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

"Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow. (1) With these words, Man Ray declared an art object that was at the edge of his control. The formula for creating the work was given. Reproduction and demolition were sanctioned. Even the emotional content was transferable. This was an object that could provoke and accept the blows of anyone's desire.

From atop a metronome, a single photographic eye stares out at us with composure. It is a lovely eye, framed by an elegant brow. The carefully rounded corners of the black-and-white photograph attest to the care with which it was handled before being paper-clipped to the metronome. Set into motion, however, the eye aggresses, disturbs, and taunts. Ticking back and forth, it regulates and controls us, stealing our will to act against it. Like a petulant child learning to play piano, we are angry and resentful, resentful of the eye that will not stop watching, will not stop beating its time. With nerves frayed and frustration pent up, we are at the edge. We pick up the hammer, smash the metronome to bits; its springs and weights scatter. Bent metal and splintered wood fly across the floor. There is a moment of release, even satisfaction, as our arm drops limply. But then we notice that the photograph is not so damaged. Creased perhaps ... abraded from the scrapes of the shattered metronome, but the eye still stares placidly, oblivious to the destruction wrought in its wake.

Acting upon his own authorization, Man Ray produced and reproduced the assemblage known as Object to Be Destroyed (1923-32) over the course of about forty years. Often dated to 1923 following Man Ray's chronology, (2) the eye and metronome made their first public appearance as an ink drawing entitled Object of Destruction (1932, Morton G. Neumann Collection, Chicago) in a special Surrealist issue of the avant-garde journal This Quarter guest edited by Andre Breton. (3) The actual assemblage debuted at the Galerie Pierre Colle as CEil-metronome [Eye-Metronome] in a 1933 exhibition of Surrealist objects; the original drawing was exhibited in Alfred Barr's 1936 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art. (4) Subsequent incarnations went by the titles Lost Object (1945), Indestructible Object (1958), and Last Object (1966), until a late edition finally took the now-appropriate designation Perpetual Motif (1972). (5)

Whether Man Ray ever actually destroyed a metronome with ticking eye is open to debate; he told conflicting stories on this point. At one moment late in life he stated his lasting intention "to destroy it one day, but before witnesses or an audience in the course of a lecture. (6) At another time, he recalled how the work was fully realized at the moment of its first demolition: "A painter needs an audience, so I also clipped the photo of an eye to the metronome's swinging arm to create the illusion of being watched as I painted. One day I did not accept the metronome's verdict, the silence was numberable and since I had called it, with certain premonition, Object of Destruction, I smashed it to pieces. (7) Despite these inconsistencies, Man Ray remained consistent about the viewer's importance to his conception of the work. (8) The object alternately stood in and performed for its audience--and the audience was in turn solicited to perpetrate the object's violence. The metronome's destiny to be appropriated by its viewers was thus fully realized when a version was smashed by a group of protesting students in 1957. (9)

If Object to Be Destroyed usurps authorial control by merging the roles of artist and viewer, it also consolidates meaning around the specific life of the artist. Submitted, as it was in This Quarter, with the instructions quoted above, the assemblage not only makes itself available to the viewer's rage, but also designates the artist's lost love. The definitive version of the work memorializes Man Ray's onetime apprentice, darkroom assistant, lover, and model, the photographer Lee Miller. Such an association might seem inconsequential if not for Man Ray's own tendency to weave personal anecdotes around his artistic endeavors. Made public largely through his 1963 autobiography entitled Self Portrait, details of Man Ray's private life--his abusive love relationships, sadomasochistic fantasies, and desperation in the face of rejection--have played a significant part in the interpretation of his career. (10) Rather than refusing the relevance of such autobiographical points of reference, this essay proposes to take seriously the structure of Man Ray's tales to understand how they approximate the operations of control and submission embodied by Object to Be Destroyed. In doing so, this essay interrogates more generalized possibilities for the disruption of power and authority, sexuality and gender, as negotiated in creative actions. The narrative that Man Ray tells about his life attempts to recapture the authority he relinquishes in his most inventive art works, but I argue here that his written words precisely fail to regain control because they inscribe his actions within a number of predetermined structures of confession and desire. His object elaborates an inability to recoup power over desire through words.