Untitled - witz cultural

l9'lRECONFIGURINGWRITINGtion chair caning, which has been pasted onto the canvas, and the picture is'framed' by a piece of rope. This intrusion of alien materials has a mostremarkable effect the abstract still life appears to rest on a real surface (thechair caning) as on a tray, and the substantiality of this tray is further emphasizedby the rope.'According to )anson, Picasso and Braque turned frombrush and paint to "contents of the wastepaper basket" because collage permittedthem to explore representation and signification by contrasting whatwe in the digital age would call the real and virtual. They did so because theydiscovered that the items that make up a collage, "'outsiders' in the world ofart," work in two manners, or produce two contrary effects. First, "they havebeen shaped and combined, then drawn or painted upon to give them a representationalmeaning, but they do not lose their original identity as scrapsof material, 'outsiders'in the world of art. Thus their function is both to represent(to be part of an image) and to present (to be themselves)" (522-23).Hypertext writing shares many key characteristics with these works ofPicasso, Braque, and other cubists, particularly their qualities of juxtapositionand appropriation. Some of these qualities appear when one compares thehypertext and print versions of my discussion. First of all, despite my divisionof this essay into several sections and the use of figures that a reader mightinspect in different orders, this essay really only allows one efficient way ofproceeding through it. In contrast, the original hypertext version permitsdifferent readers to traverse it according to their needs and interests' Thus,someone well versed in twentieth-century art history might wish to glanceonly briefly at the materials on collage before concentrating first on the materialsabout hypertext. Someone else more acquainted with hypertext couldconcentrate on the materials about collage. Others might wish to begin withone portion of the discussion, and then, using available links, return repeatedlyto the same examples, which often gather meaning according to the contextsin which they appear.Another difference between the two forms of "my" discussion of this subjectinvolves the length of quoted material and the way the surrounding textsrelate it to the argument as a whole. Thke, for example, the passage I quotedabove from fanson's History ofWorld Art.In the Storyspace version the passageis several times longer than in the print one, and it appears without any introduction.The object here is to let the quoted, appropriated author speak forhimself,, or, rather, to permit his text to speak for itself without being summarized,translated, distorted by an intermediary voice. To write in this manner-thatis to say, to copy, to appropriate-seems suited to an electronicenvironment, an environment in which text can be reproduced, reconfigured,