Artist Story: Anne Elizabeth Moore

An interview with Britton Bertran, CAR Artist Story Editor

My work's always dealt, to some degree, with the vague notion of "censorship issues" -- which in the media activist community we sometimes talk about as media access issues, and in the social justice realm we talk about as oppression. Since my book Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (New Press) came out last year, shortly after we stopped publishing Punk Planet, I've been driven to look at accidental systems of oppression—: situations in which, despite claims of freedom of expression and democracy, some participants do not have access to the tools they need to communicate with each other and better their lives.

So I became fascinated with Cambodia, where freedom of expression is defined as the freedom to say positive things about the government, and journalists are regularly beat up or worse for, you know, printing verified facts, and where one of the biggest papers in the country was recently sold to a conglomerate based in Myanmar. I was invited to come live in a dormitory in Phnom Penh for 32 young women students called the Harpswell Foundation Dormitory and Leadership Center for University Women. They residents there are just entering school for the first time because they'd sort of been forgotten about when the educational system was rebuilt in the 1990s. When I was offered the residency, I thought: Oh-ho! This thing that I've devoted most of my time to since I was 15, promoting media access via print self-publishing, that isn't working right now in the States due to what I'd call economic censorship--corporate forces pushing out non-corporate media, particularly that which speaks against corporate forces -- I'm gonna see how that flies with the cute and the Cambodian. Some of the girls in the dorm are only a few years older than I was when I started self-publishing.

I couldn't believe how well it went over. For a country where there are only three literary publishers, where freedom of expression is regularly oppressed often through self-censorship, and where the average monthly income is $30 per month -- well I thought it would be a harder sell than it was. I thought explaining why this was useful and worth spending time and a few pennies on for photocopies would be difficult. But in fact, most of the girls had just been waiting for the chance to express their opinions about the economic hardship of their country, highlight its beauty, outline their hopes for its future. So we found a way to do it safely--in English, through small social networks we invented ourselves--and wrote and drew to our hearts' content. Perhaps the strangest part was, there was no malice in our work. It was all pure, hopeful, and enthusiastic. It is a country without irony.

And there's much more to the story, but what happened was that once I came back to the States to complete a few of the larger projects we'd started together, one of them was censored by an art space that prides itself on being unjuried and uncensored, no less. It was nixed from public display without consultation. Second hand, I was told that the man who'd made this decision did so out of concern for the girls' safety.

Now forget for a moment that the person making this decision was no Cambodia scholar, and in fact made the decision without consulting the Cambodia scholar present--me. And forget that in the lead up to the decision, several inquiries had been made into the position of the organization on my work -- all enthusiastically supportive. And forget that no queries into the safety precautions already taken had been made, and clearly no due process for vetting his decision was followed. And forget that the quarter-century history of the organization was founded on all the principles that would have made such an action impossible. And what do we have? One single guy making a decision not to allow the voices of 32 young Cambodian women to be heard in public. Just like they experience back home, and for the same exact paternalistic reasons, expressed as concern.

We think we don't know what censorship looks like here in the States, and we look at places like Myanmar and Cambodia with pity for their backward ways. But when it comes down to it, we have exactly the same problems here, they're just dressed up as free-market economics.

Here in the internet age, it seems that the idea of freedom of expression is developing a new definition. What's your definition of "freedom of expression" and how can artists utilize it to the fullest extent?

Hmm. Freedom of expression is -- and I think I share this definition with others -- a complete lack of economic, physical, legal, social, emotional, or other barriers to the public communication of any individual's political, social, emotional, or other opinions or beliefs. I personally believe that the Internet is—not changing that so much, as providing false hopes for it. In fact, the Internet is controlled by as few companies as old-fashioned media (some of them are the same), and the manner of censorship is much more hidden. Plus, we forget here in the States that all the hubbub surrounding the awesomeness of the Internet assumes that everyone has access to it. In fact there is a great digital divide, as well as digital resistance. There are tons of people -- in Cambodia, in my apartment building here in Chicago -- that have no interest in nor ability to access the Internet.

So as far as artistic exploration of the limits to freedom of expression, and there are always gonna be some, I do believe there's a responsibility for artists to demarcate those lines. Test them. Yes, that means lawyers, and yes that means trouble, and yes it means offending your mom, but we're living in terribly difficult times right now, where our constitutional rights are being stricken down and rolled back on an almost daily basis. Journalistic criticism's been killed off along with the independent press, most lawyers are on corporate retainer, individual responses to the powers that be have been largely criminalized -- see crackdowns on graffiti for example--so there are very few other places from which dissent can emanate. It's up to our most creative thinkers and doers to remind society what it is capable of.

I'm working on a project right now designed to do just that. I kind of feel like, what's been lost in this world? What are we lacking as a culture after 8 years of the Bush Administration? It's hope, right? It's any sense of future potential. With enough hope, people start thinking, and when they're thinking, they're solving. Fixing stuff. And who doesn't want 200,000 collaborators in their next project of making the world a better place? So I'm spending all my days and nights trying to create a document with some friends that will reinstill hope for a better world. It's a pretty big deal. I mean, it's hard freaking work. But that's the job right? And who else gets to have it?

The long arm of for-profit Corporations seems to be getting longer and longer. How can artists make society aware of corporate influence on culture without appearing too preachy while still getting their point across?

In Unmarketable, I spend a few solid chapters addressing artistic strategies that don't reduplicate the messages you're supposedly working to combat, whether as an artist or an activist, and I've been thrilled to be able to present these ideas throughout the country and outside of it through lectures and slide talks and on panels, and of course people are buying and reading the book. Now I get to teach a class about it at the School of the Art Institute, and really explore these ideas with a bunch of young people over a couple months. So that's how I do it, but that's also my mode, as the kind of artist I am. I'm an articulator. I find weird things about our culture that I think hurt people and give them vocabulary. I'm not ever worried about being too preachy, though, because people--”especially right now--”need to be hit over the head with things several times before they learn. That's the wonder of branding. It's made us incapable of detecting nuance.

As far as taking on corporate interests, no matter who you are your message isn't going to come across if you're sponsored, or doing work that could be considered advertising. So the first step is, don't take corporate money. Now, if I can get anyone just to get to step one, I'll be satisfied. After that, we'll talk.

Anne Elizabeth Moore, staunch critic of consumerism and media activist, has been writing, publishing, and interceding in culture since the age of 15. The indomitable author of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity, founding editor of the Best American Comics series, and former editor of now-defunct Punk Planet has seen her work exhibited in major museums, praised by the business press, and forcibly ejected from retail establishments. Recently, Moore went to Cambodia to teach the first generation of feminists in the country self publishing as a way of combating governmental oppression and self-censorship and co-founded the Anti-Advertising Agency’s Foundation For Freedom, an organization that aims to limit advertising in the public sphere by offering cash incentives and giant novelty checks to ad pros in exchange for quitting their jobs. She currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and travels throughout the globe to lecture on corporate and governmental oppression and freedom of expression.