10.13125/2039-6597/4207
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2039-6597
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Daniel Brandlechner
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Between
Surface Reading
From the Earth to the World. Ai Weiwei's Functional Dante Reference in the Music Album <i>The Divine Comedy</i> (2013) and in the Lego Portrait <i>Dante Alighieri in LEGO</i> (2016)
Text.Serial.Journal
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10
Intermedial Dante: Reception, Appropriation, Metamorphosis
2020-11-29
2020-07-15
2020-11-30
2020-12-07
329-346
1
Daniel Brandlechner
2020/11/29
10.13125/2039-6597/4207
329
University of Vienna
2039-6597
20
Surface Reading
en
346
From the Earth to the World. Ai Weiwei's Functional Dante Reference in the Music Album <i>The Divine Comedy</i> (2013) and in the Lego Portrait <i>Dante Alighieri in LEGO</i> (2016)
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/4207/4536
10
            From the Earth to the World.
            Ai Weiwei’s Functional Dante
            Reference in the Music Album
            The Divine Comedy (2013) and
                 in the Lego Portrait
            Dante Alighieri in LEGO (2016)

                             Daniel Brandlechner


Abstract
       This article sets out to illuminate two intermedial Dante references in the
artwork of the Chinese-western artist Ai Weiwei: the music album The Divine
Comedy (2013) and the Lego portrait Dante Alighieri in LEGO (2016). By paying
special attention to surfaces, the “surface reading” presented in this article seeks
to interrogate the function of these references. However, in place of Why? the
question in this article is shaped more by How? Due to Dante's inherent
mediality, the intermedial Dante references function as a social medium. The
article demonstrates, how mediality becomes evident through two operators:
seriality and combinatorics. By placing the artist on one of the two sides of
mediation, this article implicitly reverses the role long reserved for Ai Weiwei:
that of the cultural mediator.

Keywords
     Intermediality; Mediality; World Literature; Dante; Surface Reading.

Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/4207
                                    Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)




    From the Earth to the World.
    Ai Weiwei’s Functional Dante
 Reference in the Music Album The
Divine Comedy (2013) and in the Lego
Portrait Dante Alighieri in LEGO (2016)

                         Daniel Brandlechner


                                   K. behielt den Brief in der Hand und sah
                                   den Mann an, der ihm im Augenblick
                                   wichtiger schien.1
                                                               Kafka, Das Schloß



                              Introduction
        Observing the various artworks of the Chinese-western artist Ai
Weiwei, it would be incorrect to assert that Dante occupies a central
focus. In the context of the recent debate on mediality and intermediality
it is nevertheless curious that a linkage between these two nodes has not
been described, since the conceptual artist Ai Weiwei has frequently
taken an interest in Dante Alighieri. This article sets out to illuminate
this connection. The motives of Ai Weiwei's Dante references - be they
personal, artistic, or political - are not discussed in this article. In place
of Why? the question in this article is shaped by How? This question


     1
      «Holding the letter in his hand, K. looked at the messenger, who just
now seemed to him more important than the message itself» Kafka 2009: 23.


                                                                               329
Daniel Brandlechner, From the Earth to the World



already points us in a certain direction, as Why? accentuates one side of
intermedial transfer, which forms the framework of this article: «How-
questions are always surface-questions» («,Wie-Fragen' sind immer
Oberflächen-Fragen»), write Helmuth Feilke and Angelika Linke in the
preface to their linguistic anthology Oberfläche und Performanz (2009: 5).
Thus, our specific interest will be in the surfaces and the «signalling
strength of certain surfaces» («Signalkraft bestimmter Oberflächen»)
(ibid.: 7). Focusing on communicative aspects of mediality, our approach
is, furthermore, in line with Giuliana Bruno's shift toward a haptic
materiality, which she explored in her brilliant book Surface: Matters of
Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Bruno 2014: 3).
        The thesis we will discuss below is simple: Dante has a function2;
on the surface the Florentine poet functions as a sounding board. We
will concentrate on how Dante himself works as a medium. In short, and
more to the point, the intermedial Dante references in the works of Ai
Weiwei function as a social medium, thanks to the mediality of Dante
himself.
        To begin with, the broad thesis – Dante as a social medium – must
be related to two concrete Dante references in Ai Weiwei's work and
expanded in the light of their combinatorics and seriality, with the aim
of then bringing these two references to the level of intermediality.
Intermediality: in a recent article Irina Rajewsky (2018) has clearly
differentiated the concept of intermediality from that of transmediality:
while transmediality investigates the representation of an element (such
as a motif, a theme, a subject) in different epochs and in different media
(such as literature, theatre, film), she limits the concept of intermediality
as an instrument of analysis to the investigation of «concrete media
practices with specific procedures and strategies that involve more than
one medium and bring out a certain 'friction' between them» («pratiche
mediali concrete con specifici procedimenti e strategie che coinvolgono
più di un medium e fanno emergere una certa 'frizione' tra essi») (ibid.:
8-9). Rajewsky's concept of intermediality helps us in the choice of the
object of research - the What? Her definition of intermediality as

