1) Methodology: "the Text is experienced only in an act of production" Text is active, the Work is fixed and passive.
2) Classification: The Work can be classified, the text defies this..."the Text is always paradoxical"
3) Signification: the Work..."is moderately symbolic" "the Text is radically symbolic" The Work is a sign, but the text is a fluid tapestry of signs.
4) Plurality: the Text is "an irreducible plural" There is no single definitive Text to a specific Work.
5) Filiation: The Work is linked to its author. The Text is a wild child that may at best only have visitation obligations.
6) Consumption: The Work is to be consumed, but the Text tempts us to play with our food. Pure consumption is boring. "to be bored means one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it going."
7) Pleasure: "the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe" ...even the relationship of a reader to a book creates social space. The active reader is constantly interacting with, and essentially rewriting, the work.
These ideas are commonly only applied to written works, but a larger scope is implied here by Barthes in his reference to "the modern ('unreadable') text, the avant-garde film or painting." Would Rothko have been seemingly impenetrable to Barthes in the 1960s, when this was written? Is it that this idea of a Work/Text relationship is best seen in historic, traditional media? Do instagram posts possess these attributes?
Mark Rothko Untitled (1969)
- Medium
- Synthetic polymer paint and ink on paper
- Dimensions
- 40 1/2 x 26 1/2" (102.2 x 67.4 cm)
- Credit
- Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc.
- Object number
- 460.1986
- Copyright
- © 2019 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
- Department
- Drawings and Prints
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