Establishing Contrary Approaches to art in Post-modern
society:
the Author is dead, long live the reader…
Introduction
This essay is an attempt to explain how contemporary art and design (or critical) practise can be, and increasingly are, understood as open 'texts' rather than the works of great authors. I will be doing this mainly with reference to Roland Barthes' understanding of the terms (1). I am particularly interested in the photographic image (2)and how the increased utilisation of cameras may be held responsible for (or be a symptom of) this change.
Cindy Sherman Vs Tracy Emin
To demonstrate the differentiation between work and text I will compare two contemporary female artists whose work represents around representations of themselves- Tracy Emin for the "work"-approach and Cindy Sherman for the "text" approach. I use the word approach, for in order to discern between the two we need not to apply the terms to a certain image or movement, rather a methodological field (3).
According to Barthes' quite radical attitude, there has, since Marxism and psychoanalysis, been no real break; nothing is new today, all we can create is different variations of the past (4). This sliding or overturning former categories requires a new object; that object is the text.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, #58
1980. Gelatin-silver print, Edition 1/10, 20.3 x 25.4 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Ginny Williams, 97.4611. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures. Digital Image © 2000 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.Through the process of carefully linking different texts together the American artist Cindy Sherman, master of camouflage, has during the last twenty-five years taken on different roles and disguises in her photographs, drawn from beheld memory of visual culture and literature. In Untitled History Portraits Sherman dresses up European religious paintings, primarily inspired by the Italian 15th and 16th century masters. Film Stills carry a dwelling horror also found in many Hitchcock-movies (5). The Fashion Series is playing with how people are popularly represented in visual culture. Her photographs are a critique of the way in which women are constituted as objects and in them she is both the subject and object.(6)
'To express a self is to reproduce an already given type (7); in other words, the world of culture is a construct with no essential, pre-social or given true self (8). These are the implications in Sherman's images; there is no 'true you' only representation. Another way of looking at is that they are all true different yous, (this image of Cindy Sherman is no truer or falser than any other image of Cindy Sherman) a thought that feels very post-modern (9).
Not having titles fixed to her images is one example how she opens up to constantly changeable readings.
The reader, the one that classical criticism never paid any attention to (10), ultimately becomes the one who creates meaning and body to the text and can be compares to someone at a loose end, unravelling the clues to create an individual solution with reference to his or her cultural situation and world of stored images.
Cindy Sherman"Untitled #224"
photograph, 48"x38", 1990.
© Cindy Sherman"A texts unity lies not in its origin but in its destination" Roland Barthes (11)
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #126 1983
Photograph on paper
image: 1828 x 1218 mm
© Cindy Sherman
Courtesy of Tate GalleryThe talent of the writer, Cindy Sherman, lies not in the originality of her sources but in the way she contrives to put them together in a new and engaging way (12). You may look upon the text as a tissue of quotations, a weave of signifiers drawn from innumerable centres of culture(13). Those signifiers have in Sherman's case no indexical connection to reality; they only refer to other images. This is a phenomenon in Post-modern society called Simulacra- a copy without an original (14).
"Some people have told me they remember the movie that one of my images derived from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all." Cindy Sherman (15)
The text is a movement of discourse, an open discussion not as palpable and depending on rules andstructure as the work, which through analytical effort can be penetrated to reveal truth. With Tracy Emin's work we can decipher her symbolism to find out the meaning and intention with it.
Emin's role is also quite contrary to Sherman's; her art is based around her being, like a diary. Narcissism it may seem, "all I have is my art, they seem to be one and the same; it is my life and my life is my art" Tracy declares in an interview for the CVA-magazine (16).She is most famous for the installation My Bed (17), runner-up for the Turner Prize 1999, with which she stole all the publicity, even though she was not declared the winner of the prestigious award (18). My Bed is literally what the title implies; Tracy Emin's bed with miscellaneous, some of them rather gruesome personal items- used condoms, bloody tampons.
"The birth of the Reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author", Barthes declares, but without the notion of Tracy Emin as a person in the back of your head the work looses its edge remarkably. It is her 'raw openness' that fascinates, the idea of art as confessional. Her chaotic life and suffering creates the interest, with the emphasis on her as an individual. She makes us think that we know her personally, she is sharing with us and thereby we also know her art. Maybe a revision of thinking about the author is in place. Rather than declaring him dead I would like to call the author-biography a text in its own right, adding to the plot. We can compare this to a film based on a true story, which the audience may perceive differently from an entirely fictional one, in that way it does matter who the author is (19).
Tracy Emin and other contemporary British artists like Damian Hirst are the proof that the author-cultstill exists, and there is, as she herself admits, a glamorous side to being a contemporary artist in Britain today. When browsing the Internet for information on Emin it is surprising how little information there is to find on her work and how much there is written about her as a person and the sort of cult she has got around her. Her home-site is like a fan club where, mostly young, admirers write about their admiration for the celebrity (20).
