Pulling apart idea of Authorship
Meaning resides in the object itself
Civil rights movements - USA, Northern Ireland 1960s
Conceptual art challenged the idea of art as a commoditiy
Try to explain the meaning of the art through the author or the artist
"The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it..." Barthes
"The creative art is not performed by the artist alone, the spectator..."
Why is it important to put an artists name on a work? Why do we need to know who did it?
Marina Abramovic so dematerialised her work and herself that she has become part of the work
Who is the author? Studio assistants make most of the work? Artist has the ideas. Number of studio assistants: Jeff Koons 120, Hirst 7. Anthony Gormley's field of small creatures made by 1000s of different people, when it's sold who takes the credit?
Kzrtzstof: Authorship and Collaboration
Distinction bewteen authorship on one hand and on the other a more complex and in process idea of making art and art practice. From a preindustrial period to early 19th century.
Author - authority. Challenge and dismantle
Dematerialisation - possible to be an artist without actually making anything
Avantgarde and group collaboration - exhibitons and talks etc becomes easier when doing together or as a group. Dada - each individual member have a different interpretation.
Interactiviity between group members.
Authority of an individual person
Play is the notion where you suspend the rules of the outside world
Develop a set of speculative rules. Play - testing out new possibilities. No longer a sense of authority, loss of authority of a single person making the work.
Destablising replaying performing staging, never a stable identity - Claude Cahun. Double exposure, playing with mirrors, fragment. Self becomes the social.
Seminar: death of the author - forces you to question it and raises arguments. Talking about writers but links to art. Everytime uses the word author we think 'artist'. Biography: who made it, when did they live, where was it made. Feel we need to understand artist to get a grip of the work. Barthes argues The work happens in itself, don't need any of that information to understand it.
Author confiding in us.
Language itself that is creating the work. Where it does something active is where we should look for the meaning of the work.
Warhol: starts to work in a collective context. Takes over a light factory as his studio - calls it the factory. Suggests ideas of working and labour and collaboration.
Not only working on his own working with others to get ideas
Texts and images work in very different ways. With a text you read the works in a certain order, some sort of structure. With artwork you are trying to read into it the language of it. Not as easy to understand as a piece of text.
How would you feel to attend an exhibition where you're not told who it's by.
To what extent do you want the audience to know your name and your background?
Warhol - such an interesting life and back story and stories and how he makes work, actual work is not that incredible.
Title is often part of the work, so to agree with ideas from death of the author wouldn't allow this.
Problems with the Internet and overload of images - subconsciously copy work. Impossible to make completely now work, already submerged in all of the work you've ever seen. Only adding to what already exists.
Valerie - SCUM look up
Never going to give entire context to the audience of your work.
Performative work - all work has been made.
Banksy - identity staged, still has a character, we still know meaning behind the work even though we don't know the artist.
Marcel Duchamp
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