Foster Hal (ed.) Prosthetic Gods

October books, 2004. — 490 p. — ISBN 0-262-06242-9The beginnings of this book date to the late 1980s. Since then, too many people have aided me to acknowledge adequately here (sometimes this “me”also seems plural). Nonetheless, though I hesitate to implicate them again, some friends and colleagues must be singled out. The historical insights and critical commitments of my coeditors at October (Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Denis
Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Mignon Nixon, George Baker, Leah Dickerman, and Malcolm Turvey) continue to challenge me. The same is true of my closest interlocutors at Princeton (Carol Armstrong, Eduardo Cadava, Beatriz Colomina, Stanley Corngold, Anthony Grafton, Michael Jennings, Stephen Kotkin, Thomas Levin, Alexander Nehamas, Anson Rabinbach, Carl Schorske, Sandy Tait, and Michael Wood). The work of friends further afield has also guided me (T. J. Clark, Jonathan Crary, Thomas Crow, Michel Feher, Briony Fer, Kenneth Frampton, Michael Fried, Martin Jay, Greil Marcus, Eric Santner, Kaja Silverman, Anne Wagner, and Mark Wigley). I am thankful to the journals that published the first attempts at some of these texts—October, Critical Inquiry, Modernism/Modernity, and Res—as well as to the institutions that com-missioned others—the Drawing Center, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Tate Modern.11 The work of
writing and revising was begun on a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1998, and completed on a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in 2003. I am also grateful for timely leaves from Princeton, for a publications subsidy from the Department of Art and Archaeology, and for
the assistance of Gordon Hughes and Johanna Burton. Finally, this book is for Tait and Thatcher, with thanks for their laughter.