There are some formal elements supporting the understanding of Tracy Emin's art as work:
She uses characteristic sewing, which may be compared to manneristic brushstrokes in modern artworks such as Vincent Van Gogh's paintings (21), often theorised in modern criticism as the artist expressing his inner feelings.
There are objects, specific and personal to the artist (like her bed) that are included and pointed out as something strictly particular to her.
She also uses words, little quotes or diary-notes, which fixes the reading, or at least trying to narrow it down to a certain meaning in line with the author's intention. This is directly opposing what Sherman is trying to do, namely open up to an immense number of readings. If you did not know of the Tracy Emin- myth there might be a possibility to interpret her work as textual, make your own reading, but this is something she has made sure everyone knows trough constantly using shock-strategy (raises inquisitiveness; what next) and "superb marketing" of her own persona (22). As for Cindy Sherman she hardly ever gives an interview, and when she does it is not of a private nature (most people would probably not even know what she looked like, let alone what she prefers for breakfast).
Emin's latest private view (23) pulled an enormous crowd of people, everyone eager to see and adore the artist. It had more resemblance to a film premiere, with the star herself in a silky slinky dress, smilingly holding a glass of champagne (24).So what we have is a change in people's way of contemplating visual culture, a change from a modern frame of mind to a predominantly post-modern (25). Ways of reproducing images and the use of cameras are centrally implicated as causing factor for this change. We are simply exposed to so much more imagery and information than we ever were before. The Internet spreads information worldwide in a matter of seconds, actual physical transportation has never been easier, but why go abroad if you have a theme park close at hand?(26) Living in a world overwhelmed by signs, somewhat makes you wonder if you see more images than real world. Culture itself has become a commodity, the Tate Shop is selling ginger-cookies resembling the Tate Modern museum, inflatable 'Screams' and umbrellas with Jackson Pollock patterns printed all over them. This commercialisation of art, these pastiches (27), kills the meaning when they are not hermeneutical but rather imitative, but only of formal elements not of what the artwork stands for (28). This makes detection of 'true source' an intricate (impossible?) mission, the question shifts to; who is speaking, who is spoken to, what codes do they share to communicate (29)? Umberto Eco argues that the saviour in post-modernism is irony. If you express something that other people may have done time and again you have got to be prepared to be a cliché- but through using an ironic tone, not even trying to be original, you have freed yourself from such accusations (30). Andy Warhol's silk-screens of well known commodities and celebrities is one example of this kind of irony and marks the death of the subject and the end of unique and personal style (31).
New technologies have forced us to reconsider the idea of creative activity (32). The camera was an immense threat to the author. By examining a photograph there is no method of deciding, unless signed, who the creator is, this time there are no characteristic brushstrokes. Clearly we can often find other determining factors, a certain "idiom", but, theoretically speaking, the person behind the camera could have been anyone. This 'collapse of difference' has had an enormous effect on painting and sculpture, for the photographs failure of singularity undermined the very ground on which the aesthetic rules that validated originality was founded on. Multiple, reproducible, repetitive images destablished the very notion of 'originality' and blurred the difference between original and copy. The "great masters'" approach to the analysis of images became increasingly irrelevant, for in the world of the simulacrum, what is called into question is the originality of authorship, the uniqueness of the art object and the nature of self-expression (33).Summary
We have gone from an art-scene where the author had a patriarchal relationship to his creation and was respected as the true source, to the situation where the author plays a walk-in part somewhere in the background. With the birth of the text and the death of the author, appears on the scene the reader, as a co-creator making his own personal interpretation, creating his own images, undermining the uniqueness of artworks. The contradiction to this point of view is artists like Tracy Emin who is as important to her pieces as the movie-star Fred Astair was to 'Singin' in the Rain'.
After-text/Additional questions to be asked
¤ In what sense precisely is it a contradiction?
¤ What is the significance that should award Tracey Emin's practise in working out how useful the terms work/text are?
¤ Does it shift the pairing from a simple "historical" schema to a more complex one where 'Postmodernism' is a 'cultural dominant' (in Jameson's terms) but there are other cultural forms?
¤ Does Emin's work rest on a sense of nostalgia for a need of authenticity that Barthe's work shows as perhaps fake?
See also Foucault's 'What is an Author' (reprinted in Preziosi's The Art of Art History) for a critique of the notion of authorship that might explain why the artworld likes 'authors'.1. Dealed with in Image, Music, Text (London Fontana, 1977)
2. Leaving out the social function of photographs as a recorder of family events and such wich is a separate discussion than the one of art-photography, (although they can sometimes be one and the same) Carol Squiers writes more about this distinction in her Introduction to The Critical Image- Essays on Contemporary Photography ed. Carol Squiers, (London, Bay Press, 1990) pp. 7-14
3. Although I AM using genereralisation to clarify the condition.
4. Roland Barthes 'From Work to Text', Image, Music, Text (London Fontana, 1977)
5. Young platinum-blondes in hazardous situations
6. See Jaques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalyses
7.Memory Holloway about Cindy Sherman in 'Blue-Tack and temples' Postmodern conditions, ed. Andrew Milner, Philip Thompson and Chris Worth (Oxford, Berg, 1990) p.195
8. for it the writer is the only person in litterature, Barthes, 'From Work to Text'.
