An exploration with Blaise Moritz into the motivations, intentions, and reception of art as political and a conduit for cultural inquiry.
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The role of art in our culture and society is a complex topic, to be sure. Likewise, the topic of personal creativity and the desire to create art is multifaceted. If I have learned anything over the recent years, the creative process and consumption of art are critical pieces to post-capitalist living, and here’s why:
Art is both cathartic and exploratory. It helps us collectively process strong emotions but also acts as a conduit for cultural change. Art helps us grieve; it helps us think; it helps us understand. In other words, art is important.
But when we only consider art within the cultural context of capitalism, we fall short.
As an artist and writer, Blaise Moritz has spent a lot of time exploring what it means to create and consume art. Through poetry, illustration, narrative, and political comics, Blaise’s creative gifts to the world explore many of these complex topics, from consumption to culture; history to politics.
In this episode of the podcast, Blaise and I talk about his history and inspirations in his own creative process alongside the community of artists in Toronto, but also his experience studying art and comparing it to the grassroots movement of DIY and zine culture. We explore what it means to make art outside of capitalism, intrinsic motivations for creativity, and how politically-driven art can be accessible across cultures and classes.
You can find Blaise’s work on his website at https://blaisemoritz.com or connect with him on Instagram at @blaisemoritz.
There are also a few other references from the conversation that I want to include here:
- Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist whose work is focused around the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays. https://projects.jennyholzer.com
- CAROUSEL was an exquisitely produced hybrid literary/arts magazine representing new & established creators, with a focus on positioning Canadian talent within an international context. The print edition ran from 1983-2003 and then as an online magazine until 2023. http://carouselmagazine.ca
- Bar Delicious is a book by Blaise Moritz published by Conundrum Press in 2023. You can purchase a copy at https://conundrumpress.com/product/bar-delicious
- Ray Walker (1945–1984) was an English artist, considered among the most prominent of a movement of political and community orientated artists who created murals in London during the 1970s and 1980s.
You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack.
If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com.
TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos)
Intro: Welcome to Novitas , a podcast exploring stories of post-capitalism and what it means to live towards a collective liberation. The stories shared here covered topics like culture, politics, education, parenting, but also especially art. My guest today is an artist and writer living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, named Blaise Moritz. Blaise has published numerous works through independent publishing studios, but also self-published much of his own work. Blaise in my mind is first and foremost a poet, a zinester, and an artist, whose expansive work touches on topics of history, culture, capitalism, and more. Blaise is also, however, a connector, a community connector, and a connector of thought, bringing together both people and ideas, exploring culturally significant experiences of ideas and art to create thought-provoking pieces to share with the world. In this episode, Blaise and I talk about his experience and inspiration, his motivation and process. I hope you’ll enjoy this conversation and find your own artistic inspiration while you listen.
Kel: Well, I guess I should first say, Blaise, thank you so much for joining me and taking time to have this conversation. I wanted to start off by asking you when you started creating art and kind of how did your style develop over time? Were there experiences or influences that shaped your perspective or how you wanted to make art?
Blaise: Yeah, Kel, sure. Great question. Yeah, lovely to be here. I really enjoyed being part of the first issue of Novitas. You know, I think probably, I would think there would be a lot of people who maybe would relate to the idea that I go all the way back to before I can remember, like when I think about, you know, making art. So I think about enjoying doing that as a child, as that being an activity that I enjoyed, an activity that, you know, I felt encouraged in, an activity that I felt was like an interesting, you know, way of relating to all sorts of other things. Like when I look back, I can feel like, well, if somebody was going to encourage you to know about say another culture or another person, one of the things that they did was show you some of their art or encourage you to draw, copy some of the pictures or something like that. So I think that, so I always go back to that. And I think about like just enjoying copying pictures out of books on Greek mythology that I had.
I always go back to that. Like I can remember that, you know, it was always interesting to me when I was, since I’ve been a very schooled person in my life, it was always interesting to me to meet people who had, who associated art making with school, right? Like I actually went to, you know, studied art as an undergraduate student in college and ended a year of graduate school and to meet people for whom art was something that they had sort of… it was one of the various things that institutions had presented to them as things that they might do and that they just sort of liked it a little bit better or thought it would be, you know, somewhat more tolerable to be a art professor or something than an economics professor or something else. Like, you know, I always found that sort of fascinating, kind of bewildering.
