Prosthetic Gods - 9780262562812

How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal tothem? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of suchkey modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst.These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal orfuturistic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist artabove all others: the primitive and the machine.Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies ofGauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turnsto the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. NextFoster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticistLewis. These "new egos" are further contrasted with the "bachelor machines" proposed by the dadaistErnst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic modelsof Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in thesurrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse todissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatterpieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lostobjects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to RobertGober.Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Gods does not impose psychoanalytic theoryon modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historicalfield that they share.