Exploring Art as Intertextual Practice

Like the age-old saying, “There is nothing new under the sun,” the idea that no piece of art exists in isolation is by no means a novel one. Instead, across literature, film, theatre, dance, music, and a plethora of other disciplines, art is a mosaic of preceding intertextual cultural works. Writers and creators engage in intertextual practice to enrich narratives, challenge assumptions, or evoke shared cultural memories. This can occur both intra- and interdisciplinarily. Furthermore, intertextuality confirms the collectivist nature of artistic practice. We create pieces of work that speak and respond to each other, akin to a long-winded, never-ending, intergenerational conversation spanning years of cumulative contributions.

To give credit where it’s due, the term intertextuality was coined by Julia Kristeva in 1967. The theory of intertextuality suggests that a text needs to be read in light of its allusions to and differences from the content or structure of other texts. No text functions as a completely closed system. Take, for instance, The Heart of Redness (2000), a novel by South African literary giant Zakes Mda. The novel follows the story of a South African man who returns to a divided village in pursuit of lust, redemption, and identity. The book is an intertextual reference to Heart of Darkness (1899), a novella by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad, a text that on its own speaks to a shared settler-colonial narrative as the sailor Charles Marlow tells the story of his assignment as a steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior. Beyond literature, we see intertextuality across every creative discipline. In music, think remixes and samples. This intertextual practice is a part of the postmodern tradition of fashioning pre-existing material into something inventive and new. It’s the art of recontextualization: thinking about how something in one domain can be applied in another for an entirely different purpose and function. 

Virgil Abloh famously popularized the art of irony with the iconic use of quotation marks in his Off-White designs. With this method, Abloh rejects the who-did-it-first mentality in favour of the intertextual logic of Internet culture. He makes a good point in his often-paraphrased analogy about how a candle placed in a pristine white gallery becomes art; placed in a garage, it becomes overlooked. The object stays the same—only the context changes, which inadvertently changes how the very same object is perceived.

Even memes can be considered a vibrant form of Internet-native intertextuality. The original context of the meme is usually a pre-existing television series, film, or clipped video. But on the internet, the piece of content takes on a new expression. It becomes a display of humour, a symbol of a particular emotional expression, and a representation of a feeling. These are only two examples of intertextuality.

Returning to the literary world, there are varied methods of intertextuality, such as:

Parody: the method of mockery; the deliberate, humorous imitation of a specific author, genre, or well-known work.

Allusion: a subtle or indirect reference to another text, historical event, or myth.

Pastiche: a work that openly mimics the style, tone, or techniques of another artist or period. 

Quotation: the exact repetition of a phrase, line, or dialogue from another text, usually accompanied by quotation marks.

Irony: a text intentionally clashing its expected meaning with the reality of the referenced text. 

Satire: using parody to ridicule or critique a social norm, institution, or political figure by imitating a recognizable text. 

Intertextuality is by no means plagiarism, however. The two are completely different. Plagiarism, in contrast, is presenting another person’s ideas or work and passing it off as one’s own. There are many moments in popular culture that have highlighted the tension between intertextuality and plagiarism. Take musician and producer Pharrell Williams’s hit song, Blurred Lines (2013), where Marvin Gaye’s estate successfully sued both Pharrell and Robin Thicke, claiming their song plagiarized Gaye’s 1977 track, Got to Give It Up. Whether the incident was an instance of intertextuality or plagiarism is entirely up to the reader to negotiate. And even that negotiation is motivated by several factors, often beyond the control of the artist or creator, such as profit, popularity, or perhaps both.

While plagiarism brings with it important ethical considerations, intertextuality invites inquiry into the very act of artistic and cultural practice. Take, for instance, the similarities between the IsiZulu and IsiXhosa languages, or how eerily similar the works of Kenyan-born, New York-based visual artist Wangechi Mutu and the visual design/art direction in Björk’s 2017 album, Utopia, are, despite the fact that it is unknown whether the two have ever met.

Intertextuality makes creativity fun, dynamic, and interconnected because the best creatives are often incredibly good at referencing. Their intertextual palette is wide because they can identify and connect patterns across a wide range of disciplines, genres, and categories. Their creativity becomes inherently post-disciplinary because their expression isn’t limited by medium. Category-disrupting creativity is the best kind of creativity because it’s inherently cyclical and doesn’t seem to have any limits, precisely because of how it cross-pollinates across different contexts. That’s the beauty of viewing art not as an isolated incident, but as an intertextual practice that has been around since the dawn of time. Art is a conversation; let it be a pleasant one.