King Lear
Here’s the thing about Man Ray sitting in Hollywood in 1948, chain-smoking and staring at photographs he took a decade earlier of nineteenth-century plaster shapes that some French mathematician built to explain shit that nobody except twelve people in the world could actually understand, it’s the most beautiful kind of fuck-you to meaning itself.
Much Ado About Nothing
Think about it. The guy’s in exile. All of Europe’s best minds are washing up on the California shore like interesting debris, drinking too much at parties with Stravinsky and Buñuel, pretending they’re not drowning in ennui while the orange trees bloom and the studio system grinds out its dreams. And Man Ray looks at these photographs, these mathematical models, curves and surfaces and impossible geometries that exist purely to make the invisible visible, to give form to abstraction, and he says, essentially…
Hamlet
“Yeah, these are like Hamlet.”
Macbeth
Not because they are. That’s the whole goddamn point. He writes “2 + 2 = 22” on a blackboard behind one of them like some kind of Zen koan cooked up by a hungover dadaist. He plays games getting people to match the paintings to the plays and doesn’t give a shit when they get it wrong, sometimes they got it right; sometimes of course, they didn’t, and it was just as well!
Because what he’s really painting, what he’s been painting since he put a camera down and picked up a brush again, is the space between things. The gap where meaning should be but isn’t. Where mathematics dead-ends into beauty. Where Shakespeare’s human equations of jealousy and murder and love become these white plaster things, these mute witnesses to their own incomprehensibility.
Merchant of Venice
And André Breton warned Man Ray not to show the paintings next to the actual mathematical models, said the art would get “definitely outclassed.” He was right, of course. You can’t beat mathematics for stark beauty. But that wasn’t the point either. The point was the translation itself, the impossible journey from equation to photograph to painting to Twelfth Night, each step further from any source you could pin down, each transformation more gorgeously, willfully absurd.
Twelfth Night
Man Ray took objects designed for pure reason and turned them into headless torsos, into skulls that look like breasts, into theatrical tableaux where the only drama is the refusal of sense. He made beauty out of estrangement. In Hollywood. During wartime. While Europe burned.
As You Like It
His tombstone says “unconcerned, but not indifferent,” and yes, that’s it exactly. That’s the whole Shakespeare Equations hustle in five words. Not indifferent to beauty, to form, to the ecstatic collision of incompatible things. But utterly unconcerned with whether any of it adds up.
Julius Caesar