As I grew up, I mean, I was very interested in comic books because I think for me, you know, when I encountered comic books, I think that I encountered them as an extension of how I liked to read. So I’m a, I love to read, but I was not a… I didn’t take very immediately or very naturally to reading books without pictures. I don’t know if it was just the comfort or the love of, you know, reading books that had pictures as a child. But, so I don’t know that comic books appealed to me because I particularly liked the stories, you know, really when I look back at them and stuff, I sort of think like, you know, I never particularly fantasized about those kinds of situations or things like that.
Kel: So it wasn’t a super hero thing…
Blaise: Yeah, no, I just kind of felt like, well, you know, there’s only so many Dr. Seuss books and there’s only, you know, and it was, I think, doing the grocery shopping when I found comic books. And I think, yeah, it was like, wow, look, there’s stuff to read with pictures in it and it’s colorful. And so I think I’ve always… and I also think the idea that it was accessible, you know, if I was paid, you know, 10 cents to do my grocery run, then, you know, after a couple of days, you could, like I think at the time of comic book cost, like 35 cents or something. And it was sort of fascinating to think about. And I think I go back there because I think that’s still sort of a touchstone for me to think about, like capitalism doesn’t necessarily get to own all economic activity or the idea of a market or the idea of production or exchange. Like these things exist in humanity and exist in history, like outside of the dimension of capitalism. And I think so, so to me, art is kind of associated a little bit with things like love of reading, love of pictures and feeling like, um, that those things could be accessible, could be shareable and stuff. And, uh, so I think that was a very definitive thing for me. I think, um, for me, it goes all, you know, that connection to it being sort of like a primal thing, you know, a thing that’s part of who you are is like very important to me.
Kel: Yeah, for sure. That’s really cool. And I, you touched on a lot of really cool things in there and I’m going to circle back to some of them.
Blaise: Yeah, sure.
Kel: I love the idea of comic books being outside of the system of capitalism. And I mean, there’s, there’s the collectors and there’s the, the, I guess, the industry that has turned it very much into a marketable product. But I’m kind of the same way where I grew up during the hayday of Archie comics.
Blaise: Sure.
Kel: And so that was, you went to the grocery store and there was, you would get the latest Archie comic and I think it was a couple bucks and it was like a hundred pages worth of comics. And that was totally accessible for a young person that had a little bit of pocket change. Right? And I think that’s also why I’m very much drawn towards zine culture because it really exists outside of that idea of, can I do this to make money? Right?
Blaise: Sure.
Kel: One of the reasons that I really fell in love with your comics and your, I guess, style of art, because it seems to tackle kind of these complex topics or maybe ask complex questions through really simple statements. And the pieces that you submitted for the Novitas issue, I think really reflect this as well. Can you remind me what they’re called?
Blaise: Oh, sure. I refer to them as Zero Songs.
Kel: Zero songs, that’s it. I think there’s something really cool about the combination of the abstract nature of the illustration that couples with this like abstraction of complex topics into really simple statements. And was that intentional? And where did you get that kind of inspiration as well, if so?
Blaise: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, definitely intentional. And thank you for picking up on that. I mean, I think it comes from a couple of things. An artist who had a very big influence on me was Jenny Holzer, you know, the American artist who’s probably best known for her long-running body of work, which are usually titled truisms. Barbara Krueger also, who did some similar kinds of work, but Jenny Holter is known for these sort of short aphorisms, you know, abuse of power comes as no surprise, and she would have all different ways of deploying them. You know, I was in New York City not too long ago, and I always think when I walk through Times Square that like I saw Times Square before it really got renovated and there was a block of, I guess what had formerly been like X-rated movie theaters and they were derelict, but they had, Jenny Holzer had done an installation where her truisms were on the marquees or she sometimes prints them out on like a cash register receipts at the gift shop if there’s a gallery or museum that’s having a show of hers or something. So I think I was always fascinated by these kind of aphorisms and I think I often noticed them in other authors. Kafka and Beckett were authors that I liked in high school and sometimes they have these short expressions or very sparse expressions. In recent years though, I was really impressed by, I guess, two specific things. One was a wonderful Canadian artist named Marc Laliberté, who’s long been associated with Carousel Magazine, which bills itself as “hybrid literature for mutant readers”. Marc had a long running feature called the Four Panel Project, in which he encouraged people to experiment with a four panel cartoon strip as a sort of poetic form or poetic cartoon form. So that was definitely a big influence on me, seeing the different things that people have done with that.
