Textualterity

About this book

How might it be that works of art and literature are not just made, but unmade, remade, and made over? Joseph Grigely argues that it is the very nature of art to incorporate change by editors and conservators as it is resituated in different publications and exhibition sites. Asserting that the common editorial practice of creating eclectic texts is essentially a eugenic practice based on Romanticism's desire for racial and textual purity, Grigely reconceives the notion of textual difference, or textualterity. Grigely draws not only on a wide range of cultural transformations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature - including Thomas Bowdler's 1818 edition of Shakespeare and the Reader's Digest condensed edition of Tom Sawyer - but on a detailed exploration of recent controversies in the arts - including the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel, the removal of Richard Serra's site-specific sculpture, Titled Arc, and vandalism to works by Michelangelo, Rodin, and Davis Hammons - to argue for the need to understand these textual transformations as fundamental cultural phenomena. In a concluding chapter devoted to Jackson Pollock's Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), Grigely shows how the title and the media of Pollock's painting have been changed (by friends, curators, and an inch-long cicada) in ways that ultimately affect our conceptualization of the work of art as a timeless object.