      2
          In a mathematical sense.


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                                  Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)



«between media» (ibid.: 9), however, can only be a starting point of the
present study. What? must be supplemented with How? We want to
respond to this question with an operation that focuses on the
underlying mediality of the research objects themselves: The method
consists in a form of “surface reading”. In the influential introduction to
a special issue of the journal Representations, Stephen Best and Sharon
Marcus (2009) have problematized “symptomatic reading” and
proposed, instead of a hermeneutic approach, a reading that does not
seek to uncover a deeper hidden meaning, but which focuses more on
the surface of the text, what they understand as «what is evident,
perceptible, apprehensible in texts» (ibid.: 9). Our surface reading shall
be realized with an operation that deserves more attention in
comparative literature: «not interpretation, not explanation, not
prediction, not prescription» (Marcus-Love-Best 2016: 1), but description.



                         I - Combinatorics
       As already mentioned, Ai Weiwei has repeatedly taken an interest
in Dante Alighieri. The first Dante reference we want to discuss here is
Dante Alighieri in LEGO (2016). In the exhibition Ai Weiwei. Libero
(23.09.2016-22.01.2017) a portrait of Dante Alighieri in coloured Lego
bricks was exhibited in Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. The portrait shows
a lateral left bust profile of the poet against a white background. Dante
is wearing a red robe and headdress, garlanded with the leaves of a
green laurel wreath. Dante Alighieri in LEGO has a clear «intermedial
reference» (Rajewsky 2018: 11-12): the model is the well-known portrait
of the first Commedia illustrator Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510).
       Dante Alighieri in LEGO is one of four Lego portraits of historical
personalities shown in the exhibition. Arturo Galansino, the Director
General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and curator of the exhibition,
states that these Lego portraits on the one hand are firmly connected to
the history of Florence and on the other are dedicated to political
dissidents all over the world: alongside the portrait of Dante, the exile
par excellence in the history of literature, there is a portrait of Galileo


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Daniel Brandlechner, From the Earth to the World



Galilei, a figure who embodies the ideals of truth and oppression against
the progress of science, of Savonarola, the preacher symbol of morality
who resists power, and of Filippo Strozzi, the founder of the palace and
a bitter opponent of the Medici family (Galansino 2016).
        Art here serves to raise a serious question, a question that Roland
Barthes outlined in Mobile (1962) by Michel Butor and described as «the
possibility of the world, or to speak in a more Leibnizian way, of its
composability» («la possibilité du monde, ou pour parler d'une façon plus
leibnizienne, de sa compossibilité») (1993: 1307). In his Lego portraits, Ai
Weiwei combines two approaches: the logic of Lego and the logic of the
jigsaw puzzle. The logic of the classic Lego bricks wants every single
piece to be combined with every other single piece ad libitum; there is no
pre-structured order. In contrast to Lego bricks, puzzle pieces cannot be
combined at will, but have an overall pre-structured order due to their
shape and the surface picture as a whole. Furthermore, the goal of Lego,
if one can define one at all, is to construct buildings and other, primarily
three-dimensional objects, whereas the puzzle pieces serve to
reassemble two-dimensional pictures.
        By replicating Botticelli's well-known work of art with Lego
bricks, Ai Weiwei exposes what the philosopher of language Sybille
Krämer has been describing for years as a «cultural technique of spatial
flattening» («Kulturtechnik räumlicher Verflachung») (2019: 836): not
only «Lucio Fontana's cuts through the surface of his paintings open up
his pictures to three-dimensionality and a plastic depth» («Lucio
Fontanas Schnitte durch die Oberflächen seiner Gemälde öffnen seine
Bilder der Dreidimensionalität und einer plastischen Tiefe») (ibid.: 835);
Ai Weiwei, too, «exposes and infiltrates [...] two-dimensionality as a
familiar condition of traditional pictoriality» («er exponiert und
unterwandert […] die Zweidimensionalität als vertraute Bedingung
traditioneller Bildlichkeit.») (ibid.).
        Dante Alighieri in LEGO must therefore be considered as a digital
work of art. Why digital? At first glance, this categorization may seem
surprising, since in Dante Alighieri in LEGO no technical devices are used
at all; there is no flat computer screen, there are no flashlights shining
with special effects. However, it is the etymology of the word digital that


