Art Monsters.

Putting the man in the manifesto.

I recently read Claire Dederer’s sublime book MONSTERS, in which she tries to make sense of our, or at least, her, complicated relationship with art monsters - the creators whose misdeeds stain our experience of their work. I emphasise her as she often castigates herself for slipping into the commentator’s “we” before correcting to explore her personal confusion over still loving the great work of awful people. Rooting her examination in her experience of art and life as a woman also makes it a difficult, shaming read as a man.

No spoilers but most of Dederer’s monsters are men. You know their names and their crimes. They rape, they bully, they manipulate and we, you, I, let them because of their art. Keen, almost desperate to prove that women can also be self-obsessed, self-mythologising art monsters, Dederer finds herself forced to describe a different mode of monstrosity. The women she finds we find monstrous are child abandoners, securing their creative freedom by relinquishing their burden of care, they refuse to be possessed, they refuse to be needed. Her men are monstrous in the imposition of their desire, her women by their withdrawal, their denial of love.

For both the justification is the work. Dederer is frighteningly good at unearthing the fear that if the artist denies his muse, his desire or even his whim to any degree then he is, in someway, betraying his art. A lesser artist holds back, the greats go boldly across all boundaries and taboos. If Dederer herself does not believe this, as I’m sure in every named instance of abuse, neither do you, she does a very good job of showing how the we of the audience not only do in someway buy this argument but propagate it. The artist as voyager who goes beyond boundaries is the same artist who starves for his genius, who wires his brain with chemicals and dares to burn up by 27. I often feel this story is what we prefer. I didn’t write Smells Like Teen Spirit so I didn’t have to shoot myself in the head. My art may be nothing special but at least that means I can live in the comfort of mundanity.

For women the case for abandoning your babies is easier to sustain. Having a room of one’s own is not just about the desk space, it’s about the door that shuts and locks. The tyrant who takes what his art demands is acting a role we give him but the artist who tends her fire in private is just being practical. It surely is possible to make great art without being an abuser. Is it possible for a person, of any gender, to make art without a locking door, a wife, a staff or a cold hard heart? This isn’t just about the care of children. Can an artist create great work whilst also creating space to care for their elderly parents? For their partner? For their friendships? “I have far more important things to do than come to your wedding” wrote William Morris. It’s hard to disagree.

One day in the past my friend Guy Ducker suggested to Chris and I that we should write a manifesto. Manifestos are like to do lists in that their creation is often a surrogate for actually doing anything. I adore Arnold Lobel’s short children’s story in which his regular protagonist, Toad, falls under the perfectionist spell of his own to do list. When the wind whips it away, his friend Frog must chase after the list because Toad is paralysed by the realisation that catching his list was not on his list. I have often been Toad. I love a to do list and share my mum’s habit of adding in the things I’ve already done so I can easily burn through some cheap ticks first thing.

We chose a similar method with our manifesto, laying out rules binding us to a creative approach mostly defined by existing limitations. “Our films will be original stories” wrote the guys who couldn’t afford to option a book, we “will not bend to the will of the industry” said the filmmakers the industry was bending over backwards to avoid. Tick and tick - look how rigorously we were adhering to our manifesto! Nevertheless from these pragmatic foundations we built an argument for removing all security, all safety nets from our creative and professional practice.

Contemporary cinema is cautious. The form is expensive; the desire for a safety net is understandable - but deadening. The removal of risk is just insurance against surprise. No story enthrals us only with its familiarity. There is no genre that wishes to remain predictable. There is no beauty that does not revitalise our senses.

To keep our work vital we need to carry out a risk assessment and re-impose the dangers of which we have rid ourselves.

Rather than making our difficult situation easier we would look to actively make it harder, determining that this difficulty would also propel us towards innovation, originality and vitality. It’s counter-intuitive but isn’t that the point?

Chris and I convinced our producer Cassandra Sigsgaard to sign and we stuck to the spirit (and almost the letter) of the manifesto when making our film NINA FOREVER. I can’t say if the manifesto made the film better, or even different; after all mostly our rules were accommodations with our existing difficulties. Still whether by design or as inevitable consequence of the task, making the film was hard. Hard is a concept you understand but never know until it is happening. Hard is always harder than you expect. Still, imagining the hardship was working in our favour certainly made it easier to bear but look, we’re right back at the artist as voyager, as starving, raving shaman venturing into the wilderness for - for what? Glory? The entertainment of strangers? A good story? Shits and giggles…?

I would say that this is all monster-thought from a distant past. I would say that our “Highwire Manifesto” was part of the problem, a pointless machismo of struggle, had it not been an essential part of my thinking when starting a family.

Of course this was a decision arrived at by feeling rather than thinking. Of course, it’s not actually a decision. My wife and I chose to stop saying no and got lucky. But in as much as my intellect was involved in this process, it was shaped by my manifesto. Having seen the creative power of choosing the hard road I could no longer hear the wretched argument of the pram in the hall (sorry Claire, who isn’t reading, but still, I tried to write this without doing that but there it is). I knew parenthood would be hard, would make my life harder, would make my work harder and that hard would be hard, not bracing or inspiring but often just awful even frightening. But all that became part of the point. I came this way not despite my art, but for it.

For me this thought was about parenthood but it holds for any sort of care. As I wrote recently, art is the perfect disguise for selfishness. As any sort of artist you will be drawn to protect your isolation, your focus. Don’t get me wrong, of course sometimes this is essential, but with help it doesn’t have to be permanent. Of course to care and work I need my wife but she also has art to tend to and I hope I am a good wife to her in turn.

If we accept that the artist might need the struggle, if being hard is a necessary condition for art - then don’t take the easy way out by locking the door. There are ways of making yourself a lightening rod for inspiration other than being a monster. If, as a man, I really want to dare to venture past all the taboos, then I must care.