Considering the current political climate and with ethical dilemmas constantly challenging us as individuals, I was wondering how you as a writer feel about the following quote.
To be an artist and to be political is the same thing.
-Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei #WritersLife #AmWriting
Personally I don't write intentionally with an agenda. But with the emotionality of my characters and the "why"of it, I do at times tackle relevant issues that can be an indication of my personal politics. The fact that I always include racial diversity in my writing is an example. Not all writers of color do. I've been criticized for including interracial relationships. Or, I've been told that removing either would help me have more of a mainstream audience. So I agree with the quote.
Note: Please answer the question presented; this is not a forum to debate your actual political views.
This is a hard one because I can't decide whether I whole agree with the statement or not.
I can see the similiairties between the two, of course. As a writer or artist, we sometimes use our creativity to send a message or to portray a feeling and inspire that same feeling in others. We also do it out of pure emotion and love for our craft. To express ourselves, our emotions and show off how we see things in this world. We even go as far as to create a world that we wish to see or things we wish would happen (A common theme with authors, I think.)
Politicians may do things in a more strategic or tactful way for different kinds of benefits that come along with their outcome but they still have the same ultimate goal. They want to send out a certain message of (mostly) their own beliefs of how they can change things and help create a world that they wish to see. When a person really cares and they are in politics, they add emotion into everything they do because to them, it's real and the actually have love for what they stand for and those that they speak for.
But they way each of these types of folks go about things is so different that it's hard to see that the goal is the same. Not to mention the horrible stereotype that comes along with being a politician.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
– William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream) I think your politics are formed by a much wider world view, and your job as a writer (or artist of any kind) is to present your world view as accurately and fully as possible. The goal is to take the reader to another place - the world as you see it.
Obviously that involves politics, but also much more. To reduce it to politics alone over-simplifies it. I don't discuss politics AT ALL in my stories, but I'm guessing you could figure out my general political leanings from my writing.
Good thread topic - I am looking forward what others will say.
Art should always challenge the normative in some way, to make people think about the way they perceive things, but erotica is not necessarily 'art'. And it is rarely political. You have challenged the 'norm' against miscegenation, so in that sense, your stories are 'political', and if any erotica qualifies as art, yours certainly would be candidates. I have also written interracial, not necessarily to be political, but because it was a real experience in my life. I've also written about the conservative religious repression of sexuality, and the struggle of an Amish girl to free herself from that burden, but that was also from personal experience. In a sense, my whole life is a political statement because I tend to gravitate to situations which go against societal norms.
I don't believe being an artist of any kind makes you political. Or that being political makes you an artist. I see them as two separate things entirely. Some one could be involved in both. In doing so use their art of writing or drawing, painting, etc,etc, to write, draw, paint, etc, etc, about their political views.
All my stories have been about sexual events that happened in my life. Some have included a few interracial events but they have nothing to do with my political beliefs. I have never fucked a black man or woman or an Asian man or woman and don't plan too. This has nothing to do with my political beliefs but just my personal beliefs.
Brandi
It’s a broad statement. If he’d said it about morals, I could understand it, because morals sit behind everything I do. Moral issues are exciting.
But not politics. I mean some art is political. The situationists, Banksy. Solzhenitsyn, Dickens. Protest singers. I, Daniel Blake. But most art is personal expression and feelings. Some of these might extend to politics, but usually don’t.
There’s only one time I’ve had a political theme behind anything I’ve written. It was a story about a refugee wanting to visit the country of Jane Austen, but finding out it had closed its gates to her. That destroyed her life. I wrote that story just after Brexit and its accompanying racism. I was ashamed to be British. Still am.
I didn't want to agree but then I started thinking of some of my favorite things that I considered "art".
To Kill a Mockingbird... definitely political
A Christmas Carol... yup
Salvador Dali... Absolutely and consciously political
Jimi Hendrix... Obviously
Ralph Waldo Emerson... political AND religious
And even in my limited way (I'm not calling my writing art, because it isn't), feminism is a pretty steady theme in the things I write. If it isn't in there, I'm conscious of it.
So, maybe yes. True art has something to say.
Interesting question, and hard to answer without some sense of what ABG means by politics or political.
