An art history of machines?

Abstract

A toast offered in honor of Donald Preziosi on the cusp of his seventy-fifth birthday, this essay considers a range of machine metaphors, their art historical settings, and their implications. Addressing the mythography of Daedalus and his wonder machines in relation to art history’s machinic enterprises, an ancient art-archaeology seminar Preziosi directed at UCLA (in 1988) and the book, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (1989) form the focus of my thinking about Preziosi’s work. At issue across the essay is the work of recursion, when machines make machines and in so doing create a recessive subjectivity for the maker. The essay ends with the speculation that art history’s disciplinary machinery may owe its generative strength to a perpetual need for replacement parts.

Keywords

• Donald Preziosi
• geranos
• mekhane
• nautilus
• khoros
• rhizome
• thaumaturgy
• recursion