9. Barthes, 'The Death of the author'.
10. Aoife McNamara, 'Cindy Sherman: a Cultural Study of Identity' (Middlesex University, London,
11. Ibid.
12. You can also compare it to the task of critical writing.
13. Barthes, 'The Death of the author', p. 146.
14. On this subjekt it is written in 'The Evil Deamons of Images and the Precession of Simulacra' by Jean Baudrillard, it is also implied in Jameson's 'The cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' to name a few who have acknowledge this phenomenon.
15. From Cindy Sherman 1975-1993
16. Mark Gisbourne 'Life Into Art' CVA-magazine nr 20 (2001).
17. 'My Bed' (London) courtesy of Charles Saatchi (owner of Saatchi gallery, north London) who recently bought the installation for a sensational £ 150 000.
18. The winner 1997 was Steve McQueen's video 'Deadpan' where a house collapses over the artist.
19. Take for instance a film like 'Schindler's list' . It is easy to MAKE UP a story about some heroic man (in fiction we can all be heroes) but to KNOW that he really existed gives a compleatly different creadibility and feeling to the work (even though one should probably question how objective this interpretation of reality really is).
The feeling described in Roland Barthes 'Camera Lucida' as he sees a photo of Napoleon's cousin
20. "I think you're great", "I love your work", or even "I love you", are typical expressions. In fact, I did not manage to find ANY critical voices, although I am quite sure they exists aswell.
URL: http://www.bway.net/~modcult/tefhome.html (2001-04-25)
21. again, it is not as simple as claiming that the work is something that solely belongs to modernism, but it works as a generelisation. You could in fact read Van Gogh with a textual frame of mind aswell, as, for example, Griselda Pollock does in Differentiating the Canon.
22. Matthew Collins testifies this statement in an article for Blimey! no 15 1997; "After (1993-ish I would see Tracey Emin at various gallery openings: She would just launch into talking about herself
23. for her exhibition 'You Forgot to Kiss My Soul' shown at White Cube2 2001-27-04 to 2001-05-26.
24. Alex Renton 'The Daily Tracey' The Daily Mail 2001-04-27 p.29.
25. In modernism it was necessary for art to be separate from society in order to keep a critical distance which stands in direct opposition to the post-modernistic engagement with society, where art is interakting with, not beeing detached from society.
26. See Sarah Chaplin and Eric Holding 'Adressing the Post-Urban' on "Disneyfication" and "McDonaldization" Renaissance and Modern Studies (1997) pp. 122-134.
Also 'Variations on a Theme Park' by Michael Sorkin (ed.) A New American City and the End of Public Space (New York, Hill & Ward, 1992) pp. 233-249.
27. blank parodies, Thomas Mann invented the concept of imitating the concept of imitating peculiar or unique style.
28. Memory Holloway 'Blue-Tack and Temples: Artistic Practise in the Eighties, a Post-modernistic view' Post-modern Conditions ed. Andrew Milner, Philip Thomson and Chris Worth (Oxford, Berg, 1990)
29. Kobena Mercer 'SKIN HEAD SEX THING- Racial difference in the homoerotic Imagery', New Formations, 16 (spring 1992) p. 8.
30. Umberto Eco 'Postscript to the Name of the Rose- Postmodernism, Irony the Enjoyable' The Postmodern Reader ed. Charles Jencks (London, Academy Editions, 1992) pp. 73-75.
31. As Frederic Jameson argues in 'The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' Postmodernism, or the
32. Memory Holloway 'Blue-Tack and Temples' pp.188.
33. see Derric Price's and Liz Wells' (ed.) 'Thinking about Photography- Debates Historically and Now', Photography: a Critical Inroduction (London, Routledge, 2000) pp. 20-23.
KEY TEXTS
Barthes, Roland 'Death of the Author', Image, Music, Text (London, Fontana 1977)
Barthes, Roland 'From work to Text', Image, Music, Text (London, Fontana 1977)
Gisbourne, Mark 'Life into Art', CVA-magazine, 20 (2001)
Holloway, Memory 'Blue-Tack and Temples: Artistic Practise in the Eighties, a Postmodernist view', Post-modern Conditions, Ed. Andrew Milner, Philip Thomson and Chris Worth (Oxford, Berg, 1990) pp. 187-197.
Mercer, Kobena 'SKIN HEAD SEX THING- Racial difference in the homoerotic Imagery', New Formations, 16 (spring 1992) pp. 1-23
Price, Derrick and Wells, Liz 'Thinking about Photography- Debates Historically and Now', Photography: a Critical Inroduction ed. Liz Wells (London, Routledge, 2000) pp. 11-61
Krauss, Rosalind E. Cindy Sherman 1975-1993 (New York, Rizzolo International Publications Inc., 1993)
