Moore, Anne Elizabeth

PERSONAL:

Born in Winner, SD. Education: University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, B.F.A., 1993; Art Institute of Chicago, M.A., 1998.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Chicago, IL. E-mail—aem@anneelizabethmoore.com.

CAREER:

School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, instructor in visual critical studies, 2008—; also taught journalism at Columbia College, Chicago and art in the University of Illinois at Chicago's graduate department. Self-publisher of zines, 1993—. Also worked for Fantagraphics Books, Seattle, WA, c. 1999-2004, and as editor, contributor, and publisher of Punk Planet, Independents' Day Media, Chicago. Exhibitions: Book and Paper Center, Columbia College, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Whitney Biennial, 2008.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Received grants and support, including AS220; CAAP grant; Harpswell Foundation; Illinois Arts Council; Real Hot 100.

WRITINGS:

Hey, Kidz! Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People, Soft Skull Press/Publishers Group West (Brooklyn, NY), 2004.

Stop Reading This: A Manifesto for Radical Literacy, Seattle Research Institute (Seattle, WA), 2004.

(Editor, with Harvey Pekar) The Best American Comics 2006, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2006.

(Editor, with Chris Ware) The Best American Comics 2007, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2007.

Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity, New Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Also author of self-published works, including There's Nothing Good on TV, 2003; Hear Us, Large Corporations: Letters from Kidz and Adults to Corporate and Governmental Bodies, 2004; and the fanzine by and about people named Anne titled AnneZine. Also author of the blogs Anne Elizabeth Moore's Blog and Camb-(l)o(g)dia. Contributor to periodicals, including the Onion, Chicago Reader, Bitch, Tin House, Stayfree!, Progressive, Journal of Popular Culture, and Punk Planet. Cofounder and editor, Matte; series editor, "Best American Comics," Houghton Mifflin.

SIDELIGHTS:

Writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore is one of the bastions of the counterculture—an individualist who has followed her own path, even when that goes against the trends of society at large. "Is it possible to follow your passions, to do what you truly love to do, without compromising your values? What about meeting basic human needs? Can it be done? Some people struggle most of their lives to obtain this dream. Some eventually submit to a job that goes against their beliefs or end up starving to death in the street," wrote Matt Dineen on the Toward Freedom Web site. "Yet others have proven that it is possible to live a life that is consistent with your values, pursue the things you love, and still afford food and rent. Anne Elizabeth Moore is one of those rare people."

Moore's career is, generally speaking, rooted in publishing. She worked for Fantagraphics Books in Seattle for about five years before moving to Chicago and becoming editor, contributor, and publisher of the now-defunct magazine Punk Planet. She also worked as a series editor for the venerable "Best American Comics" series for Houghton Mifflin. Her books, however, grew out of her personal interests. "Moore began self-publishing, with a fanzine by and about people named Anne called AnneZine, in late 1993," stated a contributor to the author's home page. "Since, she has created over thirty single-shot zines on topics as significant as pie and as meaningless as international coffeeshop chains." "When I was really, really young," Moore told Dineen, "I decided that I was never going to make any compromises in terms of what I was going to do. And what does that mean? Well, it means that I was never going to work for a fast food company. And I was never going to do straight journalism, newspaper journalism, because I felt like it was an easy way to have what you're doing be controlled in some way. And I wasn't going to get a job at a bank. I just wasn't going to work at jobs like that."

The focus of Punk Planet under Moore's guidance was the emergence and development of "underground culture": "a specific group of self-identified people," the author told Eryn Loeb in a Bookslut Web site interview, "who are really interested in talking about and making culture that comes out of autonomous, non-corporate modes of production, and also uses those structures and attempts to rebuild them from the ground up." The attempts to maintain the independence and authenticity of grass-roots level culture against the incursions of large corporations is the subject of Moore's book Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity. "I apparently have a space in my brain where I store my discomfort with popular modes of activism," Moore explained in an interview with Murketing, " and where I was turning over projects like Dispepsi for years, just chewing on, well, the fact that a bunch of Bay-Area troublemakers kind of made a soft drink commercial unpaid. That is crazy. Why would they do that?" Independent media is no longer truly independent, she concluded; instead it is "now brought to you by several major corporate sponsors" who have coopted the counterculture's ways of communicating and ideology. For example, "recently, well-known graffiti artists were hired by Sony to tag buildings with cleverly disguised ad copy," wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. "When caught by police, they received miniscule fines" compared to what they would have gotten had they not been working for a multinational company. Marketing campaigns for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Nike's co-opting of indie band Minor Threat's image for its "Major Threat" campaign are also cited by Moore as examples of ways in which corporations try to take advantage of anticorporate countercultural organizations.

In Unmarketable, declared Mother Jones contributor Alissa Quart, Moore examines what happens when corporations try to turn the independent underground into a venue for selling products. She "offers a sophisticated analysis of how companies co-opt trends and a relatively knowledgeable gloss of ‘copy-fighting’—challenging companies' often extreme intellectual property claims." The problem, she points out, that indie culture proponents face is this: independents face huge penalties for using material copyrighted or trademarked by corporations. At the same time, however, the corporations feel free to take advantage of the authenticity of indie culture without penalty. "We each define our own integrity in a different way, and we're each going to give it up for different things," Moore told Loeb. "But when you start looking at the actual money of it, and you start breaking it down into these amounts of money, it becomes very clear that this is a labor issue. The history of labor organizing—and feminism as well—is founded on realizing how little you're being offered in return for the work that you're doing really hard on behalf of an entity that you do not control."

Moore told CA: "I write for only one reason: to cause a change in the reader that will eventually inspire a more just society. It's a little bit rare right now to have writers who position themselves as social justice workers, so it's lonely, and it doesn't pay very well. But sometimes I get an email from someone—‘Hey, I just quit my job in advertising!’—or stumble across a tiny blog entry—‘Reading Unmarketable made me realize why I couldn't shop at Whole Foods anymore.’—and it starts to seem like it's working. If I can contribute to a shift in our culture from exploitative behavior to participatory, I think I'll have had a good career."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 1, 2007, Gordon Flagg, review of The Best American Comics 2007, p. 42; November 15, 2007, Barbara Jacobs, review of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity, p. 10.

Curve, May 1, 2008, Katie Peoples, review of Unmarketable, p. 72.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2007, review of Unmarketable.

Mother Jones, November 1, 2007, Alissa Quart, review of Unmarketable.

Publishers Weekly, July 31, 2006, review of The Best American Comics 2006, p. 60.

Reference & Research Book News, February 1, 2008, review of Unmarketable.

ONLINE

Anne Elizabeth Moore Home page,http://www.anneelizabethmoore.com (August 24, 2008), author profile.

Bookslut,http://www.bookslut.com/ (August 24, 2008), Eryn Loeb, "An Interview with Elizabeth Moore."

Murketing,http://www.murketing.com/ (August 24, 2008), "Q&A: Anne Elizabeth Moore, author of ‘Unmarketable.’"

School of the Art Institute of Chicago,http://www.saic.edu/ (August 24, 2008), author profile.

Toward Freedom,http://www.towardfreedom.com/ (August 24, 2008), Matt Dineen, "An Interview with Anne Elizabeth Moore."