If the intention of the author matters, then I'd say that not all art is political. e.g., "I'm going to explore some political issues that interest me, whether of taxation, justice, self-sufficiency," etc. Only stuff like that would be political.
OTOH, it seems that in the "all politics is local" view of things, just about everything is socio-political. All aspects of existence. You can't really escape from the social contract, and even if you manage it, that's a political act too.
So, it may be more obviously political if ABG writes about interracial couples, or VG writes about a particular pee-pee party, but it may be just as political if VG does not write about interracial couples. Preserving a kind of norm, for whatever reason, is a political act.
Taken further, if I write about a MF couple having sex in their house, it may seem as apolitical as you can get, but...
--Was it an arranged marriage? That could be pretty political.
-Well, of course it wasn't; this is just a smut story. They're just a normal married couple.
--Oh, so they had a "normal" way of meeting, in a society where teenagers and young adults have freedom to select their mates... What about the house -- does the state own the house?
-What are you talking about? This isn't the USSR.
--Oh, so they are part of a capitalist system, with tacit approval of all that entails.
You could take that stuff pretty far, I think. Your view of normal and how you write about it is in some ways inherently political, even if you don't really realize it. But then we get into literary criticism too, about the author's intentions...
Or even the politics of what it means when a guy calls a woman a dirty slut, even if he doesn't mean it in a degrading way, but it's just hot for both of them to be talking dirty. There's a lot of cultural baggage tied up in all that, which I think is pretty easy to argue has some political / socio-political weight.
As for Bob Ross and his happy trees. Dunno. Maybe the luxury to produce happy trees, rather than tortured Guernicas, is a kind of political statement. Sort of a negative space thing.
I've been thinking about how to respond to this for a day and still have no flippin' idea.
I'm a liberal gay man, which I think may be repetitive. I've never understood the mind set of Log Cabin Republicans. And of course conservatives like sex as much as anybody. Look at all the Republican politicians who have been caught with their pants down around their knees. But Republicans claim values Democrats apparently don't possess. Which is bull shit. This said, I suppose my gay erotic stories reflect my liberalism, but I have never thought about them being political in any way. Maybe a reader could find something political in them, it would be news to me if they pointed it out. Since this discussion is happening on Lush Stories, I assume we are talking about erotic stories. In other writing, yes, I can understand politics, but in these kind of stories? Conservative or liberal, I'd think we were all here for the same thing - sexual stimulation. (That's not the expression I want, but my mind has gone blank right now.) Anyway, my stories are meant as escapism, nothing more - or deeper.
My writing is satisfying to me . . . No other agenda across the board. So my purpose or deeper goal (if I even have one, sometimes I don't) is to find a way to satisfy the itch. What the itch is changes story to story / character to character. Above all, if it's in my head and not on paper, I've let myself down and it'll eat away at me.
I don't actively pursue themes, tropes or choose to explore content due to society's pressures, views or lack of open-mindedness or what have you. I'm often writing to explore a character's path and their life. I think of them as fully developed people I'm trying to get to know. I can't just alter them to suit some sort of agenda.
I cringe when people say that authors have some sort of duty to 'write responsibly' and consider the 'impressionable minds' that might read our work.
I don't like it (can't stand it) when females insist that a lone female in a cast of several male characters somehow represents my view of all females or espouses what all 'females should be'.
I can't stand it when people try to read into what I write in an effort to find out / get to know me as a person - (my husband does this and it has really become a pet peeve of mine. I am not in my books).
All these things are like peer pressure and it pushes writers to turn writing into something it doesn't have to be.
So sometimes my writing resonates with feminists, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes my writing seems to support higher education, sometimes it doesn't. And so on - so forth. There's no unity in any of it. It's all quite chaotic. No labels. The moment I feel I've written about an idea or concept too many times, I'll bail on it and do something different.
I started a story, with the setting in Victorian England. I have been stuck with where I wish to take it since the middle of July. If anyone would be interested in looking at it and being a collaborator, feel free to contact me
I'm just writing about the good old days at the moment, back when I was a youngster and real horror. It's good to reminisce. It makes me nostalgic sometimes
I suppose it depends firstly on how you define politics, and the relationship of politics to the personal and to ethics and morality. Nevertheless, I offer these long-winded thoughts.
