2019

Mixed media

50 x 25 cm

This project is part of a study on appropriation, which departed from the texts The Death of the Author (Barthes, 1967) and What is an Author? (Foucault, 1969). I copied some sections from each text and weaved these paragraphs into a new narrative, replacing the word ’text’ by ‘it’. After that, I decided to give a body to ‘it’.

Following Isaak’s (1996) reading of Barthes (1967, p.3) in Feminism and Contemporary Art, “a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be played with", I had in mind that this work should be something unfixed, and manipulatable. Researching on the symbol of the Venus de Milo, I found that the “identity” of the sculpture (the mythological figure it was said to represent) was never really confirmed because of its missing arms. I then decided to turn “it” (the Venus de Milo reproduction I had bought from a kringloop, in Tilburg, a year prior to this) into a doll, and give “it” (the reproduction of an already armless statue) “back” its arms, in order to play with the space between its (lacking) signifier and the (imaginable) signified(s).

To decide what kind of arms it should receive – position and material – I recurred to the idea that “[it] can only imitate a gesture forever anterior [...] [its] only power is to combine its different kinds, so as never to sustain [itself] by just one” (Barthes, 1967, p.4), so I gave it plastic doll arms, with fixed gestures, which were not different from the arms of most dolls I could find (this time in a kringloop in Rotterdam). I made a structure with threads inside the sculpture, removed its clay legs, and connected the threads to the new plastic doll hands, so that “it” could play with its base.

As for the base, I decided to look into a book of ancient sculptures which could not be attributed to an author. I cut the legs of the images that reproduced these unidentified sculptures, and I made a net of connections between them – what I perceived as similar subjects, shapes, etc. – using the same thread knotted inside the doll. From this net of images of legs stitched together I made two new legs and gave the arms control over them, as if it could choose from the parts bellow.

To conclude, I turned the whole doll into a marionette – ‘this reversal transforms [it] into an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content which it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier. Moreover, [it] implies an action that is always testing the limits of its regularity, transgressing and reversing an order that [it] accepts and manipulates [...] (Foucault, 1969, p.300). On the handle, I embroidered some of the questions that “conclude” Foucault’s text:

'What are [its] modes of existence […]?' 'Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?' 'What placements are determined for possible subjects?' 'Who can fulfil these diverse functions of the subject?'

References:

Barthes, R. (1967). The Death of the Author. Aspen. Published.

Foucault, M. (1977). What Is an Author?

Isaak, J. A. (1996). Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter. Taylor & Francis.