💌 :( i dont want to separate my art from my artist :( 💌

just admit you like problematic things, don't hide behind 'objectivity' debates.

trigger warning– brief mentions of SA/r*pe for context 

Okay, so recently I've been watching a lot of men movies with my boyfriend. movies with those guys like robert de niro, al pacino, jack nicholson, leonardo dicaprio like those omggg we are scolding a lot 😠and have big guns 🔫 and big big money 💸and drink a lot 🥃 we punch, beat, shoot, crash, and NEVER CRY! NEVER EVER CRY! 

the “women don’t GET IT” kind of movies. I used to stay away from these hyper macho masculinity films because I knew they were not made for me. i’m not the target audience so i didn’t engage…also not gonna lie I thought they were cliche, foolish, and boring af 😴🤣. then I sit there, stare at big screen, and i see something there that isn’t written in the dialogue, isn’t captured on camera, that isn’t heard or visualized…i’m in the head of michael mann, ridley scott, william monahan…if they want me there or not. 

we each enter media quite differently. While my boyfriend might be sitting there thinking mmmm fun shootout scene ooooo well done car chase vroom vroom, I've got these men’s emotions on my mind. how emotional and reactive these characters are, how they take their repression out violently onto women and marginalized people, their insecurities and inadequacies motivating every decision they make. It captures a perspective of cis-gendered white masculinity that i don’t experience or feel walking through this world as a cis-gendered persian woman. it’s not necessarily empathy, it’s just an understanding.

Then I turn to something like sex and the city 2 where our girlbosses go to Abu Dhabi to wear burqas and write an entire semester’s curriculum for an “Orientalism and White Feminism 101” college course and think……………..um. ok. so i hate this. I can't look away. but i definitely, undoubtedly, hate this. but that doesn’t mean i’m mad i watched it. That doesn’t mean sex and the city is canceled. It just means I wanna talk about it. 

What’s a [fill in white ethnic group here] mobster movie in america written by an iranian woman look like? what’s an iranian historical fiction drama written by Martin Scorsese look like? Hopefully not like argo 😂😂😂😂 I hate argo 😂😂😂😂. but an honest, respectful, not-funded-by-the-cia version of that film could exist...…definitely with nuance I think Marty is capable of…but that leads me to the hot ‘separate the art from the artist’ debate. What I never understood was this idea that an artist and their art are capable of being separated. 

I learned recently the original meaning behind ‘separate the art from the artist’ was in relation to an artists’ perception and explanation behind their work versus the reaction and public perception that piece actually receives. In those terms, yes, I completely agree that the distortion culture and criticism kneads into an artists’ intended meaning is what tends to actually permeate through society, therefore actually making the cultural impact. take Lolita. Nabokov writes her as a tomboyish child with “monkeyish nimbleness”, picking her nose and adjusting her wedgie. starkly different from Stanley Kubrick's pedophillic pinup model with a bikini and a lollipop. Lolita’s textual reality and Nabokov’s intentions don’t matter if our culture has accepted the perverse as the truth. 

But ‘separate the art from the artist’ has taken on a new meaning, embodying the validity of its own argument. Now, this idea is mentioned in conversations about Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, Kanye West and the like to imply there’s no moral dilemma in consuming their work which stands completely independent from the creator’s personal life decisions, like r*ping your daughters or seven counts of sexual assault, three counts of indecent assault, and two counts relating to nonconsensual sexual activity.

Any piece of work made by me, Mehrnaz Tiv, only exists because I made it that way (I know this sounds like super obv but stay with me). I've lived in this world the way I lived. I see everything through my own eyes, hear through my own ears, my hands and body touch and feel only the way I can. My flesh that carries everything I do is made of centuries of ancestors and DNA that only belong to me. This isn’t a conscious decision I have the luxury to make. I repeat, this isn’t a conscious decision I have the luxury to make. So, I’m never “a writer”, I’m always an “iranian female writer”. I'm never “a playwright”, I'm always an “iranian female playwright”. catching my drift? 

I love hearing artists talk about their work, because almost every time, they admit they are no longer the person they were when they made the piece in question. There's a level of detachment from the person sitting in an interview speaking about it, and the person typing the script 3 years ago alone at 3am. It's the nature of art to encapsulate a moment of time, a feeling and emotion that can never be replicated or copied. I think the most honest and effective art is that which truly breathes and lives– every second of the play or film feels fully present in an indescribable, intangible way. It takes a mastery of meditative rumination, fully realized and expressed honestly. welcoming the viewer to sensory immersion.

When I geared up to watch Witches of Eastwick I was pumped. a movie about WITCHES starring Michelle Pfieffer, Susan Sarandon, and CHER?! hellooooo! then like 14 seconds into the film i was like oh ok cool so this was 10000% written by a straight dude :( it was trite, all about them fighting for a man, and just such a disappointment. the perspective of the creators of that film was there, because it always is, and it sucked! 

I don't really understand why an individual’s consumption decisions are a serious matter of discussion or debate. There’s nothing wrong, fake woke, or hypocritical about my individual decision to not watch Woody Allen movies, about the queer community cursing out Harry Potter video games, or skipping Chris Brown songs. Is this activism? Is this causing a change to the bigger picture? Probably not, and any argument that individual media consumption contributes to a larger impact is foolish. But policing each other’s preferences is foolish as well, and implying media morality is objectively trivial is manipulative and dishonest.

I am less sympathetic towards white cis male artists because…well, history.  I am much more sympathetic, forgiving, and patient with marginalized artists because…um…yeah fill in the blank. yeah, I’m biased af, deal with it 😎, and white men are as well, but the longer they act naive and apply terms of “objectivity” towards the systems they created to serve them, the longer they hold no accountability over their own biases’, the longer they discredit media criticism as insignificant, the longer they stay in charge of the castle. If ‘separate the art from the artists’ debate lords actually practice what they preach, let’s see them running around in “i love Harvey Weinstein movies” t-shirts. it just feels like libertarian trash only applicable when they feel like it and along their own biased terms.

I love what I create! I want to be a part of it! I don't want to separate my art from my artist! I breathe life into everything I do and believe in my message. I want to invite people into the worlds I create and hold their hand through the journey, maybe a little forehead kiss if you’re down…  👉👈 and along those lines, I trust artists to do the same with me and bring me into their own worlds too. That's the beauty, why deny it?