Prosthesis

by David Wills

A Stanford University Press classic.

369 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1995

About the author

Australian-born David Wills is an author, independent curator, photographic preservationist, and editor who has accrued one of the world's largest independent archives of original photographs, negatives, and transparencies. He has contributed material to many publications and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Wills has produced a series of photography exhibitions based on images from his archive. His shows include Murder, Models, Madness: Photographs from the Motion Picture Blow-Up; Edie Sedgwick: Unseen Photographs of a Warhol Superstar; Blonde Bombshell; James Bond; Women with Issues: Photographs from the Motion Picture Valley of the Dolls; and Warhology.

Wills's books include Ara Gallant; Marilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis; Audrey: The 60s; Hollywood in Kodachrome; and Seventies Glamour. He is also the co-author of Veruschka.

His books and exhibitions have received major profiles in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, American Photo, Vogue, Interview, and Time. He has also written articles on photography and popular culture for publications including the Huffington Post, V Magazine, and Palm Springs Life.

Reviews

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

The late Peter Brunette, whom I had the privilege of knowing during my doctoral work at George Mason University, was a colleague of David Wills. Although I had already read this book before I arrived at GMU (and was blown away by the writing, the erudition, and the deconstructive magic Wills performed), that link with the author through someone I knew made this book even more meaningful. I never stopped being impressed with Wills's work here, and that opinion _mostly_ remains after rereading following a lapse of about fifteen years. However, the scholarly tide has turned (for the better) and deconstruction, even works of unquestionable quality such as this book, has been relegated to a more or less deserved irrelevance. Wills mixes details of his autobiography, reflections on history and criticism, and critiques of a wide variety of cultural texts (a Charles Conder painting, the first four books by cyberpunk author William Gibson, a Peter Greenaway film). This all works because of Wills's incredible talent as a writer: his prose is brilliant, wonderful, and awe-inspiring. He has much to say about the deficiencies of many deconstructive readings (that they are really very shallow works by people who never understood Derrida or his writings), and his point is made more forceful by how exemplary an instance of deconstruction _Prosthesis_ is. Having said all that, though, Wills's work still suffers from the main problem of deconstructive criticism: it is an idealist methodology that has little impact on people's actual lives and has little constructive) to say about how people might change socioeconomic conditions (even though these come up in Will's writing, most forcefully in his critiques of Gibson's novels). Ultimately (and this is driven home in the final two chapters, a reading of the fiction and biography of Raymond Roussel and an intricate and ingenious reading of a missing closing parenthesis in a text by Derrida), Wills's work shares with deconstruction more generally a penchant for getting lost in the play of words, language, signifiers and elisions. The point of the text (to highlight that any "origin" for anything is merely a convenient marker that signifies no real origin at all) is well taken, but is also nothing new. The logic and word games are fun and brilliant, but are ultimately no helpful in the material ways that would help us and others to work through issues in the lived world rather than the world of the intellect.

[Izabella Rodrigues · Rating 2 out of 5]

So confused about why I had to read this book for class. I have no idea what it's relevance really is. like yes, it is relevant to the topic of the class, but it's style is so strange.

there really isn't much information about this book online, and I wasn't surprised to see the small amount of reads and reviews on this platform.

summary: the book looks at the presumed opposition between the natural human body and artificial inanimate objects.

discussion questions:
1. who decided to put this book on the syllabus? and why?