Word: rayed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Duchamp exhibited a urinal as art. He shocked New York when he was in his 20s with a painting supposedly of a nude woman descending a staircase, which had no woman visible, just strange, machine-like, abstract forms. All three artists did parody paintings, mocking taste. Ray painted in a bright, cheerfully kitsch style recalling décor in the background of middle-class apartments in old Hollywood movies. Picabia painted textured abstracts that had nothing but a few primitive dots on them resembling enlarged points of light. (In 1950, the art critic for TIME said they...
...exhibitionists in the pathological sense, having themselves photographed in nutty get-ups: Duchamp with his hair shampoo-lathered into devil-horn shapes or shaved in the form of a star, or dressed up as a woman; Picabia with his bare chest puffed out, posing as a classical god; and Ray in a photographic self-portrait with half a beard...
...While Ray did fashion shoots for a living, he also produced beautiful and inventive photos that advanced the medium. In various hijinks experiments, he photographed ordinary things around the house and gave them such a rich depth of tone that they seemed beautiful, like abstract art. He called a photo of an egg whisk Man after himself and the whole of humanity. And he created new techniques, including the Rayogram: the contours of everyday objects magically emerge on paper without anything actually being photographed. The Rayograms are ethereal, light-filled and lovely, though still obviously merely a saucepan...
...Ray also made comically disturbing objects. The most famous is an old-fashioned steam iron with a row of nails glued down the center, the points turned outwards, titled unreasonably but interestingly Gift...
...Sloth Ray, Picabia and Duchamp all earnestly educated their audience in seeing new ways for art to be art, while at the same time insulting that audience with attention-grabbing laziness and insouciance. They socialized and threw parties, and helped the rich collectors who were intrigued by them to choose the right works by the right established figures - Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi and so on - to improve their collections. But they pretended they couldn't be bothered to compete with such masters...