If you are unable to come to UMMA in person due to illness, quarantine, etc., you can choose a work from this set of surrealist and surrealist-adjacent pieces from the UMMA collection. 
59 Items in this Learning Collection
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Copyright
All Rights Reserved ()

What We All Lack (Ce qui manque à nous tous)

Accession Number
1997/1.129

Title
What We All Lack (Ce qui manque à nous tous)

Artist(s)
Man Ray

Artist Nationality
American (North American)

Object Creation Date
1962

Medium & Support
blown glass, clay, and wood

Dimensions
6 1/2 in. x 4 9/16 in. x 13/16 in. ( 16.5 cm x 11.6 cm x 2 cm )

Credit Line
Gift of the Lannan Foundation in Honor of the Pelham Family

Label copy
2014 Additions:
Man Ray
United States, 1890–1976
What We All Lack (Ce que manque à nous tous)
1962
Blown glass, clay, and wood
Gift of the Lannan Foundation in Honor of the Pelham Family, 1997/1.129
Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who made Paris his home. Best known for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray also produced major works in a variety of media and considered himself a painter first and foremost. He first conceived this piece in 1927 in the spirit of the Surrealist sculpture, in which objects were freed of their names and elevated from their status as mere cultural artifacts to that of art. Its title is derived from a quote by Friedrich Engels, one of the founding philosophers of communism, that was reproduced in capital letters on the cover of the December 1926 volume of the Surrealist group’s
magazine, La Révolution surréaliste. Engels said, “What these gentlemen lack is dialectic”; Man Ray clarified, “what we all lack is imagination.”
Man Ray did not explore the psychoanalytic roots of personal obsessions and fantasies like his contemporaries, who were profoundly affected by the ideas of Freud. His objects were not “objects of desire,” but rather, in his words, “objects of affection.” The lightheartedness of the artist’s message is conveyed both by the delicate, ephemeral bubble, and the whimsical act of blowing bubbles.

Subject matter
Playing with the meaning attached to the pipe, a staple of Dadaist and Surrealist conceptual art, Man Ray invites us to make a story that connects the objects, the pipe and the bubble, and the title, "What We All Lack."

Physical Description
A clear glass bubble rests on the bowl of a plain white clay pipe. Along the stem of the pipe are the words, "Ce que [sic] manque à nous tous."

Primary Object Classification
Mixed Media

Primary Object Type
assemblage

Collection Area
Modern and Contemporary

Rights
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please visit http://umma.umich.edu/request-image for more information and to fill out the online Image Rights and Reproductions Request Form.

Keywords
Conceptual
Surrealism
assemblages (sculpture)
books
bubbles
modern and contemporary art
pipe
pipes (smoking equipment)
words

9 Related Resources

The Bubble
(Part of: Many Voices)
Absence
(Part of 5 Learning Collections)
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(Part of 3 Learning Collections)
Installation Images from Ernestine Ruben at Willow Run: Mobilizing Memory
(Part of: Mobilizing Memory: Ernestine Ruben at Willow Run)
Curating Covid
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& Author Notes

All Rights Reserved

On display

UMMA Gallery Location ➜ FFW, Mezzanine ➜ M01 (Joan and Robert Tisch Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art)