Project 15: Author? What Author? (Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes)

Once again I have to apologise for the lateness of the post. I had done the works weeks ago but just hadn’t got round to typing. Sadly, I’m starting to get ill again and coupled with a bad exam result, I’ve had restructure my schedule.

This week’s project was to read Michel Foucault’s ‘What is an Author’ (pp. 949-953 in Art in Theory: 1900-2000) and Roland Barthes’s ‘Death of the Author’ (pp. 142-148 in Image, Music, Text) and then consider in regards to the work of Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine.

These two articles were written at almost the same time in the late ‘60s.  They both look at the traditional Modernist view of the author as the privileged creator of meaning and authority in the work in question and in their different ways demolish it. Some have argued that this is the beginning of the democratising of meanings others as the slippery slope to meaninglessness and extreme relativism. 

Not only do they produce explanations as to how meaning varies from ‘reader’ to ‘reader’ but also ideas upon which a generation of artists have built much of their oeuvre.

The author is a cultural construct. As texts are embedded with a complex magnitude of cultural representations, it stresses the construction of meaning not with the author but with the reader: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the author”.

The concept of the author takes precedence in capitalist ideology and while Foucault defines the ideological nature of the ‘author-function’, Barthes removes the author from the modern text. Traditionally criticism is centred on the individual.  Ultimately, it is the author who imposes limitations upon the text. 

Both Foucault and Bathes are moving away from rigid Structuralism; moving away from signifiers to autonomous signifieds with no fixed or pre-given meaning.   Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine can been seen to function as authors, though this perspective limits the signification with the discourse. As ideological figures they are principles which bound meaning. Despite assumptions several texts under the same name do not create a relationship of homogeneity, neither does the author endow organic unity upon the text; the text compiles many codes given in the author’s culture.

Barthes was radical as he asserted the independence of text; the work is not determined by intention or context. As the text is now free from textual authority, in the absence of the author it becomes futile to claim to decipher the text. Meaning in the text is shifted from being produced by an author to something that is produced by the reader. The new emphasis on the reader invalidates both the context and the creator’s intent at the time of constructing the artwork. The text is a multi-dimensional space where a variety writings, none of them original, cohere and juxtapose:  “The text is a tissue of quotations [signs] drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”. A text is never original. The author becomes a scripter whose only power is mix writing. They can only translate their interior indefinitely through language. 

The artwork of both Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman are explained in light of these articles. There work has used a mixture of signs – which can be acknowledged or deferred by the reader – in which the reader can generate meaning from. For Example, Levine re-photographed Walker Evan’s 1936 photographs of a family of Sharecroppers in Depression era of Alabama. These re-productions call into the textual of authority of the images: Who is the author? Walker or Levine?

Left: Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, [Photograph] 1981, gelatin silver print.

Right: Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer's Wife, [Photograph] 1936, gelatin silver print.

On the other hand Cindy Sherman does not directly reference the work of others. Indirectly Sherman, in The Untitled Film Stills, references various genres and movements of Cinema. The author becomes an actress, taking on the roles within her own her images.  Sherman, through intertextuality, allows the reader to resonate meaning from the image. 

Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still #21. 1978 [Photograph].
Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Clearly the cultural shift following the two articles, with the birth of the reader being at the expense of the author, makes Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘aura’ of an artwork less relevant. The sacredness of the original no longer matters.  Really, the idea of ‘aura’ becomes a cultural application which can be used or not depending on the intentions of the reader. This shift into Post-Structuralism, in regards to authorship, not only explains but validates the un-regulated nature of the internet. With no fixed or pre-given meanings  anything is possible.

Bibliography

Barry, Peter. 2009. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Barthes, R. 1974. ‘The Death of an Author?’  In: Image, Music, Text. 1977. London: Fontana Press, pp. 96-106, pp. 142-148.

D’Alleva, Anne. 2005. Methods & Theories of Art History. London: Laurence King Publishing. 

Foucault, M. 1969. ‘What is an Author?’ In: Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (ed.) Art in Theory: 1900-2000. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing pp. 949-953.