Between you and me: Man Ray's Object to Be Destroyed - Cover Story

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The back-and-forth motion of the metronome's pendulum models its capacity to reposition agency among the artist, object, and viewer. With each stroke, the object asserts its capacity to aggress its maker or viewer, but also tempts that person to take control and destroy the work. These shifting loci of agency can be theorized in terms of the social order and the individual psyche. As explained by Michel Foucault, the confession ritualizes a power relation in which the speaking subject is simultaneously active and acted upon. At the same time, Freudian psychoanalysis offers an understanding of the formations of sadism and masochism as complementary and vacillating. Thus, Foucault's theory helps us to understand the process of storytelling undertaken by Man Ray, whereas Freud's contribution addresses the failure of those stories to contain the work of art. Man Ray's autobiography conforms to the constructs of the confession by revealing his sexual proclivities and professing a tendency toward sadomasochism, but his art object exceeds the codified narrative of violent eroticism presented in his text. Furthermore, the power play enacted in the Object to Be Destroyed is fundamentally gendered; the object assumes a feminine identity through the prominence of the eye. In this vein, the eye is eroticized and disembodied, but at the same time it assumes the unconventional position of activity through its movement with the metronome and its unflagging connotation of observation.

Within Man Ray's immediate context of Surrealism, an art object that reproduces the destabilizing embrace of desire was understood to transport the viewer to an alternative reality, that of surreality, where both social and political verities could be challenged and reordered. Such a conception of freedom can be linked to Man Ray's well-known fascination with the philosophies of the Marquis de Sade, but it should also be considered within the specific context of the ethnographer and practicing sadomasochist William B. Seabrook, with whom Man Ray collaborated around 1930. Although not well studied, Seabrook's interaction with Man Ray likely resulted in the conception of Object to Be Destroyed as an intermittent surrogate for the desires of the lover and the loved, the aggressor and the aggressed.

Confessions

On the third page of Self Portrait, Man Ray recalled an early episode in his erotic and artistic life: "Looking back, I can not help admiring the diversity of my curiosity, and my inventiveness. I was really another Leonardo da Vinci. My interests embraced, besides painting, human anatomy, both male and female; ballistics and mechanics in general. For the first, I used my brother, two younger sisters, and casual playmates as guinea pigs. One outraged little girl complained to her mother and I received a thrashing, which I almost enjoyed." He then added, "Was I a budding sadist or masochist?" (11) With this, we are introduced to Man Ray--both as successor to the incomparable curiosity of Leonardo and as potential sexual deviant. Man Ray's audacity is remarkable on both counts.