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brings the category to mind. Etymologically speaking, the digital has
something to do with the fingers: with the digitus we count from one to
ten and we touch; digitalis, then, is everything that belongs to the fingers,
that is within its reach (“digital”). However, Dante Alighieri in LEGO is
not a digital artwork just because it was composed with the fingers from
Lego bricks. The visitor who does not touch the Lego bricks with their
own fingers but takes a close look with their eyes will appreciate why
Dante Alighieri in LEGO is a digital work of art: it is the simulation of
derangement3. By using Lego bricks to portray Dante, Ai Weiwei disturbs
the viewer, as the Lego bricks interrupt the mediality of the image. The
bricks’ inherent nature, their robust, angular, non-round, blocky shape,
trigger a sensation of viewing pixels in the viewer’s eye. The viewer
perceives the picture no longer as a whole, but as the sum of a multitude
of small, assembled details, which can be placed and rearranged
together in new and different ways. The distant viewer may still be able
to perceive the picture as a whole, but from close up the viewer sees
nothing but small, colourful Lego bricks: like pixels on a television
screen. As a result of this interruption of mediality, Dante in Dante
Alighieri in LEGO does not emerge as “auctor” or as “agens” (Contini
1970: 341), but as a surface.



                                II - Seriality
      Despite a statement by Ai Weiwei published on his blog in 2006,
confessing that he is «not a huge music fan» (2011: 60), he released the


     3
       Amitav Ghosh opens his essay The Great Derangement (2016) with the
idea that the interruption of mediality causes sudden awareness of the me-
dium: «Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate
turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive? As, for example, when an ara-
besque in the pattern of a carpet is revealed to be a dog’s tail, which, if stepped
upon, could lead to a nipped ankle? Or when we reach for an innocent-looking
vine and find it to be a worm or a snake? When a harmlessly drifting log turns
out to be a crocodile?» Ghosh 2016: 3.


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Daniel Brandlechner, From the Earth to the World



music album The Divine Comedy on 22 June 2013. Together with the
Chinese rock musician and friend Zuoxiao Zuzhou, Ai Weiwei
produced six tracks with a total length of about 27 minutes. Ai Weiwei,
who performed as a singer for the first time, chose Chinese as the
language for this project. Nevertheless, the album was conceived as a
bilingual album: at least in terms of the written language, both the album
title and the six songs are in Chinese and English. Furthermore, the
official website of Ai Weiwei provides the English translation of the
Chinese lyrics (“The Divine Comedy”). The content of the album is
inextricably linked to his personal experience of his own arrest in 2011,
which at least for Saviano (2013) is linked to an event that has had a
lasting influence on Ai Weiwei: the earthquake in Sichuan.
        We have set out on the reverse path to describe the way from the
earth to the world, from the earthquake to world literature. Hence, we
will briefly mention the background of the earthquake that hit Sichuan
province on 12 May 2008. Ai Weiwei travelled to the earthquake zone at
the end of May to record his impressions. Shortly before his departure,
Grief, the first of a series of blog posts on the event, appeared on 22 May
2008. Expressing his solidarity with the earthquake victims, Ai Weiwei
asks rather casually: «Who are they [?]» (Ai: 150). The question related
to the identity of the victims was taken up again in a second blog post
published on 28 July 2008, titled Does the Nation Have a List? In this blog
post, Ai Weiwei criticizes the Erinnerungskultur of the Chinese
government and links the catastrophic event more explicitly to local
discourses about China in general and the province of Sichuan in
particular, by asking the still officially unanswered question of how
many people died (Ai 2011: 178). Disappointed with Chinese
remembrance work, this blog post provides the impetus for the Citizens'
Investigation project: between 15 December 2008 and 2 September 2009 Ai
Weiwei collected with the help of volunteers data from 4,851 students