And then also, I think I was really struck by another wonderful Canadian artist, the long-running cartoonist Seth. You know, I was very struck by him in a talk once, you know, sort of musing about, you know, I wonder if, you know, I think I see comics more as like poetry with the the breaks between panels, the breaks between pages, like line breaks. I thought this was a very insightful comment and one that was resonant for me. But as somebody who was interested in outsider or oppositional kinds of art and was interested in different ways of working with language and was very interested in poetry, I sort of found myself thinking, that’s inspirational. I wonder what kind of poetic language would really be appropriate to that. But I feel like a lot of cartooning that gets, you know, sort of accepted, like, I enjoy it very much, like, you know, it’s sort of, it’s kind of comfortable a little bit. So I found myself thinking about people who wrote, like, you know, like, about Jenny Holzer, people who are, like, outside of, like, literature. It’s this very sparse, stripped down poetry. And so to me, there was something about that that felt appropriate to the idea of, like – Okay, well, if a comic strip could be like a poem or could have a poetic dimension, it felt like something was something about that very stripped down kind of language.
I think I was very interested also in the way that a panel could isolate, I mean, kind of like you see in a poem, like that a panel could isolate a word so that even a single word or a couple of words could have a resonance to them, which could be all their own, even if they also made sense in the whole sequence, they could sort of suggest something by themselves too. So, you know…
Kel: The way you use that single word sometimes in the juxtaposition of the art sometimes has an impact all of its own, even outside the context of the larger strip. That’s really cool. I love hearing all of those different influences because they come from very different places, but I can feel them all in your art, which is really awesome. Do you want to talk a little bit about Bar Delicious and how that project came to be?
Blaise: Yeah, so Bar Delicious is a sequence of about 40 panels. And it’s, like we were talking about, they function independently. They almost look like art deco or between World War I and World War II illustrations or prints. And Bar Delicious started as a poem. And it started as a poem about consumption and about. like I think one of the things that I like most in you know poetry is the idea that expression can be liberated or sort of oppositional is… if its process of becoming what it is are not like two separate things like I feel like it’s very mechanical or sort of quasi industrial to sort of like come up with an idea and then kind of manufacture it right? Like oh I know what my novel’s about so I just have to crank out the however many hundred pages of storytelling or something.
Kel: Very institutional.
Blaise: And so I think that one of the things I think about that, because I think Bar Delicious is, I hope participates in what I’d like to think of as the best of a discursive, meditative poem where it allows the thinking to unspool and stuff. So it starts out basically about like, you know, Here I am eating a candy bar. And it’s just sort of like, you know, tries to like evolve from there and think about like, you know, the processes that come together in that moment. And I think things that are we’re, I think very, should be very conscious of today, which I think many of us are, which I, you know, I appreciate in your, you know, activities that you do, I see like, you know, thinking about like, what are the natures of our desires? Like, how are those constructed or, you know, how can we see the differences between ones that are constructed or put upon us and what might be more healthy or natural and, you know, what does complicity mean? Like what does it mean to participate in the things which are kind of around you? So I think was kind of interested in this notion of sort of redeeming or recontextualizing some of those kinds of techniques to tell this story, which was ultimately about kind of being willing to sink into one’s own doubts and even at some point one’s own frustrations or outrages with sort of being, you know… A candy bar sweet and all, but it’s kind of also emblematic of this landscape you’re kind of, I don’t know, I don’t know if you’re ever really trapped in a landscape, I mean, but you’re kind of, you’re enmeshed in it, right? If you find yourself there. Like one of my favorite lines, you know, in that book, I always think like, you know, there’s one panel that says like, “but did I desire this bar delicious, this candy bar, or did I go out into the city prepared to eat whatever I might find?”
