Please comment on your favorite passage from Man Ray’s text.
8 thoughts on “Reading: The Age of Light”
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Please comment on your favorite passage from Man Ray’s text.
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“From the first gesture of a child pointing to an object and simply naming it, but with a world of intended meaning, to the developed mind that creates an image whose strangeness and reality stirs our subconscious to its inmost depths, the awakening of desire is the first step to participation and experience.”
To me, this passage reminds me of the existentialist or absurdist notion that the world, all that is the case, exists simply for the sake of its own existence. It is the human desire to impose meaning upon what phenomena the world presents to us that spurs on full participation and experience, whatever that means to the individual. That is, to live life with no desire to extrapolate meaning from the world is to not fully participate in what the physical world can offer. My reading of the notion of the absurd, then, is to understand that the human impulse to look for meaning should not be rejected simply because the world may not have a meaning; rather, this very impulse is what give humanity, at least, the possibility for a fulfilled and experience-full — if necessarily not meaningful — life. In this sense, the creation of art and image is the manifestation of the impulse to derive meaning from the world, be it the physical world that is all that is the case or the representational world. In writing this text, Man Ray seems more interested in the abstract representation of the world (either lexical or psychoanalytical), perhaps because it is through the interaction between this representational impulse and the physical world that art is created. Perhaps this representational impulse comes from the interaction between the physical world as it is, the precise inadequacy of our representational systems in reflecting this world, and the ability of the same representational system to create something that appears strange to our inputs (precisely because it does not come from the world, but rather from the systems which are abstracted from the world). Perhaps if anything can “[stirs] our subconscious to its inmost depths,” it is the strangeness of an image which finds its genesis not in the world alone, but in the representational systems we create to evoke the world.
“No plastic expression can ever be more than a residue of an experience”
I like this statement because I feel it explains how the picture itself is not what makes it significant, its what it depicts, what is captured. Also how the image, despite our carrying it into the present, will always display the past from the moment it is taken.
I think it additionally brings into question how nowadays often people use Instagram or Facebook to upload pictures to “validate” their experience – if theres not a picture it didn’t happen. But then I feel you have to ask if a picture can really justify the experience as a whole? The photo is a static and single moment captured in between many other moments.
Do you think that an image is important only because of what it depicts?
Does this mean that a ‘plastic expression’ (image) is only as good as it’s ability to depict something else?
It seems as if Ray fails to take into account that an image is in itself also an experience.
What would be the relation between these two?
“Each one of us, in his timidity, has a limit beyond which he is outraged.” I like this statement because I think it applies to everyone in all situations. Everyone has a limit in terms of timidity, when the limit is broken individual might behave aggressively. Thus, I believe individuals must respect the boundaries of others within the society. This statement really does resonates with me especially because I really do try my best to stay clear of people’s boundaries.
“No plastic expression can ever be more than a residue of an experience”
This line of the passage really stood out to me, as I believe pictures are just more than a plastic expressions. Pictures carry two sets of emotions among them, first the emotions that are captured in the picture itself, like the joy in the face of a little boy smiling at his father. Secondly the carry keep our emotions alive for that very moment, no matter how far past that picture might have been taken, and remind us of that moment. I believe it is an extraordinary event as pictures in reality are not anything more than milliseconds of light being exposed to a film. I cannot recall anything else in life, which is created with such simplicity, that carries such complex emotions within itself.
“All progress results from an intense individual desire to improve the immediate present, from an all-conscious sense of material insufficiency. In this exalted state, material action imposes itself and takes the form of revolution in one form or another. Race and class, like styles, then become irrelevant, while the emotion of the human individual becomes universal.”
This part in the first paragraph of the article really stays in my mind after many times of reading it. I remember how we talked about the advancing of visual art in class and one thing has gradually popped up in my head is that visual art has become more and more accessible and “general”. What I mean by that is nowadays people don’t really need certain education level or experiences to appreciate and understand art pieces. Like the process of creating art itself has become more common and reachable. We witness more and more contemporary art pieces focus on internal emotions and desires rather than skills and techniques. The trend connects the artists and their audiences well in the sense of sharing our universal human desire as the passage stated in my opinion. When this connection is achieved the piece becomes universal and the emotion behind it will be captured timelessly.
“For, whether a painter, emphasizing the importance of the idea he wishes to convey introduces bits of ready-made chromos alongside his handiwork, or whether another, working directly with light and chemistry, so deforms the subject as almost to hide the identity of the original, and creates a new form, the ensuing violation of the medium employed is the most perfect assurance of the author’s convictions. A certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indispensable to the purest realization of this idea.”
I really like this phrase as it ties really tightly with the conversation that the prof and another couple of us had in his office hours. The idea that pictures can convey not only the facts that it is displaying, but also feelings, or to address some common concerns of society. For example, one can read violence and bully from a beaten up child, but they can also read that from a picture including cursed language in a school environment.
I appreciate how Man Ray discusses the universality of human emotion and desire and how awakening this desire is the first step to experience and participation. And how an effort impelled by desire must have an automatic or subconscious energy to aid its realization. What I found particularly interesting in this was his strong surrealist thinking of how the potential for this energy could be limitless if we were to draw on them without shame or propriety. I agree with him on this section because there is a limit we place on ourselves that extends well beyond fine arts when we are too concerned with social norms. Of course, I’m not advocating to disregard propriety completely.
What is intriguing though is that although the universality of human emotion and desire may connect us all, it can be potentially alienating in a way. Drawing from the surrealist idea that everyone has, to varying extents, suppressed desires, exhibiting or professing such desires is what casts the shame on the individual. This just reinforces the repression of desires. Man Ray ends by saying “Open confidences are being made every day, and it remains for the eye to train itself to see them without prejudice or restraint.”, with “Open confidences” meaning repressed desires. I just find it too idealistic to ask of this from everyone.