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                                      Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)



who lost their lives in the earthquake4. However, the research work in
Sichuan increasingly led to disputes with the Chinese police, which was
hostile to the work of Ai Weiwei and his supporters. After several
clashes, Ai Weiwei was arrested in 2011 by the Chinese police. Although
his arrest was widely covered by the media worldwide, Ai Weiwei was
imprisoned for several months and then placed under house arrest.
       Ai Weiwei released the music album two years later on the music
platform SoundCloud. The platform plays a decisive role. SoundCloud
was founded in 2008 as an online music service for the exchange and
distribution of audio files with its head office in Berlin. According to a
search query with Google Trends, the countries with the greatest interest
in SoundCloud in 2013 were: South Africa, Australia, United Kingdom,
Ireland, New Zealand, Netherlands, Pakistan, Germany, Belgium and
Egypt. In contrast, the cities with the highest interest in SoundCloud in
2013 were Berlin, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Manchester, New York City,
London, Los Angeles, Sydney, Hamburg and San Diego – in other words
in a global context, interest in the SoundCloud platform in 2013 was
highest in western metropolitan areas.
       How is SoundCloud connected to Dante? We would like to
anticipate the answer: in terms of social mediality. Before we turn fully
to this point, however, let us first clarify something crucial. The explicit
Dante reference in the title, both in English (The Divine Comedy) and in
Chinese (Shenqu 神曲), evokes several questions about intermedial
Dante references in Ai Weiwei's music album. Can the question about
the reception of Dante in China help us here? This issue has been
addressed recently by Alessandra Brezzi (2011) who studied thoroughly
the history of Dante in China. However, for us it does not seem very
useful to put the intermedial Dante reference in the works of Ai Weiwei
into the context of the way Dante is received in China. We will certainly
not undertake too close a reading of the lyrics here, which would offer

     4
       First artistic results were the installations Snake Ceiling at the Mori Art
Museum (Ai Weiwei. According to What?, 25.07.2008-08.11.2009) and Remem-
bering at the Haus der Kunst in Munich (Ai Weiwei. So Sorry, 12.10.2009-
17.01.2010).


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Daniel Brandlechner, From the Earth to the World



many insights simply because Ai Weiwei's understanding of Dante
could be based on a specific Chinese approach to Dante that recognizes
the figure of the exiled writer, as the Chinese writer Mao Dun (1896-
1981) first did in his article on Dante's Commedia published in 1934 in the
magazine Zhong xue sheng 中学生 (ibid.: 260). Furthermore, reflections
based on the Chinese character for Inferno (which is diyu 地狱) would
also provide some pointers: in China, the Catholic-Christian spatial
concept of hell as an eternal place does not exist; in four modern Chinese
translations, Inferno has been translated as diyu 地狱 which is also the
meaning for prison (ibid.: 266). Following this, the music video for the
single Dumbass, which Ai Weiwei released on Youtube on 22 May 2013
shortly before the release of the entire music album on SoundCloud,
could be interpreted in this respect as an allusion to the Chinese
interpretation of Inferno: The music video shows Ai Weiwei in the role
of a prisoner performing everyday activities such as washing, eating and
sleeping, while being constantly monitored by two policemen, possibly
a reappraisal of his own brief incarceration in 2011 and a parallel
between his fate and that of Dante.
       As already mentioned, we do not want to expose ourselves to the
hermeneutic fallacy any further and do not want to expand on these
approaches. Instead, we want to take up again the function of Ai
Weiwei's intermedial Dante references and look elsewhere, thus the
mediality of Dante Alighieri himself.



