Alan Moore - The Job of Artists

Transcripts from the documentary "The Mindscape of Alan Moore" (2003)

4:52

 

Now when I was seven, I picked up my very first American comics. These were bright, garish 4-coloured things, that rather than taking place against some anonymous Northern British backdrop, took place in Cities like New York, which to me were as exotic as Mars. The idea of buildings of that scale, the idea of this modernness that seemed to pervade everything. This was a futuristic science fiction world. And then against that backdrop you had these incredibly colourful characters, who had these amazing powers, who could transcend their human limits. I'd already been attracted to mythology, fairy stories, anything which had people that could fly or become invisible or could lift huge mountains, or perform any of these heroic acts for which gods and heroes are largely famous. And so, having discovered the American superhero comic books, it was a fairly natural transition. Here was something where I didn't have to read the same myths over and over again, but where every month I could read something new about Superman or the Flash. This become a preoccupation. At first I was probably preoccupied with the characters themselves. I wanted to know what Batman was doing this month.

 

Around about the time when I reached the age of say 12, perhaps a lot earlier, I became more interested in what the artists and writers were doing that month. It'd finally occurred to me that these stories weren't just drawing themselves. That somebody was drawing them, somebody was writing them. And I became very knowledgeable in the styles of the different artists, I became critically able to distinguish between a good story and a bad story. And comic books were still very much a part of my life, I mean, which was in physical terms was changing quite rapidly, as it would for anybody at that age. I'd moved from my primary school in the working class area into which I was born to a grammar school. Now, call me naive, but entering grammar school was the very first time that I'd actually realized that middle-class people existed. Prior to that I'd thought that there were just my family and people like them, and the Queen. I had really not been aware that there were was a whole strata of humanity in between those two positions. When I got to grammar school I realized that I was one of the very few working class people there, because of the 11+ system and its rigours. And that a lot of the other children there had had the advantage of probably a better education than I'd been privy to. Thus from being a star pupil at my primary school, from being top of the class every year, and from being made head prefect with a little green enamel badge, I suddenly plummeted to 19th in the class, which was a tremendous blow to my already insufferably huge ego. I don't think I ever got quite over that. Certainly by the next term I was 25th in the class, I think for the next couple of years I was second from bottom. I'd finally came to the realization that I was not going to cut it in the kind of academic world that was spread out in front of me. I decided, pretty typically for me, that if I couldn't win then I wasn't going to play. I was always one of those sulky children, who sort of couldn't stand to lose at Monopoly, Cluedo, anything. So I decided that I really wanted no more of the struggle for academic supremacy or anything of that nature.

24:03

 

The thing about fame is that fame in its current sense had not really existed before the 20th century. Back in previous eras even if you were very very well known, that would perhaps be amongst a thousand people at most if you were a pope or somebody. In the 20th century however, with these massive surges in communication, suddenly a different sort of fame was possible. And I tend to think that what fame has done, it has replaced the sea as the element of choice of adventure for young people. If you were a dashing young man in the 19th century, you would probably want to run away to sea, just as in the 20th century you might decide that you want to run away and form a pop band. The difference is that in the 19th century before running away to sea, you would have at least some understanding of what the element was that you were dealing with and you would have perhaps say learned to swim. The thing is that there is no manual for how to cope with fame, so you'll get some otherwise likeable young person who has done one good comic book, one good film, one good record, who is suddenly told that they are a genius and who believes it and who runs out sort of laughing and splashing into the billows of celebrity and whose heroine sodden corpse is washed up a few weeks later in the shallows of the tabloid.

  

I'd never signed up to be a celebrity and I came to the realization that it was nothing that I was very comfortable with. I realized that celebrities are a kind of an industry, there a kind of a crop. Media moguls like Rupert Murdoch or people who run the big networks, they need a constant stream of celebrities to fill the column space in their magazines, to fill time upon their TV shows and because celebrities tend to burn out quickly you have to constantly create new ones. And I really didn't feel I wanted to be part of that process and so I withdrew to the relative obscurity of Northampton.

 

26:41

 

On my fortieth birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a mid-life crisis, I decided it might actually be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself a magician. This had been something coming for a while, it seemed to be a logical end step in my career as a writer, and the problem is that with magic, being in many respects a science of language, you have to be very careful of what you say. Because if you suddenly declare yourself to be a magician without any knowledge of what that entails, then one day you are likely to wake up and to discover that is exactly what you are.

 

There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up. If you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as "the art". I believe that this is completely literal, I believe that magic is art and that art, whether that'd be writing, music, sculpture or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language of magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events.

A grimoire for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a shaman. I believe all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the facets of our culture, whether they'd be in the arts or the sciences were the province of the shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation is I think a tragedy.

 

At the moment the people who are using shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up their shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquillize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everybody in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment. In all of magic, there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates, it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might be survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries, then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art, that writing are merely forms of entertainment. They're not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being, that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment, things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour while we're waiting to die. It is not the job of artists to give the audience what the audience want. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn't be the audience. They would be the artist. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

  

My career as a magician continues to evolve. Since I to a certain degree believe art and magic to be interchangeable, it'd only seemed natural that art should be the means by which I express magical ideas. This has found its way into my prose writing, in works such as Voice of the Fire and probably most visibly has found its way into the performance pieces that I've done at various locations over the past 8 years. Beautiful little psychedelic artefacts in their own right, which actually capture the kind of narrative journey that we've tried to take the readers on as part of these performances, to overwhelm the sensibilities of the audience, to tip them over into a kind of psychedelic state, where we can hopefully actually change their consciousness and direct it to different places, different levels, hopefully into new and hopefully magical spaces. When we are doing the will of our true Self, we are inevitably doing the will of the universe. In magic these are seen as indistinguishable, that every human soul is in fact one human soul. It is the soul of the universe itself and as long as you are doing the will of the universe, then it is impossible to do anything wrong.