Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods

Art, too, becomes a kind of “auxiliary organ” at once magnificent and troubled.’ Hal Foster’s use of Sigmund Freud’s analogy tries to account for the two preoccupations of the early 20th-century, ‘the primitive’ and ‘the machine’. Indeed, this book – which reads as a collection of essays rather than a narrative account – effectively presents itself as Foster’s attempt to rewrite the history of Modernism as he sees it – that is, as a psychoanalytical, and predominantly Freudian, one. However, Foster is aware of the limitations, as well as the fierce criticisms, of psychoanalysis as an art-historical tool. Cannily setting the two in ‘critical relation’, he states his aim: ‘to critique psychoanalysis even as I move to employ it’. Their common fascination in the fiction of origins is, for Foster, these two disciplines’ point of connection.
Each of the eight chapters of this book operates almost as a case study. In an exclusively male line-up that starts with Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, Foster traces his thread through the sometimes unbearably familiar examples of Adolf Loos, F. T. Marinetti, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet and Surrealist photography, followed by Jackson Pollock and the Roberts – Morris, Smithson and Gober. Many of these essays either have been previously published or develop earlier ideas – in some cases both. Foster’s discussion of the disintegration of the subject at work in the sadistic scenes of Hans Bellmer is derived from his 1993 book Compulsive Beauty, while Chapter Seven, ‘Torn Screens’, is a reworking of his seminal essay ‘Return of the Real’ (1996), complete with a repetition of Jacques Lacan’s famous anecdote of the sardine can – where the can floating on the sea seems to look back at Lacan, mortifying him as seer and seen in one – as well as an illustration of the diagram of the gaze from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1978). This time, however, the arming of the gaze against the trauma of the real is tracked back to representations of the myth of Perseus and Medusa, then forward to the work of Morris and Smithson (via the logic of Pollock’s ‘process art’ of drip painting).
However, if Freud’s original conception of the ‘Prosthetic God’ was both ‘magnificent’ and ‘troubled’, it is the latter position that dominates Foster’s account. Gauguin and Picasso’s ambivalent relationship towards the ‘primitive’ and Loos’ distrust of it, Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis’s fascination with the machine and Ernst’s demonstration of its corrosive effects display little of the exhilaration that Freud also associates with the idea. (This is perhaps not entirely true of the chapter on Lewis and Marinetti, although few would contend that these two particular men weren’t without their problems.) This emphasis on the ‘troubled’ side of Modernism may, in part, be due to Foster’s determination to disable the weary connection between the avant-garde and transgression, yet at the same time the question of whether these Modernist masters are really in need of resuscitation remains a point of contention.