Before and After Writing [electronic resource].

Galerie Gisela Capitain 2025

Open access content

I often find myself wanting to get as far from the present as possible. Recently I’ve been obsessed with the extreme past. People of 20,000 years ago possessed creative and capable minds—the same as ours, apparently—and must have made countless works of art and culture, but because all of it dates from before the invention of writing, it’s utterly lost. Why do I want to escape the present? Because of the feeling of dread that I’m living through the end of something. In response, I feel an urge rising, like a psychic undertow, to pare everything away. This sometimes sharpens into the desire to strip my world of everything known and familiar. Of course, that’s exactly what seems to be happening these days, anyway, isn’t it? This is the source of dread. It helps to remember that if we are standing at the end of something, we must be standing at the beginning of something else, and whatever that thing turns out to be, it is not yet written.
https://www.librarystack.org/before-and-after-writing/?ref=unknown

Artists' writings
Art--Exhibitions
Historiography

Text

Seth Price