User:Lbattich/On three cultural objects

Initial description of three objects

• Text

I have selected several short excerpts from various writers: Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce. These textual fragments vary in length from a sentence to a full paragraph. They all deal with the question of how to approach history, and particularly textual history. Nietzsche and Whitman, in their own way, advice the reader not to rely on existing concepts and written ideas from others, but to approach the world afresh. Their works have now become part of our cultural baggage, and so their advice has a hint of paradox.

• Moving-image

It could be argued that citation and reference are inherent to artistic practice. I have selected a sequence in a film that highlights the practice of cinematic quotation. In one scene of Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, the main character flips through an art book display, changing its pages from Suprematist images to Jan the Elder's Hunters in the Snow. This painting points us to Andrei Tarkovski's Solaris, where Jan the Elder's works are either alluded or actually displayed in several sequences of the film.

• Artwork

Kurt Schwitter, Hanover Merzbau, 1923-1936

A different approach to the use of cultural fragments is embodied in Kurt Schwitter's Merzbau installations. These works are made of different artefacts collected by the artist, which are contained in an architectural structure. Such structure, however, preserves the works only by rendering them inaccessible.