The Death of the Artist...
The Death of the Artist...
The great Roland Barthes breaks it down
(Roland Barthes - image from Critical Approaches journal)
You are a writer. A poet. A dancer. A painter. A photographer. A filmmaker. A digital artist. You create something. Finish it. And then, you die. You are dead. Seriously. This is what the French critic Roland Barthes says. I get it.
Roland Barthes died in 1980. Car crash (he was hit by one). Forty four years later, Barthes’ influence on how to analyze culture, society, history, and the human experience has never been bigger. His influence is immense and invisible at the same time. His concepts, philosophies are universal.
His concept - The Death of the Author is one such universal work of down the Rabbit Hole intellectual scuttlebutt. The Death of the Author is an essay Barthes wrote in 1967. It shuns aside the need to explore via biographical material or some sources to unquestionably understand the author’s intent in what they wrote. It’s title says it all: the author has died. It releases the author from the conversation and lets you have your own conversation with the art, which you were having anyway.
The author has no real say anymore; they have said it. The reader or the critic takes over. They don’t have to rely upon biographical materials. They are the person who decides what is being said, what has been presented to the world.
Here is an excerpt from the essay:
“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author- God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original…”
This is, to a certain degree, all art, all creative excursions. Poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction once created and released into the universe is in the hands of the reader, the audience, the observer. The creator has died. They have no more say in the matter. We can speculate all we want on what an artist was trying to say because the author has left the building.
A friend of mine, a great lover of the writings of Victor Hugo, insisted to me that Les Misreables, is a story about Jesus Christ. He said it because of the priest at the beginning of the story so central to Valjean’s journey towards redemption and purpose. Valjean, according to my friend, is a Christ like figure; he wants to save people, take care of people, and he wants to live a principled life.
It doesn’t matter if my friend is right or wrong; my friend cannot be wrong when it comes to the purpose of art. Hugo has more than accomplished the task of invoking thought and discussion and commenting deeply about the beauty and struggle of the human condition. My friend has taken his place in it as Barthes noted.
My friend need not try to figure out precisely what Hugo was writing about anyway. Hugo’s story is universal and it speaks to him (my friend) in the way my friends needs it to speak.
This is not to say that there isn’t an actual meaning to art that the artist was seeking to convey. But it does mean that what it conveys means something to those experiencing the art as well. Even though, all art has actual meaning, the most important thing is what it does for its audience (those experiencing the art).
Like for the longest time I never knew that John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme had sacred and/or divine underpinnings. The recording just sounded amazing to me; I felt something powerful whenever I heard it. It didn’t matter to me initially. I connected with the recording in my way and that was the power of it.
(art by Michael Gilmore - “Eat At Abdul’s”) - https://www.zazzle.com/store/eastofthepark
Does the artist know what they are saying? How can they know? Once an artist descends into deep subconscious thought, do they know anymore? Sonny Rollins, the great saxophonist, said that the artist wants to reach that state. A state of creativity where perhaps they don’t even know anymore. Yet, what is produced from this process sometimes is singularly amazing. Coltrane, Victor Hugo, June Jordan, all the great artist go to this place. And then we take over and slay them. The artist is dead.
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