Francis Picabia's Real Abstraction and the Beginnings of Futurist Cyborgs: The Prefigurative Avant-Gardes Available to Purchase

Turning to the work of Dada artist Francis Picabia to explore how his “mechanomorphs” raise the questions of automation, reification, and the subject, chapter 2 explores the intricate interdependency of these formations in Picabia’s singular use of the diagram, a new formal device in visual art that is conjugated with his depiction of humans as machine parts, interrogating the gap between labor-power and its bearer. The question of abstraction, of the division between intellectual and manual labor and its reification, becomes a function of the machine.