First American edition of this substantial bilingual catalog/academic text devoted to Harald Szeemann’s landmark investigation of the “bachelor machine”—the self-contained, frequently erotic and absurd apparatus that runs through modern art from Duchamp, Picabia, and the Surrealists to kinetic, conceptual, and technologically inflected work. Tall 8vo (11.25” x 7.25”), cream cloth, sewn binding, pictorial dust jacket, 236 pages, extensively illustrated in black-and-white. Edited by Harald Szeemann and Marc Le Bot. with parallel text in Italian and English. Published in 1975 by Rizzoli.
The book remains an ambitious interdisciplinary anthology of machines imagined as psychic structures: mechanisms of desire, repetition, isolation, production, and failure. Contributions include texts by Marc Le Bot, Bazon Brock, Michel Carrouges, Jean Clair, Peter Gorsen, Gilbert Lascault, Jean-François Lyotard, Günter Metken, Alain Monestier, Arturo Schwarz, Michel Serres, Harald Szeemann, and others. The densely illustrated chronology ranges across art, literature, cinema, popular spectacle, and speculative technology, making this an important document of Szeemann’s curatorial method and of the period’s expanding conception of the exhibition catalog. An uncommon and consequential catalog encompassing Duchamp studies, Surrealism, machine aesthetics, and the history of independent curatorial practice. Rear hinge partially split at top; binding somewhat shaken. Minor bumping and rubbing to extremities. Light rubbing and chipping to dust jacket, with bumping to top edge, and 1.5” closed tear to top of rear cover. Contents pristine. Now in a protective mylar wrapper.
First American edition of this substantial bilingual catalog/academic text devoted to Harald Szeemann’s landmark investigation of the “bachelor machine”—the self-contained, frequently erotic and absurd apparatus that runs through modern art from Duchamp, Picabia, and the Surrealists to kinetic, conceptual, and technologically inflected work. Tall 8vo (11.25” x 7.25”), cream cloth, sewn binding, pictorial dust jacket, 236 pages, extensively illustrated in black-and-white. Edited by Harald Szeemann and Marc Le Bot. with parallel text in Italian and English. Published in 1975 by Rizzoli.
The book remains an ambitious interdisciplinary anthology of machines imagined as psychic structures: mechanisms of desire, repetition, isolation, production, and failure. Contributions include texts by Marc Le Bot, Bazon Brock, Michel Carrouges, Jean Clair, Peter Gorsen, Gilbert Lascault, Jean-François Lyotard, Günter Metken, Alain Monestier, Arturo Schwarz, Michel Serres, Harald Szeemann, and others. The densely illustrated chronology ranges across art, literature, cinema, popular spectacle, and speculative technology, making this an important document of Szeemann’s curatorial method and of the period’s expanding conception of the exhibition catalog. An uncommon and consequential catalog encompassing Duchamp studies, Surrealism, machine aesthetics, and the history of independent curatorial practice. Rear hinge partially split at top; binding somewhat shaken. Minor bumping and rubbing to extremities. Light rubbing and chipping to dust jacket, with bumping to top edge, and 1.5” closed tear to top of rear cover. Contents pristine. Now in a protective mylar wrapper.
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