500 words on The Death of the Author and commercial illustration

In the digital age, where every last bit of advertising, or media, or packaging, or cyberspace is plastered with an overabundance of imagery, a common career trajectory for today’s illustrators, designers or image-makers to follow is that of the editorial, or ‘jobbing’ illustrator’: Practitioners working to client-set briefs, marrying their images to everything from broadsheet newspaper articles to lager bottle labels. There is an interesting comparison to be drawn between the Barthesian model of literary criticism offered in The Death of the Author, a model that is, ultimately, authorless, and commercial illustrator of today, whose job it is to attach images to external ideas or products, images that are in keeping with brief specifications and are, typically, quite free of any specific politics or agenda. While some editorial illustration can be thoughtful, sensitive, or, even, provocative, contemporary commercial illustration is simply authorless picture making, with it not being the job of the illustrator to provide any socio-political context, or justification, of their images, outside of the product they are illustrating. Even though a practitioner may have an identifiable visual voice, many illustrators who work in the commercial realm will be sure to keep their commissioned work as neutral as possible, and to reflect only the ideas that are presented by whatever it is that they are attaching their work to. Just as Barthes argues in The Death of the Author that “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified”, commercial illustrators would want to keep their output free of any overt ideologies, especially political ideologies, for fear of damaging their commercial desirability. These practitioners can be likened to Barthes’ “modern scripter”, that is “born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing”, with their work, and by extension, themselves, existing only within the parameters of their commercial visibility.

This is not to say that all commercial illustrators damage their marketability by owning their authorship, and, for some, the distinctness of their voice - their authorship - becomes an integral part of their identity. London-based illustrator Mr Bingo, perhaps best known for his on-going Hate Mail project, has an interesting and varied list of clients, including The New York Times and Doritos.  Hate Mail, through which Mr Bingo will send a hand drawn postcard, coupled with a crude, and sometimes cruel, message, to anyone prepared to pay for one, establishes an interesting dynamic between the ‘author’ (or, in this case, the illustrator) and the reader, or receiver. Barthes may have decided that “the birth of the reader must come at the cost of the death of the author”, yet through Hate Mail, author and reader  must co-exist, for one can not exist without the other, thus closing the author/reader loop.