week 8: Authorship

AUTHORSHIP

    The creation of arts comes in many forms, and with those arts come their creators, us as a society view these arts and use the authors or creators to understand their pieces. We can become very invested in the creator's life. Our collective obsession with biographies and celebrities hinder the interpretation of art by getting the viewer invested in the personal life of the creator of an art piece or text. This affects the way we interpret art because we start to learn the history behind the creator and use their history to try and understand an art piece. This obsession we create is simply our fascination with the artist; we want to understand them possibly even try to be them by learning their life stories we can understand the creator better and why they make something if we generally have an idea of who that creator is as a person, what struggles they faced and how they lived their lives. This would help us as viewers create interpretations of the art simply because we feel that we have an understanding of the creator and their life so we’d know better about why or what their piece of work truly means. When reading we discovered the idea of originality and what that could mean if no art in truly an original piece if it came from something else, that defeats the idea of something being original because art does come from somewhere, and so I would have to agree with the idea that nothing is an original piece and everything is like a quotation. Basically what I am saying is that no art is completely original if you think about the concept of how art pieces are inspired. Everyone finds inspiration for their artwork somewhere. When we make art it comes from something we know and have experienced; this is something that has developed off us as artists. Our inspirations are not these original ideas but copies of the things we see and experience, yes we can make our own “original” pieces but it comes down to the content or context of that art piece; that art comes from somewhere, so how could we claim anything as an original. This completely changes the way we think of original pieces because everything has to start from somewhere before we can actually make the piece of art we come up with. Then others may come along and recreate your art style into their own form of their own “original piece” but that word “original” has no meaning if we think about the content or context of a piece of work.

    When Barthes says that "once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile." Barthes is trying to tell us that once we remove an author from the text we no longer find the need to understand that text; it becomes pointless. The author themselves makes us look deeper into the words they write because we desire to use their text to try and understand them as an author but when we take out an author we are no longer invested in that author’s story; but now we are left with only the text. We aren’t going to dig into the text to understand it, instead we’d create our own ideas from reading the text ourselves. So understanding that meaning behind a text isn’t the main reason the text was written, it was made for us as the viewers to interpret as we please. When I think of interpreting a text it makes me think back to what I said before, us as viewers try to understand a piece by learning about the person who created that piece. But if we take away the author, interpretation becomes more; it can become personal or emotional and interpretation is seen in many different ways completely based on the viewer's perspective of the piece. Arts and texts can be interpreted in many different ways, as a viewer, reader, or listener we are not always gonna understand something as soon as we are exposed to it. With time and studying of a piece then comes understanding of a piece more thoughts are able to collect over time therefore helping to create our understanding of the pieces of arts we are exposed to. We couldn’t possibly just understand every part of something until we get the chance to examine the piece and we get to understand that piece on our own, once we do understand it, then surely it’ll stay with us in our minds from how we interpreted the arts.



    In our second reading we read Sherrie Levine’s artist statement and notice she completely plagiarizes Barthes words from his essay “The death of the Author”. She directly challenged his idea of no art being original and took that into face-value by evening using plagiarism in her own art by just creating these copies of artwork that already exist and she just slaps her name onto the piece while also referring to the “original” artist of the piece, almost like a way of citing her source. She wrote the same as barthes but applied his thoughts into thoughts for the artist and painters to show that his words not only relate to the art of words but also to those who make art with paint and paper or other media. She changed the meaning of the original text by Barthes by transforming his word to fit her own narrative. In class we even discussed the idea of plagiarism being her art form. Levine’s art work was always just copied pieces, but perhaps this was exactly what she wanted to communicate, if so she tackles this copying identity all the way up to her own art statement by taking the words of another and claiming it as her own to fit her artistic style. This is a clever way of showing how she works as a copy artist, and that “copying” is her style of work.

    I personally wondered, how could she get away with so much plagiarism? How was it that she was just creating these copies and being known for something, so simple yet daring. I believe this was what really caught many people’s attention by seeing her art and realizing it belongs to another. It was like taking offense from her work by seeing her name placed right before the original artist. Yet this was something I have never seen and never heard of, so naturally it took me by surprise. But she didn’t steal the work because she easily cites her sources to her art work claiming them to be “after” another, with this context she changed the way art can be produced. When I imagine art work being copied I imagine the art work going through changes either dramatic changes or even minor ones but I always intend to see some kind of change but for Levine, her identity in art was to make these copies of art by simply just capturing images of the art work. She isn’t wrong to claim those arts as her own because truthfully she is capturing the image herself with her own photos; so technically it is becoming her own artwork if you think about it in the way that she produces her art.











Citations_

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

Levine, Sherrie, Statement. 1947