Seminar - Authorship Barthes - Study Task 1.

As an illustrator in this day and age, releasing work onto the Internet is not out of the ordinary, it is essential to keep a blog as part of illustrative practice. By keeping an online blog it allows you as an illustrator to interact with the outside world and gain work from that. In opening up your work to the Internet, you allow it to be seen by various readers and interpreted through them “the reign of the author has also been that of the critic” Barthes, R (1968). In saying this Barthes implies that once your work has been published, your work and yourself are open to criticism. In his book The Death of An Author, Barthes explores the idea of authorship and how it affects the world. Illustrators today can create an online identity so Barthes idea’s surrounding authorship are still relevant “conceived of as the past of his own book” Barthes, R (1968), meaning that unless you are anonymous people will judge you based on previous works. Having a blog online doesn’t exclude you from this but anyone can run a blog. There are many people on social media sites such as instagram who will tag their works with the words “illustration” or “art” underneath but very few of them are actually specialized in that field of study. 

Some may argue that these tags on social media are a claim for authorship on the internet, by presenting your work so it is attached to an account and tagged within a community “some claims for authorship may be simply an indication of a renewed sense of responsibility, at times they seem ploys to gain proper rights” Rock,M (1996). By presenting your work and associating it with your name allows for potential employer to trace it back to you however this might not always work in your favour. If an illustrator produces a new style of work that is significantly different to their previous works, tracing this new piece back to their blog might off put future employers who see their previous illustrations as a risk factor. 

Barthes addresses the positives to being an anonymous author “The hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure inscription, traces a field without origin” Barthes (1968), expressing that sometime anonymity is the key to success as people are intrigued.  With the introduction of the internet it is hard to tell where illustrative works have originated from, leaving illustrators to reduce their file sizes down or watermark their work in order for it to remain recognizable as their own “attempts to exercise some kind of agency where there has traditionally been none” Rock, M (1996).  This is a sad prospect of the up and coming illustrative practice of keeping a blog, it is hard to keep your stuff original and to keep track of what has and hasn’t been done before in the field. If you do not check creative blogs constantly you stand the risk of creating something similar or the same as someone else but if you do check them, then you stand the risk of sticking to what is popular in the industry “the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original” Barthes, R (1968).