Man Ray made this work in 1923, but transformed it a decade later, following a devastating breakup with Lee Miller—a fellow photographer who had also been his assistant, muse, and model. Distraught, he replaced the original eye with a cut-out from a photograph of Miller’s eye. Though he attached only a fragmented image of Miller to the metronome, the accompanying instructions suggest that for Man Ray, the object was an emotionally evocative portrait. The instructions invite us to create our own Indestructible Object, and then, quite radically, destroy it.
"Cut out the eye from the photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow."
