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 key modern artists such as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. All these diverse figures felt the fascination for the fictions of the origin, either primordial and tribal, well futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster suggests, two forms came to dominate modern 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 primordial scene. He then goes on to deal with the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred everything primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects postulated by the Futurist Marinetti and the Vorticist Lewis. These "new egos" are later contrasted with the "celibate 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 Brassaï, Man Ray and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art out of hand in Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, Robert Morris's scattered pieces, and Robert Smithson's earthworks, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in Marcel's sculptural work. Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober. Although the title is taken from Freud, 'Prosthetic Gods' does not impose psychoanalytic theory on modern art; rather, it brings the two into a critical relationship and investigates the broader historical field they share.