Word: rayed
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...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...
...long, clandestine love affair.) But for years, Duchamp, who lived in a modest, $40-a-month apartment in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, told his friends he'd given art up for chess and philosophical writing. He said he believed in "masterly inactivity." Indeed, he, Picabia and Ray shared a talent for cerebral sloth. They all thought up endless word games that boil down to jokes about sex. This too was art. The Tate Modern exhibition is dense with doodles and scraps full of dark joie de vivre...
...celebrity gloss that we now associate with successful art. The fun of this exhibition is the evidence of a whole culture or philosophy gradually building up, more or less by chance, from scratch. What you come away with is a great insight into unconventional ways of making art. Duchamp, Ray and Picabia were not faux rebels or officially sanctioned pets like the art stars of the present moment. Being original for them was not an affectation, but a necessity...