May Ray as an Artist and Photographer: Problems of Self-identification

Abstract

This article considers the problems of self-identification by Man Ray (1890–1976) as a painter and photographer in the first half of the 20 th century, the era of formation of a new aesthetic paradigm that included the de-mythologisation of the artist and creator and the originality of an artwork. The author’s name which functions now as a part of cultural marketing, having merged with the concept of ‘brand’ on the structural level, is enhanced by its consonance with a stylistic device or even by its visual alliteration with artistic methods, eventually becoming the semiotic or symbolic function of the artist. Man Ray invented a new name for himself, later using it as a name for one of the ways of getting cameraless photographic prints, thereby consciously creating an ‘art-product’ by means of an analogy with a commodity. His intention to become an artist, and change his family identification became an internal premise of this ‘mental’ gesture associated with external circumstances, and changes that were occurring in the world. All of his diverse artistic practices illustrate the way in which the artist tried to comprehend the formal dualism of his art that was divided into experiments and commercial activity. The ‘author’s brand’ reconciles these antagonistic differences, proving that the artist himself is the only source of his artworks and the only reason for their originality. The author becomes a kind of ‘creative factory’, producing ‘updates’ under their name, and plays the role of a regulator of the process, typical of the bourgeois era of individualism and pragmatism. As early as in his painting devoid of plot, Man Ray offers a new form for the functioning of the artist’s name in the conditions of destruction of traditional ideas of authorship. Later on, he demonstrates his own involvement in the study of self-identification with the help of photography, where the questions of originality and artistic value are largely determined by its context.