“When Objects Dream,” the sensational Man Ray show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 1), is centered on the artist’s refined experiments with the cameraless images he called rayographs: the shadowy impressions left on photographic paper by scattered objects after the paper has been exposed to light. It should come as no surprise that his first experiments in the form, published, in 1922, as a suite of twelve abstract images, are among his most accomplished. Ray had already channelled the antic, subversive spirit of Dada and Surrealism with a series of readymade sculptures that included a flatiron studded with a row of tacks. But, like Marcel Duchamp, Ray was a movement unto himself. No matter t…
“When Objects Dream,” the sensational Man Ray show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 1), is centered on the artist’s refined experiments with the cameraless images he called rayographs: the shadowy impressions left on photographic paper by scattered objects after the paper has been exposed to light. It should come as no surprise that his first experiments in the form, published, in 1922, as a suite of twelve abstract images, are among his most accomplished. Ray had already channelled the antic, subversive spirit of Dada and Surrealism with a series of readymade sculptures that included a flatiron studded with a row of tacks. But, like Marcel Duchamp, Ray was a movement unto himself. No matter the medium—painting, sculpture, film, photography—he reimagined it with a focussed intelligence and a deadpan wit that still looks definitively avant-garde.
“Untitled,” 1931.Photograph © Man Ray 2015 Trust / ARS / ADAGP / Courtesy Bluff Collection
At the Met, the curators Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson set up a lively dialogue across mediums, which shows how all of Ray’s work from the nineteen-twenties and onward was intimately connected to his experiments in photography. Their installation opens up like a series of magic boxes, with windows that draw visitors deep into the exhibition, across time and space. As promised, many of the most astonishing images are photograms that, even when we can make out their ordinary components—a magnet, a pipe, a key, a handgun—glow like visions from another consciousness. And they always illuminate a painting or a sculpture nearby. Ray’s “Lampshade” (1921), a curl of painted tin suspended from a thin metal pole, anticipates the elegance and simplicity of many rayographs that followed. A group of solarized photographs, including some of Ray’s most famous portraits and nudes, capture the soft, silvery quality of many of the rayographs in a more concentrated form.
Ray’s most chaotic photograms—jumbles that push out of the frame or look like time bombs ready to explode—find echoes in his films, projected on the back walls, a show in themselves. Nervous, comic, plotless, and mesmerizing, his experimental shorts are classic underground cinema. Their restless energy doesn’t exactly tie everything together, but they help highlight the spirit of inventiveness that electrifies the exhibition as a whole.—Vince Aletti
About Town
Broadway
In James Graham’s “PUNCH,” based on Jacob Dunne’s memoir “Right from Wrong,” Jacob (an impressive Will Harrison) is an aggressive lad from Nottingham, who kills a man at a bar with a single punch. A restorative-justice initiative links Jacob to the victim’s parents, whose interest in him manages to counter the forces drawing him back toward violence. Graham’s play, imported from the U.K. by Manhattan Theatre Club, is essentially a public-service announcement for the program that helped Dunne, its facts enlivened by the director Adam Penford’s peripatetic choreography. Dunne’s individual story has value, poignancy, and warmth, but the play’s wider implication—that class paralysis can only be disrupted by tragedy—chills the blood.—Helen Shaw (Samuel J. Friedman; through Nov. 2.)
Alt-Pop
The producer and guitarist Nate Amos and the singer Rachel Brown, the duo behind the indie band Water from Your Eyes, were once a couple; ironically, they only locked in after they broke up. The pair started in Chicago, releasing four albums amid a move to Brooklyn, but they truly discovered their balance on the 2021 LP “Structure,” which Brown credits with helping them become friends again. Since signing to Matador, the band has sharpened its sound into a quirky, exhilarated alt-pop, too uncanny to be dance-punk and too lively to be slacker rock. “Everyone’s Crushed,” from 2023, brought all of the band’s previous exploits into alignment with a nihilistic sense of humor, while the latest Water from Your Eyes album, “It’s a Beautiful Place,” is beefier and harder to pin down, as the duo search for optimism amid absurdity.—Sheldon Pearce (Bowery Ballroom; Oct. 10.)
Art
“Community Service,” 2024.Art work by Parmen Daushvili / Courtesy the artist / Polina Berlin Gallery; Photograph by Steven Probert
Entering the London-based painter Parmen Daushvili’s world of beautiful muted colors, with its aquamarine blues and greens, is rather like entering a pool filled with eucalyptus-infused water—cool, refreshing, and transformative to both body and spirit. While the figures in some of the larger canvases are reminiscent of Lucian Freud’s twisting and turning sitters, Daushvili’s strongest work is not monumental but small and intimate. The outstanding “Community Service” (2024) is populated by a single person who seems to move toward us even while standing still under the scrim of the painter’s beautiful sense of color and his poetic, and ultimately gentle, sensibility.—Hilton Als (Polina Berlin; through Oct. 11.)
