Man Ray’s Deadpan Wit on Display at the Met

“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.

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