I incline to the view (it’s not my own idea, but I forget where I got it from), that artistic endeavour of all kinds (and in this I include entertainment) is a way for society to discuss itself. I think it’s quite clear that contrary to the belief of some, an interest in high art doesn’t necessarily make you a good person (the Nazis were pretty keen on high art) and liking low art doesn’t necessarily lead you to indulge in base and ignoble acts.
If this idea of art as a way for society to discuss itself stands, then yes, all art is political by virtue of its relationship to society. However, I do not believe that it necessarily follows that art should have an intentionally ethical dimension – that artists have any business telling us how to live. Art is an arena for discussion, not for decision-making.
The trouble is that the political has a habit of impinging on art (and on the personal), and may have a huge effect on the art being produced (if it gets produced at all). When art is regarded as a political act, it can have the effect of closing down discussion rather than opening it up. Any author who is not a hermit in a cave cannot help but be aware of the social and political context in which they’re writing, and must reflect on how their work might be received, whether they want to or not. And of course there’s no easy way of navigating the socio-political arena.
Most often you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, particularly in a highly volatile, polarized atmosphere where people are more concerned with divining (and commending or condemning) an author’s political intent than with engaging with the text; using it as one of many perspectives on the muddle that is life. Art works best when it’s used for reflection, and the best artists are those who allow the recipient to reflect. What I think is to be avoided at all costs, unless you’re a satirist or extraordinarily gifted, is overt political writing, which all too often comes out as mere agitprop. If I wanted to be told what to think, I’d go to a political rally – or move to North Korea.
Erotic fiction as a genre of its own has its own in-built problematic. I think one of the reasons why religious and political authorities have always been nervous about sex is because lust creates its own morality. In this it always exists in some sense in opposition to power structures – this I think is one of the neglected facets of Orwell’s 1984.
This anxiety about sex has traditionally been dealt with by confining lust-morality exclusively to marriage, to the private sphere. And when the marriage ideal fails and lust-morality rears its head outside of marriage, the aim has still been to at least keep it invisible and private. You can see this at work if you study the trial of Oscar Wilde.
From this point of view, the position of erotic fiction is profoundly ambiguous. Publishing erotic stories is a potentially subversive political act, because in doing so, one has refused the idea that lust-morality must be kept in its “proper” private place. But at the same time, the erotic story is its own self-contained space, where lust-morality can be explored on its own terms, without necessarily being constrained by other forms of morality; in other words a private space that is simultaneously highly visible.
To me this idea of the erotic story as a self-contained space within which to explore lust-morality is often overlooked. It harks back to my contention that the function of works of art shouldn’t be to offer guiding principles for life. I think it’s a grave mistake to make analogies between erotic fiction and the wider public sphere. Erotic fiction tells us that the body wants what the body wants, regardless of whether society at large approves or disapproves, and regardless of what political opinions one may hold intellectually oneself.
Lust-morality is singularly useless as a platform for organizing a society, but at the same time the ethics of everyday life are often disconnected from what lust demands. If the two can be kept in their “proper” places, all is well, but the visibility of erotica pushes it into the public arena, the socio-political realm, where it is often discussed on terms that are not its own. So the author of erotic fiction is forced to take into account two separate moral codes that are not easily reconciled (if at all).
So the short answer, I suppose, might be that the artist cannot help but exist in a political space. Regardless of the artist’s intention, any work of art is open to political interpretation. Unfortunately such interpretation and discussion is often nowhere near as sophisticated as it might be, especially in today’s excessively polarized climate.
I think that our values and world view are reflected in our politics. I think that for the most part you write from what you think and what you know as well as from fantasy. My female characters are always strong, self-possessed women and so (I hope) related to me. The male characters see women as equals, again related to my politics.
I don't think we necessarily write with politics in mind, unless you do that deliberately, but I do think there is a subtext to our stories that is political.
But the story wouldn't have the same punch, personality, style, and meaningfulness without those above inclusions. Honestly, though, I can't seem to write period without involving heavy realities of the darker side of life and politics. So maybe that original definition is more accurate to me than others. 
