The Death of the Artist

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. 

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Exploring the topic of artistry has thus far been three things:

• Intriguing  

• Enlightening

• Mildly terrifying

I didn't expect it to be a walk in the park, but I also didn't expect to be wandering fields and fields of related topics, issues, and dimensions. Not to mention disciplines.

Needless to say, I was starting to feel a little bit lost and overwhelmed by the depth and expanse of it all. Thankfully, an extremely interesting supervision with Sam has brought some new direction and ideas (adding more ideas sounds slightly counter-intuitive but has actually been a small miracle).

Within this infinite landscape, there appear to be two fundamental groundings - creativity and communication. We discussed both of these and their interpersonal skill sets - problem solving, storytelling, choreographing and teaching amongst them.

The notion massively at play here is interpretation. And I really do mean play. Putting this in a dance context, a choreographer may create their work using ideas, techniques, themes and stories from their own life experience and interpretation of such elements; this is handed to the dancers who, generally, begin by compartmentalising the work - i.e. learn steps, put steps in phrases, phrases in dances, dances in the whole show's narrative - and progressively build their own interpretation and life experiences into the given choreography. When the dancers perform the work, the baton is handed to the audience; neither the choreographer nor the dancer has any say in how each individual observer perceives what they witness which, no prizes for guessing, is based on their own interpretations and life experiences. 

There are so many layers and contributors to the artistry that the thing itself is seemingly more in control than those trying to manipulate it. The context, perspective, and perception at each level by each individual not only diversifies the content of the artistry, but the meaning and impact of it.

The director is trying to tell a story with the show.

The choreographer is trying to tell a story with the content.

The dancer is trying to tell a story with their performance of the material.

The audience is trying, consciously or not, to decipher a story from what is in front of them.

Are all of these stories going to be the same?

There may be some parameters to this, for example the dancer still has to work within boarders of what the choreographer is asking for, and may in fact have been prior selected by that choreographer because their way of moving aligns in some way with the interpretations or preferences the choreographer has, but there is arguably an expectation that artistry will be used to communicate with the audience, in this case through movement, and somehow 'deliver' the messages of the choreographer, dancer, story, and/or theme.

This is where I'd like to introduce you to Roland Barthes, or more specifically, Roland Barthes' 1967 essay 'The Death of the Author'. 

It was this very essay that Sam suggested I look at, and as someone who loves language (verbal, physical, pictorial, or otherwise) and exploring how meaning is constructed, developed, interpreted, exploited, and aestheticised, I was more than willing to delve into the theories of this renowned French essayist, semiotician, philosopher, and literary critic.

To contextualise this evocative title, the 1960s held a structuralist backdrop that advocated meanings were not purely derived from the text itself (here, 'text' refers to any cultural work - books, paintings, music, dance etc) but also from wider knowledge of cultural ideas, codes and symbols - an approach Barthes upheld. 

However, Barthes became something of a bridge between structuralist and post-structuralist schools of thought as he began to critique the emphasis placed on the individual author's intentions in an individual text. That is, if meaning is so reliant on wider cultural input and concepts, the author is less of a great creator and more of a collector and arranger of ideas. The author may, therefore, be celebrated for their performance (whatever form that is in), and Barthes doesn't try to rebuke the skill involved in creating cultural texts, but he suggests cultural texts do not have an objective, definitive meaning, and signification, which communicates meaning, is only complete when a text is read (when the dance is watched, when the music is heard). As readers of the text will derive different meanings, it follows that the text itself has different meanings, regardless of whatever meaning the author may have intended.

"The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us."

(Barthes, p.143)

"Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing."

(Barthes, p.147)

Barthes post-structuralist foundation-laying idea was the birth of the reader. 

This is where emphasis is shifted from the creation and author of the text to the experience and reader of the text. 

"The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination."

(Barthes, p.148)

So despite all those years at school you spent writing essays about what authors might have meant by different metaphors, you, the reader, may have actually been a whole lot more important in the story and its meaning than the author ever was. But don't shoot the messenger.

This is of course a theory, and can and has been challenged to re-emphasise the author's contribution, however teaming it up with the phenomenon of artistry is, to me at least, rather fascinating.

I thought I had suspended my ego a bit upon discovering how universal artistry could be, and from that point decided to seek out how gloriously different types of artists used their different types of artistry and how one may go about improving that artistry and its consequential impact, but I hadn't quite suspended it far enough to realise how much may have little to do with the creator and a lot to do with the consumer. 

As a dancer, how much does my own meaning matter when it is interpreted two hundred different ways by two hundred different audience members?

As a teacher, how much does my intended meaning matter if it is interpreted in some other way by students?

As I sit and write this blog, how much does the voice in my head matter when a different head voice will be reading and interpreting it?

If we consider the ethics around artistry and the afore mentioned foundation of communication, it may matter in terms of whether what I am bringing to the table is ethically sound and does not deliberately intend to cause or incite harm, however perhaps I only really have limited power in controlling this, for readers will bring their own interpretations to the table and my own, whether they were good or bad, become less important in the experience of that reader. 

I may need artistry to perform that work to a desired level, to help me personally get from nothing to something, but the audience may need their own artistry to take what I am offering them and assign meaning to it.

The death of the artist then, is perhaps not so much a surrender of artistry, but a recognition that the artist is as much a mere tool in connecting the audience with their own possibility of artistry as the work is a tool to connect the artist to the same thing. That is, the reader does not 'receive' a message, ethical or not, from the performer, but they are offered opportunity to engage with the phenomenon of artistry themselves. Everyone comes to play. 

Why this matters, beyond philosophical fascination, is because it challenges our inherent concern with expression. Or perhaps doesn't challenge the expression itself, but the role of the act.

"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

(Barthes, p.146)

Perhaps then, if we are truly to live and create through artistry, we must surrender to the fact that we cannot do it alone. Not only are we reliant on the pre-existing ideas and codes of the cultures around us that we cherry-pick and collage together, we are reliant upon the artistry of our readers to bring meaning to the work, just as we brought our own. 

If, as the literature I have read has expressed, artistry has been removed from common human existence and an elitism has sought to protect meaning and 'culture' of the artworks by separating them from the masses, the reverse may have actually occurred: art means less and is less culturally significant because it is in fact not complete until it is read. The more who read it, the more meaning it has. If it is not read, it may still be beautiful, but it may not be significant.

Is elitism the enemy to artistry?

Perhaps artistry is the orchestrator of a great symphony; not entirely in control of each instrument and how each interacts, but there as a guiding force in the hope of harmony; there as a central point uniting the interpretations and contributions of each element in each layer; there as a gilded signpost inviting everyone to play.

Perhaps artistry is, itself, the only true great artist.

" ... the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author."

(Barthes, p.148)

References

Barthes, R. (trans. S. Heath). (1977). The Death of the Author. In: Image, music, text. London: Fontana. pp.142-148. [online] Available at: https://sites.tufts.edu/english292b/files/2012/01/Barthes-The-Death-of-the-Author.pdf [Accessed 21st March 2021]

Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (2021). Roland Barthes on the Death of the Author. [online] Available at: https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-8/roland-barthes-on-the-death-of-the-author [Accessed 21st March 2021]

Nichols, T. (2019). The Death of the Author: WTF? Roland Barthes' Death of the Author Explained | Tom Nichols [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9iMgtfp484[Accessed 21st March 2021]