Prosthetic Gods (October Books)

490 Pages·2004·4.96 MB·English

by  Hal Foster

M762113front.qxd 10/14/04 9:40 AM Page 1
art OCTOBER GProsothetdic s
Also by Hal Foster
The Return of the Real:The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century
Prosthetic Hal Foster
The Return of the Real discusses the development of art and theory since 1960,and rethinks Gods
How to imagine not only a new art or architecture
the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes.Opposed to the assumption that G
but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic
contemporary art is only belated,Foster argues that the avant-garde is always repositioned by
P Gods Hal Foster explores this question through
innovative practice in the present.And he poses this retroactive model of critical art and
theory against the pervasive undoing of progressive culture today. r the works and writings of such key modernists as
o Gauguin and Picasso,F.T.Marinetti and Wyndham
“The Return of the Real is a model of cultural criticism at its most incisive.” os Lewis,Adolf Loos and Max Ernst.These diverse fig-
t
—Martin Jay,Department of History,University of California,Berkeley h ures were all fascinated by fictions of origin,either
e primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological.
“Hal Foster offers a guiding intelligence for anyone who wants to know why contemporary dt In this way,Foster argues,two forms came to domi-
i
art matters in the wider debates about the shape and direction of American culture.” c nate modernist art above all others:the primitive and
—Thomas Crow,Director of the Getty Research Institute the machine.
s Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of
Compulsive Beauty Gauguin and Picasso,which he examines through the
Surrealism has long been seen as its leader,André Breton,wanted it to be seen:as a movement Freudian lens of the primal scene.He then turns to
dedicated to love and liberation.Here Foster reads surrealism from its other,dark side:as an the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos,
art given over to the uncanny—to the compulsion to repeat and the death drive.Compulsive who abhorred all things primitive.Next Foster con-
Beauty not only offers a deconstructive reading of surrealism but also participates in a critical siders the technophilic subjects propounded by the
reconsideration of modernist art at large,the dominant accounts of which have long obscured futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis.These
its involvements with capitalist development,technological shock,and historical trauma. “new egos”are further contrasted with the “bachelor
machines”proposed by the Dadaist Ernst.Foster also
“In exhilarating,thoughtful and subtle arguments,Foster takes surrealist interpretations of
explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill
psychoanalysis into a shocking encounter with the Freudian uncanny....[An] extremely
in the aesthetic models of Ernst,Paul Klee,and Jean
important book.”
Dubuffet,as well as manipulations of the female body
—Jane Beckett,Times Higher Education Supplement
in the surrealist photography of Brassaï,Man Ray,and
Hans Bellmer.Finally,he examines the impulse to
dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip
Foster Hal Foster 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 mod-
Cover art:Max Ernst,Oedipus,1931.Collage.© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York / ADAGP,Paris.
ernist art;rather,it sets the two into critical relation
and scans the greater historical field that they share.
The MIT Press
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hal Foster is Townsend Martin ’17 Professor of Art
Cambridge,Massachusetts 02142
and Archaeology at Princeton University.
http://mitpress.mit.edu ,!7IA2G2-agceci!:t;K;k;K;k
An October Book
0-262-06242-9
Prosthetic Gods
OCTOBER BOOKS
George Baker, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster,
Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Mignon Nixon, and Malcolm Turvey,
editors
Broodthaers,edited by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,edited by Douglas Crimp
Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille,by Denis Hollier
Painting as Model,by Yve-Alain Bois
The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents,edited by Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century,by Jonathan Crary
Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture,by Slavoj Zˇizˇek
Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima,by Nagisa Oshima
The Optical Unconscious,by Rosalind E. Krauss
Gesture and Speech,by André Leroi-Gourhan
Compulsive Beauty,by Hal Foster
Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris,by Robert Morris
Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists,by Joan Copjec
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture,by Kristin Ross
Kant after Duchamp,by Thierry de Duve
The Duchamp Effect,edited by Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon
The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century,by Hal Foster
October: The Second Decade, 1986–1996,edited by Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson,
Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, and Silvia Kolbowski
Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941,by David Joselit
Caravaggio’s Secrets,by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit
Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875,by Carol Armstrong
Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975,
by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
Bachelors,by Rosalind Krauss
Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture,by Jonathan Crary
Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages,by Ed Ruscha
Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents,edited by Tom McDonough
Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde,by Branden W. Joseph
Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001,by Martha Rosler
Prosthetic Gods,by Hal Foster
Prosthetic Gods
Hal Foster
An OCTOBER Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or
mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval)
without permission in writing from the publisher.
MITPress books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional
use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] or write to Special Sales
Department, The MITPress, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142.
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Publications Committee, Department
of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.
This book was set in Bembo by Graphic Composition, Inc., and was printed and bound in the
United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Foster, Hal.
Prosthetic gods / Hal Foster.
p. cm.
“An October book.”
Includes index.
ISBN 0-262-06242-9 (alk. paper)
1. Modernism (Art) 2. Modernism (Aesthetics) 3. Psychoanalysis and art. 4. Creation.
I. Title.
N6494.M64F67 2004
709(cid:2).04—dc22 2004040291
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts
on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent;but those organs
have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at
times.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents(1930)

Contents
Preface ix
1 Primitive Scenes 1
2 A Proper Subject 55
3 Prosthetic Gods 109
4 A Bashed Ego 151
5 Blinded Insights 193
6 A Little Anatomy 225
7 Torn Screens 257
8 A Missing Part 303
Notes 341
Index 443

Preface
On the one hand, a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glock-
enspiel of hell;on the other:new men.
—Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto (1918)
How to imagine not only a new art or architecture, but a new self or subject
adequate to them? In the first instance this book is concerned with such imag-
inings in work and writing by key modernists like Paul Gauguin and Pablo Pi-
casso, F.T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst, Paul Klee
and Jean Dubuffet. These figures are diverse, but they are all fascinated by fictions
of origins that are at once aesthetic and subjective. Sometimes these beginnings
are seen as primordial, and cast onto a distant field of primitive life;sometimes
they are viewed as futuristic, and dreamt as a new form of technological being.
Often these fantasies are primal in a few senses of the word:not only basic to the
styles that they serve as origin myths, but also fundamental to the artists insofar
as they ask questions of first and last things—the beginnings of subjectivity and
sexuality, the ends of art and imagination. “Where Do We Come From, Who
Are We, Where Are We Going?”became a great catechism of modernist art, but
it also remains a great enigma.