Kel: I really… that’s really cool. I really love the juxtaposition of the artwork as being this kind of futuristic advertisement, but also posing the questions at the same time. Am I okay with being advertised too? So when did you publish Bar Delicious? I think it had just came out before we met.
Blaise: Yeah. It was, I guess the, that was published in a book by a really wonderful press from out east in Nova Scotia called Conundrum Press, which is building up to its 25th anniversary with a series of pocket books. And so it’s a very nice little format and they’re supposed to be sort of self-contained, relatively short graphic narratives. And so yeah, so that came out in October of 2023. So it was actually just about a year ago that that book came out and I had, I think, originally made that stuff in late 2020, early 2021. So, yeah.
Kel: Cool. We’ve touched a little bit about this idea of comics and zines and your artwork in particular being made from a place where you want to be accessible. Maybe not as like accessible to other people, but making sure that that’s part of kind of the art that you’re making rather than institutional art or art because it’s a career field or things like that. And I know from personal experience that people don’t generally make zines and comics because they’re lucrative. And I know that it can be really hard to find the motivation to continue one’s art practice in a capitalist system when you’re not making tons of money. I think this is something that a lot of different artists deal with. Where do you find that inspiration to create when it’s not financially motivated?
Blaise: I think there’d probably be two answers. I mean, one a little bit would be, you know, from my family experience. I mean, I think both of my parents are people who would probably think of themselves of having escaped their families and of having to try to like, so I think I grew up around people who were trying to find different ways of how what they thought they wanted to do could fit in the world. And so I think I grew up with some sense of that and one of the things I think that sometimes has been very rewarding to me, I just not exactly an answer of like how I keep going but maybe it’s kind of an inspiration. Like sometimes I’ve kind of felt like, like I’ve known plenty of people through jobs or through school who have sort of looked at me and said, well like I wish I still drew or maybe I’ll maybe I’ll try making a zine or like you know that’s great that you still do that. And it’s also been very rewarding and motivating to kind of be there in a world where people are, you know, like if you weren’t there, they might not have a connection to that or they might not have something because I was always very struck by that thing. I think it’s a Camus thing that like where he said like, you know, freedom is that like very small movement by which a being doesn’t completely render back its conditioning. Like sometimes it’s a very small thing, right? Like, so sometimes, you know, maybe it’s a motivation to like, maybe you can be that small thing for somebody else, right? Or that thing that just makes them wonder, like why are you doing that? Why do you spend so much of your time, you know, on that? But, you know, I also think about like that Jackson Pollock thing of like, I paint because it’s the best way I’ve found of like living with myself and like, it’s the moment of being, a moment of doing that counts. Like, I don’t know, somewhere along the way I think I found myself really thinking hard that it was kind of a mistake for people, it was very human and very natural, but kind of a mistake to say that what you want to do and how you survive are the same thing. I think that if you think you’re creative, if you think you like to write or draw or sing or dance, somehow conflating those two things and say, aha, this terrible society and its institutions dangles this weird, you know, thing in front of me of like, maybe I could be Taylor Swift. I don’t know.
Kel: I was talking about this in my last podcast with Helen talking about like, you can make your money doing this thing over here and you can create your joy over here and that’s okay. And I think that’s this really beautiful idea that like by doing this and putting ourselves out into the world and not doing it for money sometimes gives other people permission
to say I can also do that thing that I used to really enjoy doing and I stopped doing because it wasn’t profitable.
Blaise: Yeah. I think- Also, I think when you think about solidarity with other people, I think it’s great and all and I’m a firm believer in the idea that everybody can be an artist or everybody can be expressive or anybody… At the same time, I feel like I don’t see that as because that’s a better use of your time than growing a vegetable or repairing a wall that needs to be repaired. So to some extent, I think if you expect solidarity with people, you kind of have to be in solidarity with them about everything, not just like, hey, let’s all escape into a world where we make zines all the time.
