Week 8 Authorship

For this weeks readings we studied Ronald Barthes “Death Of The Author” and Sherri Levine’s “Statement”. Barthes expresses his belief that the way that a reader might interpret a text is often different than the writer intended while writing it. Perhaps every reader creates a different understanding of the text, and therefor the intentions of the writer are removed once the text is published. It is his understanding that the reader creates the meaning of the text. Rather than the reader trying to understand and evaluate the writers initial intentions creating the text, he believes that we should exercise out own beliefs and understanding that comes unique during the process of reading it rather than the meaning being pre determined. He believes that the authors prospective alone limits the text, because it is language that speaks to us, not the author. Writing should be interpreted in the moment that it is being read, here and now, because it is only meaningful as you read it. I think that his theory is interesting, however I don’t believe that the birth of the reader must be at the death of the writer. I believe that they can live simultaneously and the reader can understand literature from their personal prospective first and then through the mind of the writer. For example the reader could first interoperate the text with their own meaning/ understanding and then get just as much from it after learning about the authors values and personal meaning when creating that same text. 

Sharri Levine recreated photographs by taking pictures of the original photographs. This technique challenged Plagiarism and property issues. It affected the value of the original artwork because it is no longer one of a kind. The art work can now easily be reprinted and recreated a thousand times making it less valuable. Credit and compensation is not given to the original artist. Her defense was that nothing is original and space couldn’t be claimed by the artist who captured it first. In her statement she says:

“Succeeding the painter, the plagiarist no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense encyclopedia from which he draws. The viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost. A painting's meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination . The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter.”

The last statement is in reference to Ronald Barthes “Death of the Author” when he states that “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”

The idea that nothing is original or that everything is a quotation triggers me as an artist. In my opinion, there is originality in the world. Even though a writing is a string of words that already exist, there are infinite ways to put those words together to create new meanings, feelings and beliefs. I feel this way about art work as well; no two lines are drawn exactly the same. I believe that work is often times influenced or inspired by an existing idea but that the work that comes from it can still be completely original. The way that a piece is executed recreates it. Sherri Levine did not actually change or manipulate the original work, she just simply made an electronic copy of it. The best example that I have to explain the difference between what Sheri does and what artists and writers do is this: suppose the colors red and blue already exist in the world, artists and writers combine them to make a new original color, purple. Sherri takes the color blue and makes more blue.  

Cite:

Barthes, Roland, et al. The Death of the Author. 1977. 

Levine, Sherrie, Statement. 1947