Week 7: Authorship

  

Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife by Walker Evans (1936) and After Walker Evans by Sherrie Levine (1981)

    The Death of the Author is an essay by Roland Barthes in which he argues against the act of using an author's biography to explain the meaning of their texts. Our obsession with biographies and celebrities hinders our interpretation of art because if we know anything about the artist, we will automatically associate their piece of art with some information about them. For example, many of Vincent Van Gogh's artwork appears cheerful and vibrant, however, if you know about Van Gogh's life and at times, his mental state, it makes many of his work seem so sad. 

    The idea that nothing is original is something that I've thought a lot about. As an artist who wants to make sure all of my own work is original, I find myself scouring the internet to see if a painting like the one I want to make already exists. Or if I had a brilliant idea out of nowhere, I'm usually convinced I had seen it somewhere before and that memory is stored somewhere in my subconscious. For example, years ago I told my dad that I had a great movie idea about ghosts and in a turn of events you find out that the main character was always a ghost. I thought it was a neat and original idea, but my dad told me to watch The Sixth Sense and I've been discouraged ever since. The idea that everything we say is a quotation is hard for me to wrap my head around though. Obviously, most sequences of words have already been spoken before, but that doesn't mean were trying to quote anyone. Maybe there is such thing as parallel thinking, meaning we can have the same ideas without the influence from someone else or quoting someone else. 

    Barthes once said, "once an author is removed, the claims to decipher a text becomes quite futile." (147) This may mean that once the author or artist is gone, you cannot say with any certainty that you know the exact meaning behind their work. Your claim would be pointless. I could have a different idea of what the meaning of a work of art is, but with no solid answer from the author or artist, we both just have theories. I think that if an artist did not tell you what their work represents, then the meaning is up for interpretation, but you cannot say that you know without a doubt what the meaning is. 

    I'm not certain, but I think that when Barthes said "the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost" he may have meant that unlike other art forms like painting for example, writing is more direct. The author can clearly state the intention or the meaning of a writing. Less is up to interpretation with writing. I'm not sure that it's possible for a reader to understand everything about a text though. 

    Sherrie Levine plagiarized Barthes artist statement nearly word for word, switching some out with her own. I believe she changed the word "reader" to "viewer" and "author" to painter". Levine's art is mostly appropriations of male artists' famous work. Walker Evans was hired by the Farm Security Administration to document images from the American south during the Great Depression. Levine took a picture of a reproduction of Evans photograph in a series titled After Walker Evans. I'm not sure how I feel about this to be honest. I understand that many artists copy ideas, but she took a direct photograph of a reproduction and that's it. She didn't really use her own idea to give it a fresh take. Apparently, this is called appropriation art, and she is not the only one that does this. 

 

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author, 1967, pp. 142–148.

Savorelli, di Eleonora. “È Quello Che Sembra, O Forse No: L’appropriation Art Di Sherrie Levine.” ArtsLife, 11 Feb. 2021, artslife.com/2021/02/12/appropriation-art-sherrie-levine/. (Image Source)