tonyvwright:

The death, earlier this month, of Moebius the French comic book artist, unsurprisingly, saw a lot of posts remembering his talent and influence. Amongst them I came across a video called Moebius Redux on Krustelkrams excellent blog. ( The film seems to have disappeared now, although parts of it are still available to view on You Tube.) Near the end of the film, a few of the people that had been interviewed about their connections with him were asked to talk about what sort of a man Moebius/Jean Giraud was. One of them, the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who had contracted Moebius to design a version of Dune he wanted to film, said something to the effect of “..He was like a child…he drew all day.”

The title of this piece translates as “to be stupid like a painter.” It was an adage in common currency in France at the beginning of the last century and a view which Marcel Duchamp took strong exception to. It provided impetus for his ground breaking and highly cerebral practice which, in turn, changed fundamentally, our understanding of the visual arts and still informs the work in contemporary galleries worldwide.

A century or more separates this two opinions but despite the fact that it would be hard to read Jodorowskys reflection on Moebius, within the context of the film, as ill-intentioned, there is a connection that I suspect a lot of people who make images for a living will be sensitive to. Certainly, I am.

To say that someone is childlike is certainly more generous than assuming them to be stupid but neither position allows for the possibility of a fully developed and sophisticated intelligence. Both seem to presume that the peculiar talent for making pictures is somehow, simpler and less evolved than most other occupations.

I make no argument for a higher level of intelligence in the visual arts. In every category of occupation there exists a full range of ability and understanding. There are stupid and untalented film directors and wise comic book artists; there are foolish doctors and lawyers and accomplished, philosophically minded long-distance lorry drivers, narrow-minded scientists and genius patent officers - and all their opposites. The same for image-makers. But as a corrective to this generally held belief that we are somehow less-evolved, less intelligent, I would offer this corrective: It may be that because our work is frequently done alone, we are sometimes less adept socially than others and perhaps, because our work demands high levels of concentration and single-mindedness we can sometimes appear to be in another, less substantial, world, however, it should be remembered that if we are any good at what we do it is, in part at least, because we looked harder and longer and have seen and understood things that others might not have even noticed.

That has to be as useful a starting point for the development of a refined intelligence as you’ll find anywhere.