Robert Smithson’s Honeymoon Machine (1964) is a wall-mounted mixed-media assemblage that brings together sexuality and technology, concerns that run through his sculptures and works on paper of the early 1960s.

Honeymoon Machine incorporates photographic imagery of a female pin-up, fusing body and machine. Wires connect the figure’s breasts to a device resembling a generator, suggesting a transfer of energy between the human body and an industrial system. The title itself brings the erotic and mechanical together, making explicit a conjunction that recurs across Smithson’s work of this period. The arrangement suggests sexuality as a form of energy, circulating through a mechanized circuit.

Like The Machine Taking a Wife from the same year, Honeymoon Machine also recalls Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), with its coupling of erotic and mechanical imagery.