Man Ray destroyed the eye of Lee Miller, attached to the inverted pendulum of a metronome. His muse and fellow photographer had left him. That is why this surrealist wooden sculpture was accompanied by the instruction: ‘destroy it in one blow’.
Man Ray destroyed the eye of Lee Miller, which he had pasted on the pendulum of a wooden metronome.
The American Man Ray (born as Emmanuel Radnitzky, 1890 – 1976) experienced the transition from Dadaism to Surrealism in the Paris of the 1920s. This can also be seen in this sculpture with the title ‘Indestructible Object (or Object to Be Destroyed)’.
Many Dadaists worked with randomly found objects, which also happened to be made of wood quite often. The German artist Jean Arp made collages of rough wooden forms. There is also the famous wheel by the surrealist Marcel Duchamp, attached to a wooden chair. Like Duchamp, Man Ray took an already existing object as his starting point: not a urinal, but a wooden metronome. He projected all his feelings onto it, which he had felt for his assistant Lee and felt after the breakup.
Instructions for destruction
The sculpture already existed when the love affair ended dramatically in 1932. Man Ray then replaced the original photo of an eye with a cutout of Miller’s almond-shaped eye. And he wrote instructions with it. Also in line with surrealism which under the French writer André Breton would begin as a literary movement.
Still a loving couple here, Lee Miller and Man Ray in front of a shooting gallery.
In the instructions there is a call to radically destroy the sculpture. ‘Cut out the eye from the photo of someone who has been loved but is no longer seen. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome. Adjust the weight to the desired tempo. Keep going until the limit of the utmost bearable is reached. Then try to destroy the whole thing in one blow with a well-aimed strike of a hammer’.
This must also have actually happened. The pendulum shown at the 100th anniversary of surrealism at MoMA in New York is a replica from 1964. The original pendulum by Man Ray no longer exists.
An iron as a bed of nails
It was allowed to chafe with Man Ray. In 1921 he made another sculpture from a cast iron flat iron, with a row of pins on the sliding surface, as on a bed of nails. He gave the sculpture as a gift and therefore called it ‘The Gift’.
Man Ray became more famous for his experimental photography work. Lee Miller was also important there, as his photography assistant. Through a startled reaction in the dark room (a mouse?) she even discovered the special effects of a prematurely exposed photo. Thus they helped establish photography as an art medium within Dada and surrealist circles. Photography came to stand on equal footing with painting and sculpture.
A photo that marked the end of World War II: Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub.
Lee Miller established herself as a photographer and followed the Allied troops liberating Europe from the Nazis for Vogue magazine as the only female ‘combat photographer‘. Her photos of the concentration camps shocked the world. But even more famous became the photo that a fellow photographer took of her when she sat naked in a bath. Not only because Lee was still a beautiful photo model. It was Adolf Hitler’s bathtub. And thus the photo became an iconic image that symbolized the end of World War II.
But that is another story and is not about artists who work in wood.
Crossing from Dada to Surrealism
About the wooden pendulum you could therefore argue that Man Ray personally made the crossing with it from the chance and deliberate nonsense of Dada to the psychological expeditions into the subconscious of surrealism.
Jan Bom, October 31, 2024
