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, avantgarde 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 avantgarde, 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 revival of interest that has produced,
in 1988 alone, a biography, a reissue 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 pistons-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 accordance 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-

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

67

Srnithsorziarz Sttidies in Arntricutz Art

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 Exposition of 1900, "began to feel the
forty-foot dynamos as a moral
force, much as the early Christians
his own
~
felt the C r o ~ s . "Injecting
work with a sense of dada irony,
Schamberg suggested that the
twentieth century had quite literally produced its "deus ex
machina." When Man Ray substituted a screw for the stem of an
apple, he also conflated the theological and the mechanical (fig. 1).
This Edenic fruit inevitably evokes
resonances of good and evil, and
these resonances are further complicated 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

Untitled, 1929. Photograph

existence, particularly man's relationship to nature. God was, however, merely a one-shot dada gesture for Schamberg; indeed, it is
now acknowledged that he was assisted in the creation of God by
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, herself 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 celebrate 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
68

Fall 1989

York (1920), Paul Strand (18901976) admiringly zeroed in on the

parts of a movie camera. Indeed,
the photographer was so impressed with his new movie
camera that the first thing he did
after purchasing it was to photograph its shiny, metallic components. "Visually, it was just a
magnificent instrument," he remarked.5And 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 monumental dimensions of 6 feet
square. Strand's and Murphy's
straightforward and simple presentations made these devices very

2 Marcel Duchamp with Large Glass,ca

19,30.Photograph

visible and understandable mechanisms, unlike Henry Adams's dynamo 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
69

Smithsonian Studies in American Art

one of his many fancy automobiles. 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 philosophical 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-

3 Untitled, 1913. Watercolor on paper,

7%x ~

' V Iin.
~P
I r i ~ a ecollection

ican artists, Man Ray was perhaps

the closest in sensibility to the Europeans, 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 characterized by experimentation with
technique, sexual symbolism, and
word play.
Several works done by Man Ray
prior to 1915 convey a shift in his
70

Fall 1989

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 collections)-both quite reminiscent
of Matisse with their fauve bursts
of color. But while the 1913 watercolor represents a direct confrontation with nature-really an
awakening to its beauty (the artist

4 Man Ray 1914, 1914. Oil on board,

7 x 5 in. Priz~atecollection,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 landscapes" 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
71

Srnithsonian Studies in A ~ e r i Art

~n

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 University Library, New Haven) and Man
Ray 1914 (fig. 4), he made an
even more significant transformation. 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

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 principles 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
72

Fall 1989

terms of a particular style. Although 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).

"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 prefabricated, separable, and manipulatable. 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 increasingly 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 specific 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 Ridgefield, 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~hohad been thinking
o f turning aulaj!.from nature
to man-made productions.
He said of his inventions, "The
new subjects were of pseudomechanistic forms, more or less
invented, but suggesting geometric
contraptions that were neither
logical nor scientific."' To him,
collage had the potential of expressing his revitalized relation to
73

Smithsonian Studies in American AT?

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 constructed with functionally interrelated 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 allusions. He framed them individually 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 presentation, Man Ray encoded the dominant machine culture into his
works. Indeed, his work demonstrates 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 interpenetration between the biomorphic and
the mechanical. Roger Shattuck
has described the series as "geometric-anthropomorphic fantasies"
and 7'be Meeting as "two caricatured male and female cutouts
[which] turn and maneuver as on

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 fusion that Picabia and Duchamp expressed even more explicitly in
their biomechanical works of this
time. The new direction in Man
Ray's art might well have been encouraged by these works, as well
as by Picabia's statements in the
press. For instance, in 1915 Picabia
proclaimed, "The machine has become more than a mere adjunct of
human life. It is really part of human
74

Fall 1989

life-perhaps its very soul.""

In the next several years Man
Ray's machine aesthetic became
more obvious. He not only depicted imagery that was specifically 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

7 Clock Wheels, 1925.Rqyograph. Yale

Unitem9 Art Galley, GGift of Collection
SociUtP Anoqme

mechanical in nature, on photographic paper and exposed them

to light. This process created
white impressions-sometimes
bold and hard-edged, sometimes
mysterious and strangely threedimensional-on the otherwise
black print. To create Clock
Wheels (fig. 7 ) ,for instance, Man
Ray dismantled a clock, a procedure that may have been inspired
by Picabia's anarchistic act of dipping 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
75

Srnithsonian Studies in American Art

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 exposure 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 dissimilar 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

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 inferred 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
76