Break: You’re listening to Novitas, and today my guest is Blaise Moritz, a friend and artist who draws, writes and publishes many of his own zines and books from his home in Toronto. As we mentioned, Blaise contributed some of his art to the first edition of the Novitas magazine, which was released in the summer of 2024. The next edition of the magazine is now underway and will be released this winter, so stay tuned for more details on the website at novitasmag.com or on Instagram at @novitasmag. Now back to the conversation.
Blaise: But when somebody says like, I’m not sure I want to do this thing, like we’re, you know, it’s not being valued because like you can’t make any money in it. It’s like, well, there’s like a knot to untie there, right? There’s like, you know, you sort of like, you want validation from the very system that has basically shown you time and time again, it’s, it’s not gonna… what’s the expression? you know, work is not going to love you back. Yeah. Capitalism is not going to love you back. Yeah. You know, like, so.
Kel: Yeah. And you touched a little bit on this and I want to dive a little bit deeper. I’m always super excited to go to Toronto for zine events and comic events because there’s a really beautiful community there. Do you want to talk a little bit about that kind of zine community or scene in Toronto and how has your work been, I guess, received in that community and how do you feel like encouraged?
Blaise: Yeah, I think it’s a really wonderful community. I mean, I think it’s been… I’ll talk to Toronto but I’ll just give a quick nod to like, you know, I mean, I know sometimes people are down on the internet and down on the algorithms and things like that. I mean, sometimes I think it’s all about when you make a mural on a wall, why does that wall exist? Chances are that that wall exists for kind of, potentially questionable purposes. So sometimes I think like, well, using Instagram well is kind of like, making really beautiful graffiti on a wall that like you can get away with making graffiti on or something. Right? It’s not like…
Kel: Who cares about that, let’s just use it the way that we want to use it right? I’m here for it.
Blaise: I often think to myself you know like I mentioned earlier like oh I did go to like school for art right and uh one of the things which was very fascinating in that context was the whole you know institution of the critique and and it was like um and it was endlessly angst ridden, like people were like afraid of critiques or, you know, always talking about how to make critiques positive or… I think there can be value in some of that, but it all just seemed like a lot of wasted energy. And one of the, you know, I really found in the zine community was sort of like, not that people, you know, couldn’t have opinions or couldn’t be like some things more than others, but there’s just seemed to be, for me, a much more like top of mind focus on appreciation. First of all, that we were going to appreciate that people put themselves out there, that they spent some of their solitude, like a very precious thing, or some of their community, if they did it collaboratively. But they made something that could be outside of themselves, and they put it out there to be shared. And it just felt like, to me, again, like I had gone to school in art. When I first moved to Toronto, I was active sort of mostly in the poetry community, and sort of like the you know, like small press but mainstream, like publishing poems and literary journals associated with universities. And you know, I published a couple of books of poems with good presses and those were good experiences. But I just, you know, for at least for me, I felt there was still a little bit too much of like playing at like some kind of weird, like why are we acting like we’re in this institution? Like we have this freedom to be whatever we want to be. And we’re still talking about who’s got book deals with you know, these presses and it’s, you know.
Kel: And what’s worthwhile to be published, right?
Blaise: Yeah, and it’s just sort of, so it just seemed very odd to me. And, you know, in the zine community, I just felt like there was so much more emphasis on appreciation. And I think also the liberation of editorial control, I think is pretty important, right? Like, I think, you know, there’s nothing wrong with the concept of the editor necessarily, but I think to have that be something where, you know, I mean, just the way in other other zones of life where we think about like, how can you organize with like, you don’t have to have a boss to be organized, or, you know, you don’t necessarily have to have a hierarchy to get things done. I feel in the zine culture, like, editing is not somehow like above other functions from other functions and stuff, you know…
Kel: I totally agree. I love that. And I it’s like, one of the things that I absolutely love about zines. And again, in the community, this is so encouraged. It’s like, just do it, just publish it, make your zine. You can do it on a single sheet of paper. And if it never sells, that’s fine. It’s your act of creative expression. And you put it out there, and if people wanna receive it, that’s great. And because it’s so low budget and there’s not so much overhead to it, it’s just like continual creation without that like restraint, without the critique, without the you know, need to validate whether it’s worthwhile or not. It’s really just about like putting it out there into the world. And I know that there’s a lot of, well, the ones that I’ve seen, at least in, in Toronto and Hamilton and other places where there’s events where people can go and like make a zine and there’s very little limitations around it. It doesn’t matter what you make it about. It’s just, you know, come and experience what this is like and then put it out into the world and see if you enjoy it.
