Geoffrey Smedley: Dissections

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Geoffrey Smedley

CCA Publications, Montreal, 2013, English

Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History

paperback, 211 pages, black-and-white illustrations

Suggested Retail Price: $39.95 CAN

From the Publisher. The subject of Dissections is the mechanization of man. The book which accompanies the exhibition dissects photographically four metaphorical machines which have themselves been dissected. The project is a not a sequential narrative, but a series of brief notes, sometimes closely or sometimes distantly associated with the images gathered under the title Dissections. The hero is the mythic figure of Descartes' Clown; a neurotic and insecure robot, though also intuitive, inquisitive and courageous. The clown undertakes an auto-autopsy hoping to find his organ of existence. The robot, like Descartes, needs to prove that he actually exists.

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