Fall I989

mechanical substitution for perception (capturing what the eye

sees) or for representation (taking
over the painter's role of replicating 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 cameraproduced image, Man Ray's rayograph is thus a kind of true photograph: light writing. The implication is antitechnological or at least

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
exposes 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 developed another unconventional
technique, aerography, which involved 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 rayography 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 contemporaries' reliance on technical
aptitude, wanted to restore the intellect to art, to produce "something where the eye and the hand
count for nothing." In his aerographs, 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 ~MachineTournez 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 interlocked gears, incapable of rotating. Indeed, L'lmpossibilite has
been used as an alternate title.
Instead of Picabia's uncomplicated 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, Machine 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 ~ VoilOe,
ue
19-33,Photograph
publ&ed in Minotaure, no. 5 1193410 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 contrasts, playing off the sensual vulnerability of the nude against the
metallic strength of the machine,
the soft against the hard, and the
perishable against the imperishable. Oppenheim is not simply
nude but inked and in danger of
being run through the pressyet 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 notion of mechanical control but
also gave the machine a seemingly
human, though demonic, consciousness, like the all-seeing cyclops. The effect of the unyielding

stare of the eye as it relentlessly

measures time is maddeningly disconcerting, and its intense psychological reverberations mark this as
a thoroughly surrealist object. Indeed, it rivals Meret Oppenheim's
Fur-Lined Teacup (1936, The Museum 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 represented-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 SelfPortrait, 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 happened. 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 confounded 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 interactive 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' reactions to my first one-man show
[November 19151 were deprecat o n or outrightly hostile."17Accordingly, 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 conflation-that is, as a reference to
primitivism as well as to technology.19 Certain features of Fountain-the object's roughly oval
shape, sunken cheeks, and protruding tubelike mouth-resemble
those found in African masks.
80

Fall I989

When read anthropomorphically,

Rebus and Fountain play on the
similarity between a machinemade object and a hand-crafted
primitive object. Both Man Ray
and Duchamp thus embraced a
kind of technological primitivism-a primitivism at once futuristic and atavistic. Furthermore,
in conflating these opposed phenomena-the mechanical and the
primitive-the artists demonstrated the complementary nature
of these opposites. In some sense,
it is the technological that creates

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 PerlmutterClair in a performance directed
by Picabia, Eve offers the infamous
apple to Adam, initiating the Fall
81

Smithsonian Studies in Amerrerran

Art

and a life of labor (fig. 13). Technology, as a labor-saving pursuit,

could then be viewed as a consequence 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. Technological 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 represent 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-

13 Cine-sketch: Adam and Eve, 1924.

Photograph

thetic vantage point from which

modern man will most resource-

hlly meet the challenge of the

machine.

Notes
This article began as a short paper presented in a panel on Man Ray at the AvantGarde Art and Literature Conference held
at Hofstra University in November 1985.
1 Neil Baldwin, Man Ray:Amenenan
Artbt (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,
~ of
1988); and Pepetuul Motif: 7 7 Art
Man Ray,with an introduction by

82

Fall 1989

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.$:Technologv, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: Universih
of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. xv.

hen^ Adams, The Education of Henry

Adam (1907; reprint, New York: The
Modern Library, 1931 ), p. 380.

Francis Naumann, interview with author, Hempstead, N.Y., November

1985. See Robert Reiss, "'My Baroness': Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,"
Dadulsuwealism, no. 14 (1985): 88.
Paul Strand to Milton Brown. November 1971, Strand Papers, Archives
of American Art, Smithsoman Institution, 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 f d i n g . . .
could enact the defining technology in
its t~evyfo m . The authork role in this
technology was to design, aJenenginew, 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," DadulSuwealism, 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.

83

Smithsonian Studies in American Art

14 Man Ray, Self Portrait, p. 79

15 Paul Haviland, 291, no. 7-8 (September-October 1915): n.p.
16 Quoted in Man Ray and Arturo
Schwarz, "An Interview with Man Ray,
'This Is Not for America,' " Arts Magazine 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 (Madison, Wis.: Coda Press; Iowa City: University 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 "readymades." 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 associations (among other things it was likened to a seated Buddha). "Marcel
Duchamp's Fountain: Its History and
Aesthetics in the Context of 1917,"
DadulSuwealism, no. 16 (1987): 6494. And in a recent paper Wanda Corn
argues that the anist deliberately selected a urinal as a means of suggesting what a n should look like in
such a technological, future-oriented
culture like America's. "An Icon Revisited: Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' "
(Paper delivered at the Sevenv-seventh College Art Association Annual
Meeting, San Francisco, Cal., 16 February 1989).