Contraption: Rediscovering California Jewish Artists (Comtemporary Jewish Museum)

At first glance, the devices are mechanical tricks, absurd playfulness that, despite their impressive complexity, have no practical use whatsoever. Sixteen Californian-Jewish artists use the machine as a metaphor to critically and at the same time humorously question the individual's relationship to the technological world. The master of all "nonsense" devices is the cartoonist Rube Goldberg, who made satirical drawings in the 1920s designed highly complicated machines that did amazingly simple things, like the legendary Automatic Napkin. In the decades that followed, US artists further developed Goldberg's idea, including contemporaries such as Annabeth Rosen, Bella Feldman and Ned Kahn, who invented machines that made otherwise invisible natural phenomena visible. The volume is a creative firework of creations that reflects the world as a gigantic, absurd, inexplicable and fascinating mechanism.