Blaise: Yeah, absolutely. And to see such a wonderful mixing, like I remember it was wonderful when we first met at Canzine, because the things that you made covered such a wild and wonderful range of topics. To think about all the different things you were sharing, whether it was like the unschooling things or other just sort of things you had learned or were interested in, or some of your own drawings or things. I think to feel that freedom, like obviously I’m interested in comics or graphic literature in particular, but you know the first zines I ever knew were political zines primarily, anarchist zines, and so I think one of the things that can be really wonderful is to see where those boundaries also are broken down and stuff, and I think I like nothing better than to see like, you know, that it combines like some activism with some art or comics and stuff. And so I think the ability for those two things to come together is very powerful.
Kel: For sure. Do you have any new projects planned?
Blaise: Sure. Yeah, you know, I mean, maybe that’s one of the motivations too. I kind of feel like there’s always new things and stuff. So I set myself a schedule. So I do make a zine every month, recently I’ve been on a kind of production schedule. I just finished a story, which is actually a story about somebody working in sort of a commercial enterprise and trying to subvert it and stuff. But I think that when I think of the head to projects that I wanna work on, like Bar Delicious is part of a set of, you know, stories that take our traditional senses and then also ESP as sort of entry points into thinking about how we relate to the world. So I have two more, I think probably the next thing I’m gonna work on is two more stories about that. You know, I was very happy after Bar Delicious, I sort of worked on a project that I had wanted to work on for a long time about trying to really, to some extent, not exactly cure myself of comics, but I’m always fascinated by this idea of like, do you liberate yourself from stuff? So I did this big project about, one of the most famous American comic book artists, Jack Kirby, and sort of refashioning a lot of essays he wrote towards the end of his life when he was kind of bitter about, you know, his fortunes and trying to insist that he had all these big ideas he wanted to talk about. And so sort of taking those as a launching point. I sort of mentioned that because I think the thing I would like to do most next is I’ve had this long-term, and might be most interesting to Novitas listeners or readers, is like… I got a chance to go to England when I was kind of small because my mom did went there to do some research. And I remember this arc in my life of getting to go to England. And like, I became very fascinated with London and stuff and read a lot about it. And gradually it became a real focal point of my interest in urban renewal, because one of the big urban renewal projects was of East London. And then of the fascination of like East London, of working class London, and of it as a crucible of so many themes that have played out in Western narratives of post-colonialism, capitalism, and anti-capitalism. So I found myself going back there, specifically to the East, and discovered this muralist, this person Ray Walker, who was active in the late 70s and early 80s, and did a number of large-scale political murals, some of which still exist. There’s a project in my mind which is about the history of my relationship to London and to this artist and to work sort of more, you know, potentially more directly on some of these kinds of labor themes, political themes, because, you know, my own family is from a sort of steel country in Northeastern Ohio. I think one of the things that’s been fascinating to me in my life, which I think is always fascinating for people who are, I think, interested in our collective future is like, from one point of view, that struggle was kind of lost. Like, whole industries, whole communities were kind of destroyed. And like when we, this maybe connects, we can bring it full circle… When you think back to the 35 cent comic books in the spinner rack, and you think about like the glossy comic books of today, which are hard to afford and which really just exists to promote the next Marvel comic movie, it’s sort of like that thing of like the capitalists sort of like taking their ball and going home, when it doesn’t suit them anymore
and totally disregarding the idea that human communities have a tendency to humanize and potentially make wonderful… almost anything. You look around the world, you look throughout history, and it’s kind of magical, right? How many unlikely environments, how many challenges people have taken and made into amazing communities with amazing systems and ways of living with the earth and ways of creating things. To me, I felt very sad for the idea that like, you know, that these people in England, kind of like the people of my parents’ communities, like… They needed for industry to figure out a way to be human and non-destructive or something. They didn’t need it to just get moved somewhere else and become a problem out of sight or something. And so, to me, so I don’t know. There’s a project in there somewhere.
