Looking at the newspaper clipping from 1870 to 1930 in art and science,
this study examines knowledge production and its visual and material
background, combining the perspectives of media history with art history
and the history of science.
It traces pre- and early-modern practices of citation through to the
development of modern newspapers, as well as the beginnings of the
academic study of the modern press, and opens up the forgotten but once
everyday commercial practices of the cutting. Te Heesen offers a
counterpoint to existing works on the iconographic meaning of materials
through the use of different case studies that reveal various practices
of the clipping: a collection of cuttings about Albert Einstein; the
collages of the German artist Kurt Schwitters; and the development of a
modern archive of clippings. The final chapter is a fascinating
summation of various aspects of sociological, philosophical, artistic
and literary modernity reconsidered through the lens of the historical
constellation she assembles around the object of her study. The book
puts emphasis upon the materiality of paper and analyses the practices
connected with paper, placing them, along with their instruments and
tools, within a theoretical
framework. This history also sheds light on the handling of information,
information overload and the generation of knowledge, drawing parallels
with the Internet.
Through the prism of the newspaper clipping and a remarkable historical
reconstruction of its conditions of production and consumption, this
accessible study makes a set of powerful arguments about art, literature
and labour.
