Surrealist Ghostliness

1 The Cinematic Whirl of Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects

21 1 The Cinematic Whirl of Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects They were furious, they thought I was a bad electrician. Man Ray Man Ray made, photographed, and filmed objects he imbued with intimacy by subliminally telegraphing the extent to which they had acquired human qualities transferred to them by human touch, thus making them ghostly. He challenged the assumption that inanimate things cannot have an inner life, a ghostly interiority produced in concert with the history of their use and their association with human touch. In this way, Ray’s objects are like children’s toys, objects of personal worth imbued with interior lives. His version of surrealist ghostliness springs from the sentient animism of his objects that raise questions about the mysterious latencies within ourselves that desired objects activate. In his images he reveals a private world, as though he has secret information about the private lives of inanimate objects, their double identities as manifestly inert yet latently lively. Like the surrealist image with its juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities, Ray’s transformations of objects involve an “operation [that] is double,” explains Brigitte Hermann. “The object must 22 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects be tampered with, modified” (9).1 By exposing the double life of objects, which in turn asserts their inherently poetic function, he unveils their ghostliness. Hermann cites a 1969 interview Ray gave to Pierre Bourgeade: “I never said the objects were readymades. Duchamp found it revolutionary to put a phrase or his name on an object found at the hardware store. No—for me, there must be not one thing but two. Two things, which by themselves had no relation with each other” (9). Ray first used objects in his Self-Portrait from 1916 (see fig. 3), for which he substituted doorbells for eyes and a textured handprint for the torso. The body represented as a hand underscores the importance of holding and touching objects. Arturo Schwarz, commenting on the work’s first public showing, writes, “Below the hand is a doorbell push-button. Visitors were naturally tempted to press the button, and expected the doorbells to ring—but nothing 3. Man Ray, Self-Portrait (1916). © 2011 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York / adagp, Paris. 4. Man Ray, La Femme (1920). © 2011 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York / adagp, Paris. cnac / mnam / Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York. 5. Man Ray, L’Homme (1920). © 2011 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York / adagp, Paris. 24 Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects happened. ‘They were furious, they thought I was a bad electrician,’ Man Ray told me with a twinkle” (136). As an object that stands in for “Man,” Ray’s Self-Portrait anticipates Breton’s corporeal pun at the root of surrealist ghostliness, whereby a body substitutes for a thing and a thing may take the place of a living body. Ghostly doubleness also haunts Ray’s openly autobiographical photographic works, such as the object Man (1918), which he renamed La Femme in his 1920 photograph (see fig. 4), an eggbeater shot in bright light so that its shadow becomes its double, and the object titled Woman (1918), which he renamed L’Homme in another 1920 photograph (see fig. 5). Woman/L’Homme, made up of two “hemispherical reflectors and six laundry pins pinching a sheet of glass,” at first calls to mind a woman’s breasts at the expense of her head, but when retitled (as L’Homme), it reflects the eyes of a man perched on a skinny torso (Schwarz 158). Like Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy (see fig. 8), the female alter ego later borrowed by Desnos, Ray also explores alternately gendered 6. Man Ray, Champs délicieux (Rayogram) (1922). © 2011 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York / adagp, Paris. cnac / mnam / Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York. Man Ray’s Ghostly Objects 25 identities within himself. He thus responds to the initial charge of surrealist automatism: to seek and uncover all the realities and identities coexisting, buried, in the human psyche. These new identities work like puns or jokes and reflect tangibly what Freud was revealing psychically at the same time: that identity is far from the stable entity suggested by Enlightenment thinking. These objects and puns hint at the ghostly complexity of human psychic identity that...