I briefly looked at 'Death of the Author', by Roland Barthes. In his essay, Barthes criticizes the reader's tendency to consider aspects of the author's identity; his political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes, to distill meaning from the work. This theory is applied to the interpretation of text, but is relevant when thinking about the way in which we view art. "To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text." Readers must separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach's discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical parables), for each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a famous quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations," drawn from "innumerable centers of culture," rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins," or its creator, "but in its destination," or its audience. No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a "scriptor" (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority.") The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and "is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate." Every work is "eternally written here and now," with each re-reading, because the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the reader. Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot.

In Art this could open up ideas about how work is exhibited, how being as important as what. Fundamentally, each individual will read work according to their own personal choice, cultural background etc. The 'Author' cannot possibly be in control of how their work is widely read. I have been thinking about my personal approach when viewing work. When I make myself aware of it, I think I often tend to look quite passively. Perhaps in a gallery situation people can become desensitised to the work due to being forced to actively look at things, looking being predominant. The physicality could be an obstruction as it requires somekind of immediate response. The natural tendancy to form a definitive evaluation of things, forces you to search for the artists statement about the work. There is confusion between what you initially think, then what you should think now you know the true meaning.

I watched the culture show the another night, there was a feature about the current exhibition at The Whitworth Gallery in Manchester called Subversive Spaces: Surrealism + Contemporary Art. Uneasy and disoriented visitors to Gregor Schneider’s Kinderzimmer will find themselves groping their way into the blacked-out space of the usually sunlit South Gallery of The Whitworth Art Gallery, moving toward an eerily lit nursery. The children’s rooms have been recovered from a village in Schneider’s Rhineland home, erased to make way for opencast mining. I'm not sure if the presenters reaction was genuine or not, but the works purpose seemed to be concerned with giving the audience somekind of disturbing experience. The work could only be seen by going through the dark, confined space one person at a time, so perhaps this could effect the individuals response. This is something i have been thinking about, the gallery space as a social environment contains distractions, it would be interesting to regulate this in someway.