Man Ray, or Recovering the „In-between” between Word and Image

Abstract

Taking the current debate on the relationship and interrelationships between artistic media as my departure point, in this article I discuss the work of Man Ray, one of the most recognizable representatives of early modernism, whose achievements, especially literary, are still too little known as examples of modernist artistic self-consciousness. Reclaiming his visual works, writings and various multimedia hybrids as a rich historical source can, in my opinion, help to make visible and “recover” for the contemporary discourse on the transmedial condition what Rosalind Krauss dubs the “inner lining” of a medium or form and Marjorie Perloff, quoting Khlebnikov, describes as the “strings of the alphabet” hidden by “phantoms” or Wittgensteinian “imaginings”. The art of Man Ray, unjustifiably considered by many “lightweight”, attests to the validity of Walter Benjamin’s assertions about the importance of any particular medium or technological form for, as Krauss has it, “restructuring the condition of the other arts”. In his visual and verbal realizations (which he called visual poetry), one can discern traces that Perloff has been following for years in her search for “the unfulfillednpromise of the revolutionary poetic impulse”, pointing to what, though difficult to name, exists “in between”, in the Duchampian realm of inframince. Captured in words and images, reflection on such matters is omnipresent in Man Ray, but its depth and multiple meanings acquire a new dimension when his canvases, collages, constructions, photographs, rayographs or films are “read” in the context of his surprisingly rich and varied writings. “Recovering” the multitude of themes and motifs contained in them is significant as another, to many quite unexpected, confirmation of the endurance of the avant-garde gesture.