The original piece in this serial work, or Multiple, was a Readymade metronome. Man Ray simply attached a photograph of an eye to the armature. The object itself was exhibited and so were his photographs of it. He titled the piece, and the accompanying photographs, Object to be Destroyed. This simple adaptation of an object and its title suggests many themes, amongst these would be the transient nature of existence:
The object could be destroyed, but a record of it exists in the form of photographs, and also in the memory of those who saw it. This drew attention to the nature of direct experience and representations. An observer may be able to recall the object as it moved and clicked when set in motion, whereas photographs could only suggest these attributes through clever time lapse and sequential prints. We can see recordings and representations of others, but these indicators are not the person or the object and are not the same as memories. Memories themselves are unreliable and can be coloured by subsequent experience, idealised or romanticised. The real passage of personal time is subjective, not the tick-tock perfect measure of a metronome… “Time flies when you’re having fun!” We can remember something from years ago, “like it happened only yesterday,” yet struggle to remember something that actually did happen yesterday.
In 1932, Man Ray split up from his long term partner, Lee Miller (who was also a groundbreaking photographer), and substituted a photograph of her eye in place of the image he had originally attached to the object. Some saw this as a metaphor dealing with the insistent, and sometimes unwelcome, memories of past relationships. The tick-tock of the metronome could now symbolise a heart beat, the essential rhythm of life and love.
In 1957, a group of students stole and destroyed this adapted version. Man Ray changed the title of its photographs to Destroyed Object. The multiple nature of photographs made him think of the validity of original experience and its relationship with personal memory over time. This concept tackled bigger questions about authenticity.
Over the next few years, Man Ray produced 100 replicas of the original and also photographed these. In 1964 he renamed these editions, Indestructible Object – even if they were all destroyed, more could be made, and as none were the ‘original’, each would be as authentic as another. The concept had become the ‘reality’ of the work and existed independently. (To confound this further he also used the same titles for other works.) The object and photographs were replicas and artifacts that embodied that concept, though it no longer depended on any single representation for its continuation. Likewise, a memory is independent of the experience that created it, and the memory may linger long after that original experience.
In this serial work the original concept is developed and changed over time. It is difficult to say if any single piece constitutes the work as the original object no longer exists, although the photographs of it does. As replicas of the original can be made that are identical to, though are not, the original, so any number of identical prints of a photograph can be made from the single negative, which in itself is a chemical recording of light.
With this series of Readymades, Multiples and photographs, Man Ray extended concepts laid out by his close associate Marcel Duchamp. Although this work grew from a Dada approach it became seminal to the development of Surrealism – poetically, an object comes to symbolise much more than its surface reality, including aspects of the human condition – memory, emotions and our subjective experiences.
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