III - Surface, Readymade and World Literature: Dante's
                      Mediality
      On 4 May 2006 Ai Weiwei wrote an essay about Andy Warhol,
published on his blog on 3 October 2007 (Ai 2011: 127-130). From the
perspective of an eyewitness he writes about the loss that the death of
Andy Warhol on 22 February 1987 represented. After compiling the
most important key data of the life and attempting to classify the art, he
quotes Warhol saying: «If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just


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look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am.
There's nothing behind it» (Warhol, as cited in Ai 2011: 129). This interest
in surfaces can also be tracked in the artworks of Ai Weiwei. We have
already referred to the surface in Dante Alighieri in LEGO, by means of
which the portrait of Dante is disturbed and its mediality is exposed.
However, we have not yet fully examined the surface of the music
album.
        The album cover for Ai Weiwei's The Divine Comedy shows a detail
of a phone picture in black and white. In the foreground of the picture
is Ai Weiwei with his mobile phone, who is about to take a photo against
a mirror with a flashlight in order to capture the situation. In the
background of the photograph we see police officers and the musician
Zuoxiao Zuzuhou. The photograph documents a situation that took
place in an elevator in Sichuan in 2009 after Ai Weiwei was arrested by
the police. Since then, the photograph has been reproduced and has been
placed in new contexts. For example, it introduces the exhibition
catalogue for his exhibition in Munich (Ai - Simmons 2009: I) and has
since been reused in various contexts as in the series Illumination.
        Seriality is a key concept for Ai Weiwei since his very first
beginnings. The exhibition catalogue for his Munich exhibition So Sorry
is illustrated by two black-and-white photographs from the photo series
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, one of the first projects after Ai Weiwei's
return to Beijing in 1995. In front of a camera, Ai Weiwei had
photographed himself as he dropped a two-thousand-year-old vase
from the Han Dynasty on the floor and destroyed it. On the front of the
exhibition catalogue, a full-length photograph shows the artist standing
in front of a wall, looking into the camera: in the upper third of the
picture, he is balancing the vase with his index fingers diagonally in the
air; on the back, the same shot is shown again, but now pieces of the vase
are lying scatted on the floor: the artist has dropped it and now, without
having changed his facial expression even slightly, turns his palms
towards the camera: So Sorry is written in large orange letters where the
name Ai Weiwei had been in the previous shot in the same large orange
characters. In the description of Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn for the
exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World (6.10.2017-


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Daniel Brandlechner, From the Earth to the World



07.01.2018) at the Guggenheim Bilbao (2017) it is stated that: «With this
work, Ai Weiwei began his ongoing use of antique readymade objects,
demonstrating his questioning attitude toward how and by whom
cultural values are created». In other words, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn
was seen as the starting point for Ai Weiwei's attempt «to make Chinese
culture into a readymade» (Siemons 2009: 26).
       This approach can be traced back to Marcel Duchamp, who
repeatedly used ready-made utility objects and declared them to be
finished works of art.5 Following incomplete studies in New York, Ai
Weiwei returned to Beijing in 1993. Nevertheless, his time in New York
did not leave him unaffected. Beside Andy Warhol, it was Marcel
Duchamp «who would most influence his own career» (Ambrozy 2011:
XIX); he also forms a point of reference relevant to the question we are
asking: the social mediality of Dante. One cannot underestimate the
influence of Marcel Duchamp in art enough. He plays a special role for
the art of China in general and for the art of Ai Weiwei in particular 6.
       Can we consider Dante Alighieri also as a “readymade”? Like the
old vases from a long-gone dynasty, the figure of Dante represents
something preformed, something finished, something found, to which a
certain cultural value is attached. Just as Ai Weiwei, by destroying the
vases that function as media, asks about the conditions of cultural value
attribution, The Divine Comedy and Dante Alighieri in LEGO also raise the
question of the conditions of cultural value attribution. However, the
disruption of mediality is no longer the destruction of a material object,
the broken jug, the disturbance now is based in terms of “seriality” (The
Divine Comedy) and “combinatorics” (Dante Alighieri in LEGO). By thus
focusing on Dante and his Commedia, Ai Weiwei reveals the mediality of
world literature.
       This is what we have described as the functional Dante reference:
the slow movement away from the earth and the Sichuan earthquake of

