黑料不打烊

On September 6th 2023, Luxembourg + Co., New York, will open Man Ray: Other Objects. The first of its kind, this exhibition invites visitors to experience in person the premise of an artist鈥檚 practice that relied on and relished in the absence of originals.

Often considered as unique artworks, Man Ray鈥檚 original sculptures possibly never existed. They are often only known through the artist鈥檚 accounts in writing, conversations, or conspicuously dated photographs. In place of these absent signifiers, however, Man Ray created alternative variations on multiples occasions throughout his career, under morphed titles, materials, and in various quantities. These he sometimes called 鈥榬eplicas鈥�, on other occasions 鈥榚ditions鈥�, and when something clicked and the work really evolved, he would refer to them as 鈥榥ew originals鈥�. In either case, however, objects never emerged in Man Ray鈥檚 practice merely as copies of an earlier, superior version. Rather, they were each a new stage in the life of the piece, an accumulation of meaning that had come to create a more complex entity.

A metronome with an eye pending on its needle, a flat iron with tacks on its surface, a hanging mobile made of coat hangers, a plaster female torso tied in rope, and a group of small vertical sculptures fondly nicknamed 鈥榤onuments鈥� by the artist, these are the five objects that constitute the exhibition. They are familiar symbols of Dada and Surrealist sensibility, yet all tell mysterious stories about their inception in the 1910s and 20s that puts their very existence in doubt. Rather than showing one example of each, as it has been the case in previous displays of the artist鈥檚 work, Man Ray: Other Objects exposes the evolution of each object in its various states, alternatives, and titles. The exhibition is therefore an unlikely experiment that places a defined group of objects side by side only to exemplify how inconsistency, difference and originality can be manifested through the process of reproduction and multiplication.