#Authorship
The exhibition raises ”new questions for our time about aura, authenticity, originality, and authorship. [...] and […] what the real and its replication can mean to us in a post-digital age.'
Elena Filipovic, 'Mark Leckey, "UniAddDumThs", 2014-15'
creating, transforming, arranging or convening material and/or immaterial (new or preexisting) elements under the sign of a name.
The ‘-ship’ of ‘authorship’ is maybe interesting – its ordained givenness or self appointment. See the Writing Test for ‘exhibition’ for something from Fred Moten on the blur of spirit between artist and viewer.
this 'blur of spirit' expressed by the ultimate author Tarkovsky through cinema...
"if the external emotional structure of a film is based on the author's memory, when impressions of his personal life have been transmuted into screen images, then the film will have the power to move those who see it"..
analogue transmission
I was recently a juror for a prize for young art writers. Some 75% of the entries were written in the first person, often using it not only to relay the particularity of experience but to include specific details about the author's own life. Reflecting on making the film "Riddles of the Sphinx" in 1977, Laura Mulvey noted that she and Peter Wollen were not much interested in self-expression, influenced as they were by methodologies stemming from semiotics and poststructuralism. What are the motivating factors in the countermovement underway today? A declaration of situatedness, surely. But what else? Long after the supposed "death of the author," biography and intention are back.
…from mid 14c. auctor, autour, autor—‘father, creator, one who brings about’, from Old French auctor, acteor ‘author, originator, creator, instigator’, from Latin auctor ‘promoter, producer, father, progenitor’—agent noun from auctus, past participle of augere ‘to increase’—from late 14c. as ‘a writer, one who sets forth written statements, original composer of a writing’—‘source of authoritative information or opinion’; archaic sense behind authority; in Middle English sometimes confused with ‘actor’; 16c. -t- changed to -th-, on model of change in Medieval Latin, on mistaken assumption of Greek origin and confusion with authentic…
I am not the original composer of the above paragraph. I am merely its truncator, its slasher, its cutter-upper. I am neither its progenitor nor its father. (‘If I could paint with my cock, I would’, Picasso is alleged to have said.) I am, however, a very good writer.
One of the paradoxes of authorship is maintaining consistency. Every day is different. Yesterday, when I began contributing to these definitions my voice was quick, poetic, abstract. Today brings a contemplative, serious writer, more interested in narrative and making sense. For authors the struggle is maintaining a voice. This is only amplified by use of the first person. As Erika Balsom says, 'a declaration of situatedness, surely.' Surely so. Today is both not yesterday is both not tomorrow.