L'énigme d'Isidore Ducasse

[Jerome Marot]

Man Ray: L'énigme d'Isidore Ducasse (1920)
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The enigma of Isidore Ducasse was assembled in New York in 1920. Man Ray wrapped a sewing machine in an army blanket and tied it up with string. Like most of the objects which he made up to the late 1940s it was assembled primarily to provide an unusual subject for a photograph and then discarded.

The inspiration and the title of this object derive from a famous line in the book Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) by Comte de Lautréamont, the pseudonym adopted by the French poet Isidore Ducasse (1846-70): 'He is handsome … as the chance meeting of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissection table'. The strange juxtaposition of images in Lautréamont's writings made him almost a prophet in André Breton's mind and the image of the sewing-machine and umbrella was to become almost a maxim for the Surrealists. This photograph of The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse was reproduced in the preface to the first issue of La Revolution Surréaliste (December 1924), the Surrealists' first major periodical.

 

[Jerome Marot]

Regular visitors to this forum may have noticed a series of images characterised by the absence of something lately. It all started with the thread by Tom Dining: Windows without women, apparently started itself in response to another thread which showed a picture of a window frame with a woman (naked, so don't clic that link at work, unless your work involves watching naked women).

I noticed that in each of the pictures of window frames without women there was a bicycle. Tom answered that all he could see was the absence of a woman. I thought to myself that characterising a picture by something which was not in it was a rather surrealistic concept and that there were plenty of other subjects that were not in these photographs. So I used the famous surrealistic saying above to ask if we could have the same picture without the sewing machine and the umbrella. Obviously, there are no umbrella and no sewing machine in Tom's pictures of window frames, as well as no woman.