pigment, in the possibilities of form invention and organization,
and in the flat plane on which these elements are brought to play. The
artist is concerned solely with linking these absolute qualities directly to
his wit, imagination and experience, without the gobetweens of a 'subject.'
Working on a single plane as the instantaneous visualizing factor, he
realizes his mind motives and physical sensations in a permanent and
universal language of color, texture, and form organization. He uncovers the
pure plane of expression that has so long been hidden by the glazings of
nature imitation, anecdote and other popular subjects. Accordingly the
artist's work is to be measured by the vitality, the invention, and the
definiteness and conviction' of purpose within his own medium."
In the early months of 1916 it seemed his future direction was set, however
within the year Man Ray came to regard Cosmism's respect for the qualitative
aspects of the medium as an impediment to free expression. He would later
reveal that this new-found concern was an outgrowth of discussions with
Marcel Duchamp in the winter and summer of 1916.
Duchamp first met Man Ray in the summer of 1915, having fled war-torn France
that June. Like Man Ray, Duchamp was intensely interested in Stirner, and
was at that time developing his own Stirnerist art practices in a unique
direction. Inspired by Stirner's
. condemnation of the ego's subservience to metaphysical concepts and social
norms, Duchamp became increasingly preocčupied with creating "art"
that, subordinated these ele
. ments to the caprice of his personality.
In Three Standard Stoppages of 1913-14, for example, he replaced the
standard meter with a series of measures .which he decided upon arbitrarily,
according to chance. This work, Duchamp tells us, was directly inspired by
Stirner. The readymades of New York Dada, such as the infamous Fountain of
1917, pursued the same end. Here Duchamp undermined the socially imposed
conventions that defined art, replacing painting and sculpture with a
mass-produced object devoid of aesthetic deliberation and any trace of the
creative process. The "readymade" was Duchamp's Stirnerist revolt against
the rules the art object imposed on his individualism. Thus he trumped the
object as such, and the dualistic tension between the creative artist and
the qualities of the medium so central to Man Ray, Weichsel, and the
Vorticists dissolved into an all absorbing conceptualism that banished the
question of the medium and its integrity altogether.
But there were other implications. In the 'drive for a primitivist
aesthetic, Cosmism and Vorticism paradoxically disciplined the protean self
with the demand that affirmation of the art object's basic qualities
override the artist's creative freedom. This quintessentially modernist
rebellion pulled up short on the question of the ontology of art. Duchamp,
however, pushed on to corrode art's ontological viability by bringing the
public and their subjectivity into play as generative components in the
formation of both the artist and the art object. In Duchamp's variation of
anarchism, the unending flux of Stirner's decentered "I" was
complimented by anti-art productions that were equally unbounded and
undetermined, contingent things of discourse, rather than qualitative
difference.
Man Ray's own desire to be unshackled from art's conventions came to the
fore in.late November 1916, when he exhibited his first mixed-media
assemblage. The Self-Portrait was composed
of a canvas featuring Man Ray's hand print to which he attached two electric
bells and a push button. It evoked the idea of a door, however this door
didn't open nor did its doorbell ring. Man Ray later recalled the
consternation of the many visitors to the gallery, who pushed the button
over and over expecting the bells to ring and them complained about the
faulty wiring.
Man Ray's creativity had incorporated the spectator's and thereby activated
his assemblage, which gained its potency not from any primary pigment but
rather from the ideas it evoked in the confused minds of the gallery goers.
They pushed the button that opened the door to their imaginations with a
paradoxical judgement-it doesn't work-that begged the question as to whether
Self-Portrait was a work of art at all.
Here an intersubjectivity attuned to Duchamp's conceptualism underlined that
the Cosmic qualities of the canvas were decidedly beside the point.
In a related development, Man Ray began painting with an airbrush in early
1917. In his autobiography Man Ray recalled that the machine allowed him to
spray paint on any object, "with no need of an easel, brushes, and all the
other paraphernalia of the traditional artist." Thus Man Ray circumnavigated
the procedure of painting, an innovation which allowed him to overcome the
obligations Cosmism imposed to attend to the canvas' unique qualities. "I
was more interested in the idea I wanted to communicate than in the
aesthetics of the picture," Man Ray later recalled. "When I discovered the
airbrush, it was like a revelation- it was wonderful tO paint without
touching the canvas; this was pure cerebral activity."
Among the numerous airbrush paintings Man Ray created during his Dada years,
there is one, entitled My First Born, which encapsulates the full
ramifications of his turn from. Cosmism. Here he paid ironic tribute to his
own originality and creative independence with an airbrushed painting of the
mechanical device that produced it. The tribute was richly deserved. This
machine had freed Man Ray's ideas from the tyranny of painting and'allowed
him to realize his longstanding project of anarchist liberation,
paradoxically, through the death of the "primary pigment" that had given
Cosmism "life." My First Born is the culmination of a Stirnerist evolution
from the expressionism of Cosmism to the conceptualism of Duchamp. In this
sense Dada was but the latest phase in a quest for individualist liberation
through an anarchist mastery of art which actually began in 1914.
This essay has been adapted from a chapter of Allan Antliff's forthcoming
book, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics and the First American Avant-Garde,
due to be published by the University of Chicago Press next year.
Again, taken from Anarchy magazine #50.
Nick the Lemming
--
Happy VHEMT Volunteer
May we live long and die out
In Your Face, Space Coyote!
Brandon Freels
"The Lemming" <Ni...@justonelife.freeserve.nospam.co.uk> wrote in message
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The Lemming
Brandon Freels <b.j.f...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
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> Thanks for the texts Nick.
NP.
I just scanned, cut and pasted, so any internal errors are my own.