Imagining a new self equal to the new art of modernism; primordial and
futuristic fictions of origin in the work of Guaguin, Picasso, F. T.
Marinetti, Max Ernst, and others.
How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or
subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this
question through the works and writings of such key 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 or futuristic and technological. In
this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above
all others: the primitive and the machine. Foster begins with the
primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through
the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist
obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things
primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by
the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These new egos are
further contrasted with the bachelor machines proposed by the dadaist
Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally
ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as
well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography
of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse
to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of
Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks
of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire
in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert
Gober. Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Gods does not
impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two
into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they
share.