      5
        His best-known readymade to this day is the exhibition piece Fountain (1917), a urinal
which was denied its original semantics by the fact that the exhibition context in a museum
ascribed the value of an art object to it.
      6
          Cfr. Tancock 2014: 50, Barry 2019: 209.




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2008 towards the world of world literature. But which world? Whose
world? Karima Laachir, Sara Marzagora, and Francesca Orsini have
clearly identified the problems of the word world, since it always implies
a priori a perspective: «‘world’ is always a view from somewhere»
(Laachir – Marzagora – Orsini 2018). Instead of thinking about world
literature, they suggest the extremely useful term “significant
geographies” to examine the implicit attribution of value: «The
advantage of thinking of significant geographies over ‘world’, we
contend, is that it makes us consider local and distant geographies […]
and their interrelationship in ways that […] make us think about actual
trajectories and specific uses of spatial concepts/images […]» (ibid.).
       If we also do not simply include Dante in world literature, but on
the contrary, critically question the ascription of value and follow the
trajectories, we come very close to what we have intended to describe as
a social medium. Dante functions as a bond between local and distant
geographies, but he is also social in the sense that he points to «what
concerns human society, the coexistence of people and their
constitutional order as well as economic conditions» («was die
menschliche gesellschaft, das zusammenleben der menschen und seine
staatlich - rechtliche ordnung wie die wirtschaftlichen verhältnisse
betrifft») (“sozial”). Dante: locus, a place, a spatial concept, a platform on
which people can meet, exchange ideas and/or quarrel.



        IV - The Intermediality of Dante as Latency
       If we now want to work out the final point and bring it to the level
of intermediality, we must first ask and recapitulate: what are media in
general? How do media work? The above-mentioned German
philosopher Sybille Krämer has been dealing with these questions from
a philosophical perspective for many years. In her article Epistemologie
der Medialität she has brought this question to the point by assuming that
media «functionally take the position of a third party or a Third that
mediates between two different sides, fields or systems and creates a
nexus of connection and transmission between them» («funktional die


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Daniel Brandlechner, From the Earth to the World



Position eines Dritten bzw. einer Drittheit ein[nehmen], die zwischen
zwei unterschiedlichen Seiten, Feldern bzw. Systemen vermittelt und
einen Nexus der Verbindung und Übertragung zwischen ihnen stiftet»)
(Krämer 2019: 837-838). Krämer thus understands mediality as a form of
relation; in doing so, she turns against Marshall McLuhan's old
commonplace and emphasizes that the medium is not the message, but
that media communicate messages, that they deliver messages. Media, and
this is their merit, mediate what is to be communicated: they stand
between two sides and are thus in between. Krämer follows this approach
by developing the concept of medial “transfiguration” on the basis of a
painting by Raphael (Transfiguration, 1516/20): «The medium shows
itself in the transmitted content in the form of a trace.» («Das Medium
zeigt sich am übermittelten Gehalt in Gestalt einer Spur.») (ibid: 844)
Media transmit from in between, but the transmission is not to be
understood as a neutral process. Media do not simply transport a
message, but in the act of transmission they exert a formative force on
the message, which is not evident, but latent: «Traces are changes in the
visible in the mode of a latency [...]» («Spuren sind Veränderungen am
Sichtbaren im Modus einer Latenz […]»), (ibid.) as Krämer writes. It is
sufficient to recall that already in the etymological root of the word
medium we find these two dimensions, on the one hand “betweenness”
and on the other a quality of “becoming” (Bruno 2014: 5). This may be
what is shared by the act of mediating and Lévi-Strauss' concept of
“bricolage”: just like the material of the bricoleur, the medium gives form
to the message, turning the signifiés into signifiants and vice versa (Lévi-
Strauss 1973: 34).
      We have now dealt exclusively with the operation of mediality and
have not yet spoken about intermediality. It is important to make and
clarify this distinction and to differentiate the media-philosophical
concept of mediality from the comparative concept of intermediality. In
the act of mediation several intermedial references can therefore be
differentiated and considered separately and independently. In light of
this, the accusation of Irina Rajewsky seems unfounded. In her
aforementioned article, she sees the field of intermediality represented
by two non-complementary poles:


