We could boil down many a successful artist’s story to a couple of sayings like this: “I just picked up this guitar and started playing in my room after school.” Or “I picked up dad’s camcorder and just started making movies with friends – I never gave any thought to principles or technique. It was just, what feels right? What excites me?”
Here is music producer Rick Rubin conveying much the same message in a clip that has been widely circulating lately:
Self-expression and artistry are synonymous as concepts today. Rarely are the related truisms ever questioned.
Rubin says, “The Audience comes last.” We’ve heard many similar sentiments over the years.
“Just express yourself.”
“Write what you know.”
“Never mind the rules, just be authentic.”
What do we mean by self-expression anyway? Are we talking about something like autobiography or self portrait? We might say that music or cinema are languages. We use language to communicate. Is a language about only self-expression, or about expression in general? I would argue that when the teenager discovers the electric guitar it isn’t really “expressing himself” that he’s interested in. There’s a pull toward that guitar and that amp that he doesn’t quite understand and can’t verbalize. A will to unlock the power of the instrument, to juxtapose oneself with one’s heroes.
It is no small task to become expressive with an instrument, whether that be a musical one, or a camera, or a paintbrush, or a chisel, or a pen. It is a wonder anyone persists through those difficult early stages when mastery seems so impossible and unreachable. Perhaps it is the knowledge that others before have done likewise that urges you on. But anyone who has attempted such a journey will know that a personal hero’s achievements are equally condemnations of your insufficiency as much as they are inspirations to you. Something else grips you along the way. There is a slow dawning awareness of your own growth over time; that your hand, gripping the guitar, can indeed make that chord shape that you never thought was possible for you. And there is something that must be like falling in love, a joy of creation, for a musician it is reveling in pure sound and rhythm; you can hear beyond the imperfection of your fumbling hands the very potentialities of the instrument itself. For the filmmaker it is often in editing; the joy of a surprising juxtaposition, the salvaged sequence that you thought you had failed, for which you discover a novel solution. It is in seeing an abstract idea come to life and take a solid form which has a real effect on people when they engage with your creation.
In none of this do I see a necessity for autobiography. People and their sayings stress self-expression but I don’t think that’s what they really mean, not everyone at least. But there is a parallel current running that says, “forget your standards and your heroes. Just be. You’re good enough as you are.” And if art is indeed measured best by the authenticity of your feeling while making it, then there is no measure for its success beyond that ephemeral satisfaction that you feel.
This mode protects the ego from criticism and ill feeling, and this can be appropriate for some contexts - for beginners, for children, for art therapy, for periods of burn out and relaxation.
But if one perceives in the art world, diminishing returns, a scarcity of new classics, a dearth of iconic, era defining images and sounds, then I think we must pause at this juncture to look closer.
I am not here to wage war on self-expression, that would be entirely counter-productive. I am also not suggesting that artists should to align themselves with political or ideological movements and take all their cues from other people. Such efforts almost always fall short of their lofty ideals. I am at war with mere self-expression. It isn’t good enough. I am at war with the purely intuitive grasping at ephemera of inspiration that fades as quickly as it arrives. I am at war with mining the depths of my own psyche for some hidden key of perfect authenticity.
At film festivals in the past year, I have been asked about how I had the idea of She Watches Blindly. Sometimes when I recount the story, which is rather straightforward and far less interesting than the film itself, I hope, I have sometimes detected a hint of disappointment in the questioner that film is not deeply personal to me, or that the film is not somehow a secret autobiography; that I did not draw from my deepest pains and emotional wounds to make it, and instead that I merely imagined it.
Just because the story has little to do with my own life does not mean it is not personal to me. Even though I have almost nothing in common with the characters of the story, I have in a sense been living them for the past five years. If I am writing, directing and editing a film, then it is an extension of my thought, so in that sense, it cannot fail to be deeply personal. There is nothing special about me in saying that. The same is true of anyone who pours their deepest effort into their work.
I have so far lived a comfortable, middle-class life. It would be a real shame if my personal story were the measure of my work. What film is great that does not go beyond the idiosyncrasies of its author? What is great art that does not touch that which is universal and transcendent? To stop at mere self-expression is to miss all the fun and true creativity that lies in artistic expression.
Unlocking the self is not the panacea of creativity that everyone says it is. Indeed in obsessing over self, by fixating over matters of personal style and brand, autobiography and self portrait, one can forget the love that drove one to learn to master a medium. You do not learn to play an instrument because you love yourself, but because you love music. I am convinced this focus on self-expression is merely a crutch, an excuse to not learn more about the world, not to face one’s own deficiencies in knowledge and technique, to remain permanently a beginner and an amateur, who withers at the sound of critique and hides behind style and good vibes the emptiness of their thought.
Into self-expression, has been smuggled all manner of ideology, pastiche, and rip-off. What is a self if not a mirror and a sponge of the society it was formed in? If my childhood was a succession of movies, and video games, broken up by occasional school drama and bike rides, then the expressing myself would amount to little more than perpetuating the idle fantasies of youth.
And If I were a deeply wounded person, an outcast, a reject, and a failure, then I would have nothing to offer except my pain and forgotten hopes. But both the prosaic dreamer and the wounded outcast can be gripped by a love beyond the mere happenstance of life. It is by reaching for that thing outside of the self; that you do not own, and that you have no right to except that you are gripped by its beauty, and find in your heart a deep desire to share it with world, to give it a form that fixes it in space and time. So doing, you will lose that thing, but something new is born in its place. That thing is a work of art.
They say write what you know.
Instead, write what you love.