Doublethink.

One vs many.

A man once a passionate and popular voice of the left, an outsider with a gift for words, a cultural icon who kicked against societies constraint, now disgraced by revelations of sexual misconduct, cruelty, misogyny and allegations of rape, if George Orwell was alive today he’d have his own show on Rumble, or at the very least GBNews. The 2 Minute Hate extended to fill the 24hr media cycle.

I recently read Anna Funder’s book “Wifedom” about the amazing and tragic life of Mrs.Orwell, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. I use the term “read” in the true Orwellian sense, meaning that I did nothing but listen whilst my wife furiously told me all the most dispiriting examples how Eileen was mistreated by a man whose life she saved, whose quixotic existence she funded and whose most influential works she would eventually either inspire or co-author.

Attempting to avoid this revision of Orwell I’ve heard men hold that the text is supreme, that it lives beyond its author or authors. Indeed, Orwell, a person who never existed, could easily be considered to be a name for both Eric Blair and Eileen O’Shaughnessy. This is true both in theory and, it seems, in practice. However, as a parable of Stalin’s rewriting of the history and meaning of the revolution, the pure text of “Animal Farm” cannot be quarantined from the truth of the erasure of its other author. The irony is too stark.

When reading “1984” at school, teenage Tory Ian Connatty told the class that the book decried Socialism. I exchanged a knowing glance with our teacher, Mr.Liddon, an impossibly tall man, then still so young as to be regularly confused for a member of Year 13. The book, I corrected Ian, was actually anti-Fascist. It’s easy to get confused. Orwell, a life-long Revolutionary Socialist actually wrote it to denounce the wrong type of Socialism. Though both Mussolini and Hitler began as socialists, their ultra-nationalism grew from a mythical sense of “the people” not so dissimilar to the view Marx or Orwell had of the working class. Really, the Fascism of Hitler is as much the wrong-type of Socialism and Stalin’s was. In short, both Ian and I were right. Fundamentally “1984” retains its popularity and power because it is just generally Against. Whether you cast Big Brother as Stalin, as McCarthy, as Thatcher, as Putin or simply as the faceless eyes behind the countless security cameras that watch our daily travails through this machine for living, we can all find something of ourselves in Winston Smith.

It is a commonplace that artists tend to be “of the left”. Certainly if asked to list the great creative minds who have openly supported political parties and movements of the right I struggle to get beyond Tom Stoppard, TS Eliot and Borges. However most artists tend to deal in the politics of vibes. The nature of art is to surprise, to alert the senses, to wake you up. It offers rebellion against conformity. Set against the small c conservatism of mundanity, artists do often appear to kick against authority, yet mostly this rebellion takes the form of self expression, of individuation. The explosion of pop music in the 1960s is usually cast as an outpouring from the left but in as much as governments actually appear in the lyrics, the complaints of the Beatles, The Stones, Dylan and the Who are chiefly about war and taxes. When not off their tits or finding elegant rhymes for their misogyny, pop’s most political generation mainly sound like the Republican Freedom Caucus. It’s a revolution that rarely goes further than “leave me alone with my money and also be naked.”

I remember walking up the hill from my parents’ house and being stopped in my tracks by a sudden shaming realisation that little in my lived experience of my creativity matched the ideals I thought I held. I was happy to decry the atomised, materialist quest for individual self-actualisation through the vacuous accumulation of things that goes hand-in-glove with that corrosive inability to perceive of experiences, emotions and relationships except as other kinds of thing to be possessed; nevertheless my life as a filmmaker, as a creator, as an artist, merely gave me cover for the same self obsession. As a freelance creator I had placed my life outside the bounds of the social safety net I would normally insist should be a universal. To this day I still move from zero hours contract to zero hours contract, I have no pension, no holiday or sick pay and at the time the revelation struck me I wasn’t even eligible to join a union. Indeed the biggest role a union had played in my career was the attempt by BECTU to stop my friends at Shooting People advertising unpaid jobs, a fight which at that point felt like an existential crisis for those of us attempting to enter the industry without rich or well connected parents. Ayn Rand would have been proud of me. Like so many artists, I thought I was a socialist but my life was that of an entrepreneur - someone who made something out of nothing and wanted the freedom to do so undisturbed. The freedom to be left alone is not the freedom of the left.

However, the right only own the concept of liberty when it is defined as something wrested from society. But who truly is free in isolation? The hypocrisy is not that Eric Blair considered himself free on his ramshackle small-holding whilst depending on Eileen’s income to survive, the hypocrisy is his willing elision of her support. The hypocrisy is that he thought he was alone.

I once interviewed Ai Wei Wei in his studio in Berlin and was stunned by the sheer volume of people it takes to create “his” work. That an artist can be multiple is not a story we like to hear. The one way in which my work lives up to my ideals is that as a life-long collaborator my authorial pronouns have always been they/them. This is not straightforward or easy, not least in the resistance Chris and I have faced from those who struggle to conceive of art except as the act of a singular vision. I don’t seek to diminish any of the shame currently attached to Eric Blair’s ghost, but some responsibility lies with us too and our need for Orwell or Shakespeare or Ai Wei Wei to be individuals.

Even the desire for isolation, the contrary need to walk in the opposite direction, only makes sense as a response to a crowd. An activist may want a revolution, may want things to change, artists however live in revolt, an evolving but continuous state of response. Rarely are you free without help. No one gets rich through their own hard work alone. Art is a collaborative act and we should not hide that fact.