Red Couch
(Reclining woman) Man Ray
I saw this painting during my senior year of high school. It was on view at the Syracuse University Art Museum the weekend I went upstate to tour the school. I liked that it was by Man Ray and I remembered the red couch.
When a painting is remembered, in the memory of, dream of, impression of the work, the subject and the object are tied.
A sentence happens in order, a painting happens at once. The object takes the weight of the subject’s action in the same instant as the action undertaken.
The guitar is not Blue; The sofa is not there.
So a painting is special: an object, a blue guitar, can change the subject, things as they are.
“My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects.
“Finally, I have sought to study-it is my current work-the way a human being turns himself into a subject. For example, I have chosen the domain of sexuality-how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of "sexuality."”
Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power 1982
Something about the Red Couch transcends the question of objectification of its sitter by successfully fusing the subject and the object in literal and literary and figurative and symbolic terms. That burdensome question of objectification of the muse, the question of the painter's (male) gaze, can be abandoned because it is admitted. The woman is a Red Couch. The man is his blue guitar. The equality is addictive.
Photographers Kevin Clarke and Horst Wackerbarth took their red couch on the road for their book The Red Couch, A Portrait of America. The red couch is the subject, people who sit on it fungible, dependent. Often the red couch is photographed on its own, both the subject and object of the portrait. Clarke via NYT: “I thought of Man Ray and his idea of when objects dream, and the dream of the red couch was to travel and see America.”
The muse is obviously there to be “objectified,” that is, rendered still and material through the process of painting, but an artist with esteem for his subject such as Man Ray, or Kevin Clarke, would not equate objectification with subjugation. Man Ray’s objects have agency, Tristan Tzarza imagined Man Ray’s objects dream. The Red Couch is an old friend of mine.
MAN RAY WHEN OBJECTS DREAM AT THE MET
September 14, 2025–February 1, 2026
writing does not confer imporatance, it reflects it - greta gerwig
Man guitar woman violin not so different are they