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 University of Vienna
Keywords: Intermediality, Mediality, World Literature, Dante, Surface Reading

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.

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Author Biography

Daniel Brandlechner, University of Vienna

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.

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Published
2020-11-29
How to Cite
Brandlechner, D. (2020). 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&gt; (2016). Between, 10(20), 329-346. https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/4207