Study Task 1- Illustration and Authorship

The work of Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans is much debated within the art community, due to the complex ideologies surrounding its creation, which in its simplest forms, is simply a photograph of a pre-existing photograph, taken by Walker Evans, entitled Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife. Barthes would be uncertain as to whether After Walker Evans is the creation of Levine, as he believes that the author ‘has the same relation of antecedence with his work that a father sustains with his child’ (1968), which would suggest that he believes the life of the art after its creation is of no concern of the artists themselves, and therefore any forms of copying could simply be regarded as have been influenced by the original. This would further suggest that Barthes would believe that although Evans is the original creator of the piece, it has then taken on a life of its own and become a creator of a piece itself, in turn, transferring the authorship of the new photograph to Levine. 

Barthes (1968) also supposes that a piece of art cannot possibly be contained by a single artist, as it is ‘a multi dimensional space… none of which is original’ as it is ‘resulting from a thousand sources of culture’. This may suggest that he would support Levines work as a new entity, as all culture and art appears as varying forms of pre-existing work. This unoriginality of art proposed by Barthes is far less despondent than it first seems, as he celebrates this through exposing how it has far more than ‘a single ‘theological’ meaning’ and is open to interpretation from anyone who views it, which in itself imbues a uniqueness in meaning through a shared authorship.

One person who would disagree with Barthes is Rock, who argues that the origin of authorship denotes ‘the person who originates or gives existence to anything’ (1996). This viewpoint would aim to persuade that there can only ever be one author to a piece of work, and that this is where the meaning is implied. It would also suggest that Levine has indeed simply copied Evans, and that her work could never actually be accredited to her in the first place, since it adds no more meaning than Evans did when he created the photograph.

Barthes has a counter argument that ‘these 'imitative' arts comprise two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it’. Here, he would suggest that the physical work itself has little to no impact on the perceived message, which is created by the meaning surrounding it. Therefore, Levine has as much ownership to the piece as Evans, as he took a photograph of a pre-existing image, as did Levine. It could even be argued that Levine has more authorship over the piece, as ‘the Author is supposed to feed the book’ and the most famous contribution to this work is Levines copy, which gives it notoriety and adds a depth to the piece, therefore extending its lifespan in the public eye.