Les Champs Délicieux: Man Ray, 1922
Les Champs Délicieux: Man Ray, 1922
Tristan Tzara
No longer does an object, by crossing the trajectories of its outer edges within the iris, project a badly inverted image on the surface. The photographer has invented a new method: he presents to space an image that exceeds it, and the air, with its clenched fists and superior intelligence, seizes it and holds it next to its heart.
An ellipse turns around the partridge; is it a cigarette box? The photographer turns the spit of his thoughts to the sputtering of a poorly greased moon.
Light varies according to how stunned the pupil is by the coldness of paper, according to the weight of the light and the shock that it causes. A wisp of delicate tree conjures up metalbearing beds of earth, or bursting plumes of water. It lights the hallway of the heart with a lace of snow. And what interests us is without reason and without motive, like a cloud dropping its load of rain.
But let’s speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera. But, you say, there is no color, no trembling of the brush. At first this uncertain quiver was a weakness that justified itself by calling itself sensitivity. Apparently the virtues of human imperfection are to be taken more seriously than the virtues of a machine’s precision. And still lifes? I would like to know if hors-d’oeuvres, desserts, and baskets of game are not more attractive to the breath of our appetite. I listen to a snake whirring in a mine of petroleum; a torpedo twisting its mouth; dishes breaking during domestic quarrels. Why don’t they make portraits of this? Because what this concerns is a medium that conveys a special commotion to those who approach it, but that uses up neither eyes nor colors.
The painters saw this, they gathered in a circle, they argued for a long time, and they came up with some laws of decomposition. And laws of construction. And of convolution. And laws of intelligence and comprehension, of sales, of reproduction, of dignity and preservation in museums. Others came along afterward with cries of enlightenment to say that what the first ones had done was nothing but cheap bird excrement. In its place they proposed their own merchandise, an impressionist diagram reduced to a vulgar though charming symbol. For a moment I believed in their cries, the cries of idiots scoured by fountains of snow, but I very quickly perceived that they were only tormented by a fruitless jealousy. They all ended up confecting English postcards. After having known Nietzsche and sworn on their mistresses, after having extracted the enamel from their friends’ corpses, they declared that beautiful children deserved good paintings in oil, and the best of these was the one that returned the highest price. Paintings with tailcoats and curled hair, in gilded frames. To them this is marble; to us, our chambermaid’s urine.
When everything we call art had become thoroughly arthritic, a photographer lit up the thousand candles of his lamp, and the sensitized paper absorbed bit by bit the black outlines of some everyday objects. With a fresh and delicate flash of light, he invented a force that surpassed in importance all the constellations intended for our visual pleasure. The mechanical, exact, unique, and correct distortion is fixed, smooth, and filtered like a mane of hair through a comb of light.
Is it a spiral of water or the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? As a mirror throws back an image without effort, as an echo throws back a voice without asking why, the beauty of matter belongs to no one: from now on it is a product of physics and chemistry.
After the grand inventions and the tempests, pockets of magic wind sweep away all the little swindles worked by sensitivity, knowledge, and intelligence. The dealer in light values accepts the bet proposed by the stableboys. The measure of oats they give to the horses of modern art each morning and evening will not disrupt the thrilling course of his game of chess with the sun.
August 1922
