EThere are many ways to approach art: intellectual, sensual, comparative. The freedom of access is just as constitutive of it as the freedom of material and form. Claire Dederer chooses an emotional approach; one that excludes what she knows about the meaning of the work she is looking at and instead asks what she feels as she looks at it. For her, there are works that she hates and loves at the same time. They are works that open up a contradiction within her – works by artists who have sometimes committed serious crimes.
When the author was researching a book about Roman Polański in 2014, she was stunned by his act of “monumental monstrosity.” In 1977, the director first drugged and then raped thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey. When Dederer looked at his work again, knowing what had happened, she was nevertheless moved by its “monumental beauty”. Instead of giving in to the reflex of separating artist and work from each other and thus escaping the problem, Dederer confronts the incompatibility of her own imperatives: on the one hand, wanting to be a “virtuous consumer and a demonstrably good feminist,” the works of sexual predators neither buying nor appreciating, and on the other hand being a “recognized member of the art world” who knows and receives these works.
“Who exactly is this ‘we’?”
The author discusses this tension in her book “Genius and Monsters. “On the difficulty of separating artist and work.” The title already hints at the polarity that will lead to Dederer not being able to offer the reader a simple answer – or rather not wanting to. But she doesn’t have to do that to make her self-questioning worth reading.
As antiquated as the concept of genius may sound at first glance, Dederer’s method is subversive: she appears as a first-person narrator and thus puts her subjectivity at the center, regardless of the possibly obvious accusation that she thereby forfeits the claim to objectivity that she has per se questioned. For example, when she writes: “Who is this ‘we’ that critical writings are always about? Us is a back door. We is cheap. We is a way to simultaneously reject personal response and wrap yourself in the cloak of authority. It’s the voice of the mediocre male critic who actually thinks he knows how everyone else should think.”
Dederer is aware that not everyone looks at works of art the way she does and that there is no universally valid way of looking at them, which would go against the essence of art anyway. But that doesn’t mean that art can’t be true. However, it often remains ambiguous in its way of expressing the truth.
The work that we need in the times of Till Lindemann
That’s why Dederer doesn’t even try to base her involvement with Woody Allen on his role as a filmmaker; rather, she chooses him because of her own connection to his work: “In my youth, I felt a kindred spirit with Woody Allen.” She found herself in his work seen represented. For a long time she considered “Manhattan” (1979) to be his best film. In it, Allen plays 42-year-old gag writer Isaac, who has a 17-year-old girlfriend, Tracy. But when Dederer learned that Allen had slept with Soon-Yi Previn, the daughter of his then-partner Mia Farrow (she was presumably still in high school at the time), she was unable to watch his films for many years. “I felt having sex with Soon-Yi was a terrible betrayal of me personally.” Eventually she watched it again, and Allen’s actions resonated in every scene.
For Dederer, viewing art is always the “encounter of two biographies: the artist’s biography, which can interfere with the enjoyment of the work, and the viewer’s biography, which may influence how he or she absorbs the art.” In this respect, the term “genius” does not describe something static any more than its counterpart “monster”. Dederer repeatedly starts anew, looks for approaches, tries out points of view, because the recipient’s story cannot be complete at the moment of viewing, just as the view of the work remains unfinished and changeable.
The thirteen chapters move along the work of various artists, from those mentioned above to Pablo Picasso, Michael Jackson and Ernest Hemingway to JK Rowling and her transphobia and Joni Mitchell, who chose art over her child. With “Genius or Monster,” Dederer creates a polemic that doesn’t stop at its own monstrosity.
An artistry shines through in her explanations, giving the subject impact on a second level. It is the work that we needed in the times of Till Lindemann – and by “we” the author of these lines obviously means herself.
Claire Dederer: “Genius or Monster”. About the difficulty of separating artist and work. Translated from English by Violeta Topalova. Piper Verlag, Munich 2023. 320 pages, hardcover, €24.
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