Man Ray's mock-up for Electricite, 1931

"A PUZZLING CONTRAPTION greeted visitors to New York's Daniel Gallery in 1916: a wooden panel, bearing two bells at its top and a ringer at its base. Framed by painted f-holes, it suggested a musical instrument or a sounding apparatus; a raised handprint at center seemed to indicate its recent use. In fact, the work, appearing with the title Self-Portrait, refused to operate."

"A tiny photograph, currently on view in the Metropolitan Museum's prodigious Man Ray survey, is all that remains of this since lost work. If its absence speaks obliquely to the Dadaist disregard for aesthetic permanence, its iconography-and its iconoclastic mordancy-echoes throughout his entire corpus. Again and again, we find enigmatic encounters between the mechanical and the erotic; a self-possessed symmetry intermittently upended by formal and conceptual incongruities; disembodied signs and silhouettes in place of integral figurations."

"In these regards-and in Self-Portrait 's play between black and white, form and void, flatness and dimensionality-the work anticipates the para-photographic experiments that would soon come to occupy the artist and to influence his output in every medium. In 1921, while developing photographs for the visionary French fashion designer Paul Poiret, Man Ray accidentally made a photogram, in which objects are placed directly on photosensitive paper that is then exposed to light, creating a negative impression of the assemblage on the substrate."

A puzzling wooden panel titled Self-Portrait appeared in New York in 1916, bearing bells, a ringer, painted f-holes, and a raised handprint while refusing to operate. Its inoperability intensified the tension between abstract form and self-portraiture and enacted an impish provocation. Only a tiny photograph now survives in the Metropolitan Museum. The object's absence reflects Dadaist disregard for aesthetic permanence while its recurring iconography blends mechanical and erotic motifs, formal incongruities, and disembodied signs. In 1921 Man Ray accidentally produced cameraless prints later named Rayographs by placing objects on photosensitive paper and exposing them to light, producing collage-like images that influenced his work across media.

Read at Artforum