Art and monsters: What does it say about us?
Is it still acceptable to listen to Thriller, read James K Baxter or watch Louis C.K without guilt? Michelle Duff reports.
When writer Pip Adam found out renowned poet James K Baxter was a self-confessed rapist, she immediately went out and bought all the works by his wife, Jacquie Sturm.
‘‘I’d read them before but I just thought, I want these books,’’ she says. ‘‘I don’t have much desire to read any more James K Baxter. It’s not easy, because I’ve read all his work and it was just pivotal at times of my life. I’ve been on the pilgrimage up to Bethlehem.
‘‘I’m not saying that this stance I’m taking is the right stance, it’s just how I feel, viscerally and physically. I just can’t do it.’’
I’m talking to Adam, currently New Zealand’s top author – she won the top prize at the Ockham Book Awards last year for her novel The New Animals – ahead of her appearance at Womad in New Plymouth this weekend. But our conversation has been hijacked by the question everyone seems to be asking right now – what do we do with the art of awful men? Those who are, almost daily it seems, being revealed as sexual harassers and abusers?
Adam, who also teaches university students creative writing, is led by her gut. At first, as the allegations against the Woody Allens (child sexual assault) and Louis C.Ks (sexual misconduct) began to stack up, she tried to find a way to allow herself to continue to enjoy their work.
‘‘I found myself saying, ‘Well, that’s no big deal, that’s the person and this is the art.’
‘‘But then I thought – there is so much art that didn’t happen because this person behaved in a certain way. They decided that their art was more important than someone else’s by behaving in that way, and it just makes me sick.’’
Sturm was a pioneering writer from Taranaki, the first Ma¯ ori woman to obtain an undergraduate degree. Her early stories are considered exemplary and, as University of Canterbury adjunct fellow Jeffrey Paparoa Holman argues in The Spinoff, she could – and arguably should – have had a stellar literary career. Instead, her husband, her era, and her race had a silencing effect.
‘‘Being in that hideous relationship must have just been soul-destroying and hideous and awful, but also the loss of that voice – that voice is lost in a way that’s really sad,’’ Adam says. ‘‘I think that’s a wider problem than was happening just in that household, and I think we need to be alert to that.
‘‘I think we need to look at the control we can have over that. For every James K Baxter, there are more women who have not produced work, and what I want to do more is seek them out.’’
The desire to want to scrub the work of alleged sexual predators from the cultural landscape, and from our playlists, makes sense. In many cases these men were able to get away with what they did for so long – and continue with long, successful careers – because they were so famous and powerful. The very nature of their work allowed them to offend, to gain access to victims.
What’s worse is the role we, as a society, have to play in enabling this. Anyone who has watched Leaving Neverland can’t help but wonder how we all managed to excuse or explain away Michael Jackson’s clearly abnormal interest in pre-teen boys, the court cases, all the signs that pointed to the King of Pop also being a paedophile.
What do we do now we have that knowledge? I asked those who think about this for a living for their views.
THE HISTORIAN
University of Auckland historian Kate Hannah, whose speciality is the study of the invisibility of women in science, tends to agree with Adam’s analysis.
‘‘One of the things I think about with, say, Baxter is who gets left out when we pay so much attention to him – the famous person, the person who has the profile. [Sturm] was actually an amazing writer, so instead of giving him our attention, perhaps we should have been giving it to her.
‘‘His voice, even in death, is still the stronger one. We need to start noticing the people who have been marginalised.’’
These kinds of ethical issues often crop up in science, where studies with far-reaching results were done by horrific people – for example, Nazi experiments into hypothermia and organ transplants, and gynaecological research in the United States performed on slaves.
Modern researchers try to get around this by citing other studies where possible, or at least noting their problematic nature, Hannah says.
‘‘Newton said: ‘If I can see further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ We have to acknowledge that some of the people we are standing on were bloody awful.’’
Hannah thinks, personally, that it’s OK to enjoy work made by problematic artists, as long as there are no living victims to consider – R. Kelly being a prime example.
‘‘That’s still happening now, and it could be a personal stance to go, ‘I’m not going to listen to that person, I’m going to listen to others, instead.’ There’s so much good music in the world that isn’t made by alleged rapists.’’
THE LITERARY CRITIC
‘‘We probably can’t stop ourselves still liking the art of someone like Michael Jackson,’’ says Hannah August, a literature expert from Massey University’s School of English and Media Studies. ‘‘For many people that’s part of their own musical history, you can’t turn off your emotions towards art like that – but you can be a conscious consumer of it.’’
In terms of books, literary critics used to consider the writer and the product inextricably linked. But since the 1950s, more reader-focused theories say works are open to the reader’s interpretation. ‘‘The meaning that the author instils in a work of literature probably has very little to do with who they are as a person,’’ August says.
‘‘I don’t think we can stop ourselves from liking something once it’s on the page, because it has nothing to do with the author. What we can do if we find that author morally objectionable is say, ‘Is this author still alive? Is he or his estate still profiting from the sale of this work? Where is the money going?’
‘‘While we can’t turn off our aesthetic response to the work, we can be conscious in our consuming decisions.’’
This approach is at odds with pop culture, she admits. ‘‘Popular media is super-fixated on the connection between the author and the work – we’ve kind of elevated authors into
‘‘While we can’t turn off our aesthetic response to the work, we can be conscious in our consuming decisions.’’
Hannah August, of Massey University
celebrities and we think knowing more about them will help us understand the books they’ve written, but literary scholars would say that’s not the best way of understanding it.’’
When the content of the book itself is considered misogynistic or racist, then it should still be read, but critically, she says.
‘‘It’s important to read those texts because it shows where we’ve come from. It’s also rare they don’t have literary merit; they generally are good works in some respects and, just because they were written in a time, say, that was strongly impacted by patriarchal culture, I think it’s dangerous to say we won’t read any of these books.
‘‘Works of fiction are mixtures, like people are mixtures. Nothing is black and white, and we would encourage people to explore the nuances. I think it’s important to evaluate your own moral stance as you do that, particularly when you’re dealing with an author who is still alive.’’
THE ETHICIST
Refusing to engage with artworks because you disagree with the morals of the artist is a matter of personal choice, according to Waikato University art philosopher Justine Kingsbury.
‘‘People should feel free to do that, definitely. But if the artwork is a truly great work of art, I’m inclined to think its aesthetic value isn’t undermined from what you know about the artist.
‘‘If you find out [an artist] is a terrible person, that shouldn’t stop us from thinking his work is wonderful, because it can be wonderful in its own right, no matter what you think about him. I think something would be lost if we had to write off all the works of art done by morally problematic people.’’
With someone like Baxter, what new knowledge might do is highlight problems that were already there, Kingsbury says. ‘‘There are issues in his writing and the way he represents women and there always were; it may be a bit surprising that more wasn’t made of them before. What happens now is attention is drawn to something in his work you might not have noticed.’’
And she would consider it problematic if, say, the artist’s morals were directly embedded in the work – for example, if Jackson had written a song that appeared to be endorsing paedophila. ‘‘That is a problem, but then that would have been a problem anyway.’’
Even with all the reasoning in the world, you can’t help your own reaction, Kingsbury says. And that might be what it all boils down to.
‘‘I used to be a big Kevin Spacey fan, but now I have an ‘ick’ reaction when I see him on the screen.
‘‘That might not be a reflection of the quality of his work, but it does mean I’m less motivated to seek it out.’’