Kel: There’s a project. That’s cool. I like, again, I love hearing about all your different angles of inspiration because you can see them coming together into something really tangible. So I’m excited for that, whatever it may be, whichever direction it may go. But I think, yeah, the idea of accessible art mixed with political messaging is really a cool, and doing it outside of the capitalist motivation to make money is this truly liberatory practice where we are now spreading accessible messaging to more people out there in the world. So that sounds exciting, whichever direction it may take. Okay, last question. Do you have any words of encouragement or inspiration for new or emerging artists who are interested in creating art in a world that often diminishes the artist experience as impractical or not worthwhile?
Blaise: Yeah, for sure. So you asked earlier about like the sort of economy of language in some of those cartoons or comics like the Zero Songs that are in the Novitas magazine. Another touch point was some people who tried to strip language down to its essentials to try to make sure that language could communicate. And so they came up with things, these are philosophers of the early 20th centure and they came up with things like “blue here now” to be very specific. Like this was something very tangible. It’s very beautiful. It’s a sort of poetic thing. Well, and you were asking about the zine community and he asked about Bar Delicious. So in the last TCAF last year, I got the chance to be on a panel and it was led by somebody I knew through the zine community here, a wonderful artist named Lina Wu. And it had two other people who
had books in that conundrum series of chapbooks. And we talked about, you know, our roots in zine culture. One of them was an artist from Vancouver, who was just sort of a legend in making mini comics, named Colin Upton. So there was lots of nice questions and conversation. And, you know, when I was saying earlier, like sometimes we find our ideas in conversation, I think that one of the most important things that occurred to me to say to the people at that moment was, “I’m here now”. I’m not hoping to be someplace else. This is not a stepping stone or anything. I want to be in this conversation right here, right now. We’re doing it. We’re having a wonderful interaction. We’re living a wonderful life. We’re talking about art. And so I think one of the big lies of our culture, the dominant culture that we live in, is that it sort of says it’s very realistic and very practical somehow, and yet, it’s completely abstract. You know, it’s always about something else. It’s always about, you know, it’s not really about, like, being in the moment of who you are and how you relate to the Earth or to other people. And so, I would just encourage people to say, like, well, you know, just make it because in that moment when you’re making it, like, you are authentically yourself, and you are, to some extent, there’s a lot of different traditions or things you get situated in, but if you want to know what you could do to cure the earth, cure yourself, obviously there’s lots of direct action, lots of different things you can do, but don’t doubt that that moment of indulging your solitude and your individuality and expressing that self, that is a place where good things come from. The things that we don’t like in the world, I don’t believe they come from that moment. So I think if you let yourself dwell in that space and if you say your creativity is like a moment of dwelling in that space, I think you’re contributing to the good.
Kel: That’s beautiful, Blaise. Thank you so much. What a heck of an outro there. I think that’s like good life lesson for anyone regardless of whether they’re making art or not to be able to treat each moment as an end in itself and not a means to a further end, right?
Outro: Thanks for listening to our conversation on the Novitas Podcast. My name is Kel Smith and I really enjoy chatting with Blaise Moritz, an artist and writer from Toronto, Ontario. You can find more about Blaise on his website blaisemoritz.com, that’s blaisemoritz.com or on his Instagram account at @blaisemoritz, where you can see so much of his art online. As mentioned, Blaise published a pocketbook with Conundrum Press called Bar Delicious, and I’ll include a link to where you can purchase a copy of that book in the show notes. If you’re interested in supporting this podcast, you can become a paid subscriber on the Substack account over at novitas.substack.com where you’ll find other podcast episodes alongside additional writing and thoughts around what it might mean to live outside a capitalist system. You can also follow along on our Instagram account @novitasmag. Thanks for listening.
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