In Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814), the lounging woman’s unusually elongated hips were derided by critics as anatomically illogical. Artist Taffy pulled the subject’s spine very harshly, a medical scientist I have since estimated She has at least five additional vertebrae, which is actually a malformation that causes severe paralysis. Rather than enhancing sexuality, these interventions misalign the subject’s body. In Man Ray’s photograph, the location of the F hole conceptually undermines Kiki’s sonic capabilities. They shut her up.
“A teasing emblem of love and control”
Also, it doesn’t end there. These scars are also marks of enslavement. When Man Ray created his work in 1924, the F hole was the center of attention. Once associated primarily with first-rate orchestral instruments, its meaning has begun to expand. Modern mandolins were already equipped with sound holes, and the year before Man Ray created Le Violon d’Ingres, Gibson introduced the L-5 archtop guitar, the first of its kind to utilize an f-hole for the masses, giving the instrument the volume and resonance it needed for performance in dance halls and jazz clubs. Suddenly, the F-hole wasn’t just shorthand for projection and power, it became a symbol of commodified culture and mass-produced sound. By tattooing Kiki on her back, they branded her and made her an object to be bought and sold.
Yet, paradoxically, they deepen the photographs’ meaning and enrich their range of cultural resonance. The violin has long carried occult overtones in art, music, and literature, from Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death (1562), in which Death plays the violin, to Niccolò Paganini’s surreal violin virtuosity, which sparked rumors of a pact with Faust. The connection between the violin and our invisible world was well known to Man Ray’s contemporaries. Ten years before Violon d’Angle, Marcel Proust likened the experience of listening to a violin to being “like listening to the voice of a captive genie struggling in agony in the darkness…like a pure supernatural being whose invisible message is revealed as it passes by.” By fusing the shape of the kiki with the shape of the violin, Man Ray taps into an interesting tradition of grasping the ungraspable.
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In Man Ray’s imagination, images like Le Violin d’Angle were created as talismans to evoke invisible spirits. The so-called “rayograph” technique featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit, devised by artists as an immaterial interpretation of physical X-rays, was highly ritualistic. To create these, the artist sought to circumvent the soulless camera machinery by placing objects directly onto photosensitive paper. He believed that this process allowed him to access hidden energies and dimensions beyond human perception.
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