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        a first pole (mostly in the fields of genealogy, history, philosophy
     or general media theory) to which can be traced approaches that
     consider intermediality as a fundamental condition of our culture
     and therefore as a basic phenomenon; a second pole consisting
     instead of approaches (originated mainly from literary studies) that
     conceive 'intermediality' as a category for the analysis of concrete
     media practices or configurations - in case these manifest specific
     elements or strategies of an intermediate type.

         (un primo polo (per lo più negli ambiti di genealogia, storia,
     filosofia o teoria generale dei media) cui sono riconducibili approcci
     che considerano l'intermedialità come una condizione
     fondamentale della nostra cultura e quindi come fenomeno di base;
     un secondo polo costituito invece da approcci (originati
     prevalentemente dai literary studies) che concepiscono
     'intermedialità' come una categoria per l'analisi di pratiche o
     configurazioni mediali concrete – nel caso queste manifestino
     specifici elementi o strategie di tipo intermediale). (Rajewsky 2018:
     6)

     Instead of attributing Sybille Krämer to the first pole, which was
contested by Rajewsky, we want to differentiate the concept of mediality
from that of intermediality as complementary but supplementing
categories and understand Dante as a Third, a mediator-figure. Hence,
by placing the artist on one of the two sides of mediation, we have very
implicitly turned the role long reserved for Ai Weiwei: that of the
cultural mediator.
      The innovative aspect of Ai Weiwei's art has often been explained
in terms of the symbiosis of Western and Eastern culture: «The
complicated convolution of ways of speaking and interests in East and
West», as Siemons puts it (2009: 27). But Ai Weiwei worked hard to deny
the image «as the supreme interpreter of his country» (ibid.: 28). This can
be seen from the research subjects we have dealt with. Although
garnished with Western elements, Ai Weiwei's music album The Divine
Comedy is oriented towards the Chinese discourse and deals with his
own experiences in the outcome of his earthquake works. In contrast,



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Dante Alighieri in LEGO is one of the numerous examples of Ai Weiwei's
artwork with which he turns away from his one-sided role as China's
cultural mediator in the West. By taking a stand on Western discourses,
he simultaneously rebels against this image. Thus, at the height of the
European refugee crisis, he addresses the European discourse in his
exhibition in Florence: not only explicitly, by having twenty-two refugee
rescue boats installed on the exterior walls of Palazzo Strozzi (Reframe
2016), but also implicitly, latently: by exhibiting Dante as a surface, that
is to say: a Third. The trace, the trajectory of Dante-surface leads to a
debate about attributing social value. Concluding, we can affirm that
surfaces are not superficial at all.




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Daniel Brandlechner, From the Earth to the World




                                     The Author
Daniel Brandlechner

      Daniel Brandlechner is a doctoral candidate at the Department of
Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna, Austria. His
research interest lies in literary disaster studies, transnational cultural
transfer and digital comparative literature.

        Email: daniel.brandlechner@gmail.com



                                     The Article
Date sent: 15/07/2020
Date accepted: 20/10/2020
Date published: 30/11/2020



                            How to cite this article
Brandlechner, Daniel, “From the Earth to the World Ai Weiwei's
Functional Dante Reference in the Music Album The Divine Comedy
(2013) and in the Lego Portrait Dante Alighieri in LEGO (2016)”,
Transmediality / Intermediality / Crossmediality: Problems of Definition, Eds.
H. Backe, M. Fusillo, M. Lino, with the focus section Intermedial
Dante: Reception, Appropriation, Metamorphosis, Eds. C. Fischer and M.
Petricola, Between, VIII.16 (2018), www.betweenjournal.it.




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