The Author of the Painting 'Stabilizer of Symbols' Is Konstantinas Žardalevičius. But Does a Work of Art Really Belong to Its Author?

It is commonly assumed that a painting has an author — the person who painted it, drew it, or rendered it in watercolour. In rare cases a painting is left without an author, as with the recently emerged "creations" of artificial intelligence — yet such cases, as we can see, provoke a great deal of discussion and confusion: SO WHO IS THE AUTHOR NOW? Is it the artificial intelligence itself, the person who uses the program, or perhaps the scientist who created that program? An unusual situation immediately brings our "self-evident" beliefs to the surface, stirring up confusion and turmoil, and we, as if driven half-mad, want to answer — SO WHO IS THE AUTHOR NOW — as though only after this answer could we enjoy the work of art itself. The significance of the author in the art world is obvious. If the author is known, we have no doubt that the painting is good too. Galleries take pride in the names of the artists they present. We take an interest in an author's life and biographical facts; we want to know, we ask, we ponder what this author — this particular person — wanted to "convey" and "express" through this particular painting.

A painting created by artificial intelligence, 2022. Can we admire a work without knowing its author?

In this text, I invite you to join me in setting aside, for a moment, our habitual belief that a work of art belongs to its author — let us close our eyes, place this belief in brackets, and open our eyes again ready to explore with curiosity. Let us rethink the identification of a painting with its author by raising a somewhat uncomfortable question: does a work of art belong to its author at all? Let us look at how art and creativity researchers — people concerned with understanding what creativity really is, where it comes from, and what a work of art is — answer this question. Let us check how well these answers fit with our "self-evident" beliefs. Do we want to accept them, or not? How do they change our relationship with the work of art itself, with a particular painting?

Most of you have probably heard the fairly common view that a work of art should be judged separately from its author. For instance, if the author was an unpleasant, disrespectful person, perhaps a scoundrel without values, or simply an irresponsible drifter, the value of their beautifully, skilfully painted picture does not diminish because of this. The painting itself does not become any poorer once we learn certain unpleasant nuances of the author's biography. That is why art critics often suggest forgetting the author when evaluating a painting. Some researchers, focused on understanding creativity and the work of art, extend this common idea much further and more deeply. Studying the creative process itself, trying to understand how a painting "comes into being," they come to realize that, in general, not all the credit for a stunningly painted picture belongs to the author. How does this happen?

A fragment from the Lascaux cave in France. The drawing was created 17,000 years ago.

In order to see the painting's independence from its author, let us first briefly outline how creation happens — what takes place in the artist's psyche that eventually results in the particular work of art before our eyes? Perhaps you too have heard that our psyche, as far as we know today, is made up of three parts? Consciousness — the personal part that helps us find our way in everyday life and through which we define our own sense of "I"; the personal unconscious — the part into which personal experience we do not need, or experience too painful for consciousness to remember without harming itself, is automatically "pushed"; and the collective unconscious — the part of OUR psyche that, paradoxically, has nothing at all to do with our own personal identity. Because the psyche operates on a thermodynamic principle — it contains a finite amount of energy that moves within the boundaries of the psyche between its three parts — an increase in energy in one place reduces the amount of psychic energy in another. For example, if the collective unconscious becomes activated (a greater share of energy accumulates there), we begin to function worse in everyday life (less energy is left for consciousness). Since the collective unconscious is directly linked to creativity, let us dwell on it a little longer in trying to understand it. The collective unconscious is a universally human, supra-personal psychic energy, otherwise known as archetypes. It is often mistakenly thought to be shared human experience, but archetypes are not experience — they are only the POSSIBILITY of experience. This impersonal energy, unconnected with our sense of "I," can for certain reasons (which we will not examine here) become activated within the psyche, and from time to time it does — surging up from the depths of the psyche to the surface of consciousness — usually causing consciousness an unpleasant feeling, discomfort, and disorganizing the personal "I," our everyday life.

Creativity, that which ultimately earns the name "art," arises from the collective unconscious. Roughly speaking, once the creative archetype is activated, its energy surges into the artist's consciousness whether the artist wants it or not: since resisting this does not work, the only "healthy" way for consciousness to function during such a surge is to turn this energy of the collective unconscious into something tangible for consciousness — into a work of art. Do you sense one essential idea about how the psyche works here? We may not understand, accept, or "believe in" this principle of the psyche's operation, but, just as "not believing" in the circulation of blood through the body does not stop it, neither blood circulation nor the psyche stops operating according to its own principles. An artist, as a person who has their own sense of "I" and wants a comfortable, idyllic life, may dislike the powerful outbursts of the creative archetype, yet once they are activated, the artist simply has no other "good" choice. This is where many widespread views in society come from — that artists are "strange," maladjusted, unable to live properly, incomprehensible — if the passion to create (archetypal energy) is greater than the passion to organize everyday life (the energy of consciousness), then the artist truly does not have enough energy to fit fully into everyday life (because psychic energy is finite, not infinite).

Virgin and Child, 16th century. The author is unknown, since in those days few people signed their works.

What does this way the psyche works, and the emergence of creativity from the collective unconscious, tell us about a painting and its author? Do you begin to sense why a painting does not entirely belong to its author? Why, seen from this angle, it is not entirely correct to identify a painting with its author? We see that a painting essentially arises not because the author's consciousness invented it, but because the activated creative archetype began surging into consciousness. During creation, the painting seems to arise on its own from the impersonal depths of the psyche (NOT the author's personal depths), and the author becomes the one through whom the painting, as a symbol, realizes itself. As the researcher of creativity Jung would put it, "whether the writer understands that the work is born, grows, and matures within him of its own accord, or imagines that he is shaping his inventions entirely at his own discretion, does not in the least change the fact that the work in truth grows out of him." The author becomes, with all due respect to artists' abilities, in Jung's words — an "instrument": "In the deepest sense, the writer is an instrument andlt;...andgt; He has done everything he could in creating it. He must leave the interpretation to other people and to the future."

Of course, the author is important and significant (we will talk more about this in other texts). But if, in examining the essence of the creative process, it turns out that the author is the person through whom the creative archetype passes in realizing itself, then our "self-evident" identification of the painting with its author shatters against the cave wall of analysis. The painting belongs to itself — or, if we prefer, to an impersonal collectivity — while the author has the honour, and the necessary constitution, of helping it come into being. Thus, Konstantinas Žardalevičius's ability, as an individual human consciousness, to give form to formless material (collective energy) — to turn it into something tangible — helped the painting "Stabilizer of Symbols" come into being. But would this painting have had any chance of coming into being if this creative energy from the depths of the collective unconscious had not reached Žardalevičius's consciousness? No, it would not.

Konstantinas Žardalevičius, "Stabilizer of Symbols," 2006–2008. Paveikslai.lt

In the context of these reflections, all the discussion about who the author is in artificial intelligence "creations" partly loses its significance, since the work itself grows out of the depths of our psyche. Let us note today's very widespread, and truly fascinating, cultural phenomenon of "memes" — an obvious authorless collective expression. As the creative process and its essence are studied ever more closely, the authorship of a work of art becomes less and less evident. Moreover, when we speak of "who," we expect personal identity — "here he is, this one or that one" — yet how much of that personal identity is actually in the painting?

The Creation of Corgi, 21st century, meme.

I invite you to rethink personal identity in creativity together with me in the next text of this series, "A Painting Not from Experience, but from a Dream. How Personal Is Creativity?". And what do you think, before we even begin to examine it? How much, indeed?

Text by Anžela Duchovska