Off Broadway
The vanishing, last year, of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” from Broadway (cape whooshes mysteriously) makes way for its not-quite-replacement, “Masquerade,” an immersive version directed by Diane Paulus. Theatregoers, dressed in cocktail attire, pursue—but do not apprehend!—the famously masked monster and his soprano abductee, chasing them from the vaulted basement of a midtown building to its roof. Even diligent Webberheads will need to overlook certain gaffes, like a hero who seems to have tied himself up in a climactic moment and a Stygian lair well marked with glowing Exit signs. The excitement of extraordinary voices singing close by fades, too, due to the necessity of canned accompaniment—it’s somehow not that scary to be stalked by a phantom of the karaoke.—H.S. (218 W. 57th St.; through Feb. 1.)
Dance
Paris Opera Ballet performing “Red Carpet.”Photograph by Julien Benhamou
For its first visit to New York since 2012, the Paris Opera Ballet isn’t bringing any of the classical works for which it is known, but instead a new piece by the brand-name Israeli-born contemporary choreographer Hofesh Shechter. His “Red Carpet” does supply some expected Parisian glamour: red velvet curtains, costumes by Chanel, a giant chandelier as in “The Phantom of the Opera.” But the mode is his usual earthy dream, with live music that suggests rock concerts and dance clubs, clumps of bodies that sink and slink as arms float overhead, and shifting lines and circles out of some feral folk dance.—Brian Seibert (City Center; Oct. 9-12.)
Movies
Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, a longtime star professional wrestler, brings wit and insight to his leading role in “The Smashing Machine,” a bio-pic about the mixed-martial-arts fighter Mark Kerr. The writer and director, Benny Safdie, presents the story from 1997, when Kerr had his first triumphs, to 2000, when personal problems caught up with him. Safdie perceptively locates the protagonist’s troubling inner contradictions—the atavistic fury that drives him to compete and the intense self-control that competition demands—but dramatizes such outer crises as opioid addiction and conflict with his girlfriend (Emily Blunt) only schematically. The director’s approach is coolly distant and underpowered; even scenes of bloody battle in the ring feel merely informational. Nonetheless, Johnson’s performance is eerily introverted and tautly disciplined; his presence is commanding from start to finish.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)
Bar Tab
Dan Stahl finds I.P.A.s, arcade games, and portals in FiDi.
Illustration by Patricia Bolaños
If you play it right, a visit to the new, FiDi outpost of Barcade—the hybrid arcade and craft-beer bar that originated in Williamsburg twenty-one years ago—leads to a quasi-inter-dimensional portal. Your first move, after entering, is to advance to the stone countertop on your left. Survey the chalkboard menu, rich in I.P.A.s, and choose according to your mettle. If that means the Evil Twin Pink Pineapple, prepare for a goblet of roseate brew whose tartness zaps the mouth like a laser. Explore your surroundings. Some may look familiar: pinball machines, Ms. Pac-Man, Street Fighter. Others may seem foreign, literally, such as 超・ちゃぶ台返し!, a Japanese game whose name signifies “extreme table flipping!” A knowledge of the language will aid you, as the instructions are in kanji. “At the wedding . . . something’s happened,” a player recently endeavored to translate. He commenced pounding a small table attached to the machine, then victoriously upended it. Onscreen, a bridezilla sent an equivalent table soaring through a banquet hall, felling at least one chandelier. Venture to the far corner of the bar, where a staircase descends to a subterranean wood-panelled lair; perhaps the greatest arcade game of all time, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; and the aforementioned portal. Amid the blinking screens and battered tabletops, with a synth-heavy eighties anthem mingling with ambient beeps and boops, you may feel yourself transported four decades back—or, if you’ve imbibed liberally, into another reality altogether, one in which you are somehow a character in the universe of games surrounding you. But this state is fleeting, especially during family hours on Sunday, when a parental call to arms can instantly return you to the real world: “Hey, Susan—I have to change Reesie’s diaper!”
A New Yorker Quiz
It’s finally feeling like fall. Can you guess who wrote these autumnal works?
A poem, from earlier this year, which opens with the lines, “Black walnuts hitting a barn roof / Fairly rapped the morning.”
A poem, from 2017, which includes a stanza that reads, “Fall was approaching. / But I remember / it was always approaching / once school ended.”
A story, written around 1961, which begins “November. Cold outside. It was warm inside, and the big combination played twelve wonderful records without stopping.”
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: