Introduction: The Artist as Author
Introduction: The Artist as Author
Beginning with an account of Jack Tworkov’s large Abstract Expressionist painting, Barrier IV, hanging over a raucous event organized by John Cage in 1967, this introduction challenges narratives of late-Modernist American painting that position it in opposition to the neo-avant-garde. Focusing on the history of the “death of the author” argument, which is tracked to the first publication of Barthes essay in a 1967 issue of Aspen Magazine, the introduction shows that while Modernist painting and the neo-avant-garde parted ways in terms of technique, they participated in a shared field of inquiry, which included a concern over the authorial self as the sole source, content, and aim of the work of art. Advocating for a closer analysis of the specific practices cultivated by Modernist painters in the 1950s and 1960s, a methodological approach is described, which favors attending to ambiguity and tension in the treatment of authorial presence in late-Modernist American painting. That ambiguity is treated not as evidence of confusion or bad-faith on the part of the painters under discussion, but as a demonstration of the questioning way Modernist painters approached authorship as a problem to be investigated, as opposed to a value to be upheld or asserted.
Keywords: authorship, neo-avant-garde, ambiguity, death of the author, modernist painting
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