Man Ray, czyli o odzyskiwaniu „pomiędzy” słowem a obrazem
Man Ray, or Recovering the “In-between” between Word and Image

Summary/Abstract: Taking the current debate on the relationship and interrelationshipsbetween artistic media as my departure point, in this article I discuss the workof Man Ray, one of the most recognizable representatives of early modernism,whose achievements, especially literary, are still too little known as examples ofmodernist artistic self-consciousness. Reclaiming his visual works, writings andvarious multimedia hybrids as a rich historical source can, in my opinion, help tomake visible and “recover” for the contemporary discourse on the transmedialcondition what Rosalind Krauss dubs the “inner lining” of a medium or form andMarjorie Perloff, quoting Khlebnikov, describes as the “strings of the alphabet”hidden by “phantoms” or Wittgensteinian “imaginings”. The art of Man Ray, unjustifiablyconsidered by many “lightweight”, attests to the validity of Walter Benjamin’sassertions about the importance of any particular medium or technologicalform for, as Krauss has it, “restructuring the condition of the other arts”. In hisvisual and verbal realizations (which he called visual poetry), one can discerntraces that Perloff has been following for years in her search for “the unfulfilledpromise of the revolutionary poetic impulse”, pointing to what, though difficult toname, exists “in between”, in the Duchampian realm of inframince. Captured inwords and images, reflection on such matters is omnipresent in Man Ray, but itsdepth and multiple meanings acquire a new dimension when his canvases, collages,constructions, photographs, rayographs or films are “read” in the contextof his surprisingly rich and varied writings. “Recovering” the multitude of themesand motifs contained in them is significant as another, to many quite unexpected,confirmation of the endurance of the avant-garde gesture.

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