She stands naked, akimbo, and large between empty buildings as the symbols of power, military and police, attempt to force her retreat from the burning car illuminating her thighs and pubic mound. Her face shows no signs of concession. The worker's heart pounds through his chest though he is aware that behind his back lay junkies, barbed wire, skeletons, the lost dreams of a man whose cash register no longer pops out its drawer. Behind their backs industry persists as unaware as the worker that they both exist as post forms of their prior selves, a prefix given by another to denote uselessness in a world where service not labor gives use-value. The Holocaust survivor wakes alone, tends to her plants, then gives the cat milk as her husband looks on from an aged photo on the wall; she leaves for the day to feed the birds and returns to watch love on TV shed light on an otherwise dull apartment in an otherwise dull tenement. She remembers, sleeps, and wakes tomorrow to remember again.
Eric Drooker's paintings and illustrations tell the stories the city attempts to convert into landscape. Just another defiant female, fighting worker, or lonely elderly woman become personifications of the everyday battles for place within the urban environment. The image of city dwellers furiously walking, transporting themselves from one obligation to another, reoccurs throughout his work. In the process, passersby neglect to see or acknowledge the presence of the man reaching his hands and hat out for some semblance of the change the true hustlers are hurrying so quickly to obtain. Time is money unless all you have is time and no money with which to make money in our world of obsolete employment and fictitious capital. In Drooker's art these men with nothing but time are depicted as unshaven, just like the man who begs for change hidden by the massive flows of the employed, and warming their hands over a garbage fire as snow falls around them in contrast to their dark skin.
Allen Ginsberg notes in the introduction to their collaborative book of poetry and illustrations entitled, Illuminated Poems, that:
Questions arise as to the motivation of a young artist in attempting to reveal the ugly underbelly of the urban area in which he lives. For Drooker this area is New York City, an area that undoubtedly leaves an observer open to see the polarization of gender, class, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation. These stark contrasts go unnoticed by many who walk by the man with the hat hoping for change or the elderly sitting in the park feeding the birds. Essential to the understanding of Drooker's art and the ideas he represents through his images is an understanding of his decision not to just walk by the stigmatized residents of New York but to internalize their stories and pull them out of the landscape through art.
Drooker's transcendence of society's blinders is a function of his neighborhood and upbringing. Rob Walker, in an article in the Australian journal World Art, entitled "Mean Streets," remarks that the area Drooker grew up in is "one of New York City's most storied, a place where history is measured in conflicts and confrontations, and where the most lasting tradition is rebellion." (2) Like Upton Sinclair, the notorious Muckraker, born to an alcoholic father and suffragette mother living in a lower-class boarding house in Baltimore despite, or rather in spite of, the wealth of his mother's family, Drooker experienced class discrepancies at a young age. Late in his life Sinclair attributed his disgust regarding class differences to his experiences in youth.(3) Walker similarly notes Drooker as stating, "I would see social discrepancies at a pretty early age, before I was able to understand what it all meant. But I'm convinced that it must have affected me." It didn't hurt in the case of both men that their families were composed of socialists. Sinclair's parents and Drooker's grandparents both espoused views in contrast to the societal drone of capitals' expansionistic accumulation of souls. Surrounded by social-constructions of "muck" left both Sinclair and Drooker searching for rakes; one found words, the other pictures.
Drooker not only details the downtrodden but offers suggestions for ascendance and redemption from the oppressive forces of capital and modernity that conceal the beauty of everyday life and stigmatize those who refuse to blend in with the urban landscape. Music summons Drooker's phoenix from amidst the ashes of souls burnt by the city's inferno. In his wordless novel, Blood Song, Drooker's heroine and her dog companion "arrive in the 'Big City'--a place of confusion and loneliness--the only comfort the woman can find is the sounds of a performing street musician whom she comes to love." (4) Police-state repression soon complicates this love by prohibiting street performance in public space.
Drooker describes instruments as the only weapons the people have to combat the power of the police and military, what he describes as the patriarchal powers wielding phallic symbols of control in the form of missiles and guns. There is little need for him to artistically exaggerate these institutions of power in a city where he notes the police constantly over-exert power in the form of brutality and violence. Street demonstrations are one example of what Drooker notes as "a cultural outpouring" with music embodying the "life-force and creativity" of social change versus police attempts to stifle life-breeding transformation. Drooker saw this first hand as his street musician friends' instruments were taken from them as part of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's "Quality of Life" crimes as if to disarm them from creating change in their world, a world quickly being encroached upon by upper-class desires to sweep them into the gutter. According to Drooker, "you can't make this shit up," it's all right in front of your face. (5)
Police and military figures emerge in Drooker's work as characters stationed to protect society not from "obvious problems like greed and violence, but (from) what he sees as a sort of societal fear of the creatures living in our cities most culturally vibrant fringes." (6) These institutional control devices, wielding billy-clubs and pointing the barrels of guns at individuals of the street, successfully drive the undesirables out of the city into the urban wasteland buffering industry from what lurks outside its concentric circles. In the streets the people rise up with their musical instruments of revolution to not only combat the brutality of capital's police pawns and military mice, but to form a new world where grass grows on formerly paved ground and primal dance circles emerge unfettered by the soul-crushing nature of wealth's metropolis. The city emerges as a life-force supporting a geography of change positive to the people; this life force bellows out the end of a horn like a thousand unshaven, hand-warmin' angels buskin' for change on a street corner that no amount of cops can move them from.
The struggle over shrinking public space constantly fighting against encroachment by the all-consuming power of real-estate capital within the urban environment reoccurs throughout Drooker's work. His activism and art focuses on issues of squatter's rights, rent strikes, and tenant opposition to police violence, all issues related to property and the limited physical space available in the United States' very own "global city." Public space incubates the salvation found within the beat of drums and the wail of saxophones that awaken the souls of the untouchables, those in Ginsberg's New York City "who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz." (7) Drooker's illustration of public space in his drawings reveals shared spaces decrease in size as police erect barriers to protect the dogs of private property while they urinate on the "illegal" residence squatters once claimed as home, the "empty" building soon to be "revitalized." Drooker shows frustration that the academic left, the civilly disobedient, anti-globalization left, fights far away fights oblivious to what happens in their neighborhoods. He states that while they are aware of colonial, capitalist excess elsewhere and recognize most Americans' consumer, sexist lifestyles, they cannot bridge the global/local dichotomy. Drooker relates to a conversation he shared with a young, single mother in a punk band who has become cynical to the activist movement and disenchanted by activists desire to act in protest on the weekend when it is sexy but during the week they feel no need to act. Drooker calls these the "jive tendencies in the movement" that compromise otherwise "good, righteous impulses." (8)
Industry watches lovers embrace violently while others elect to socially reproduce through needles and bottles in response to its imposed alienation. In Drooker's urban imagery industry is not forgotten. Smoke still escapes from stacks our globalized economy attempts to have us forget. Drooker grew up across the East River from one of New York City's most industrial areas. Factories like that of the Domino Sugar factory formed his childhood landscape and despite his mentioning of the pollution and bad smells he describes the "serious-looking, ominous structures" as attractive and beautiful in their complexity compared to the modernist buildings in post-industrial, service sectors of the city. Though he respects and admires the intricacy of industry, Drooker notes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as "a cautionary tale of technology" that early on in the industrial revolution recognized the ability for technology to be misused by man. Drooker also quotes William Blake's description of the "dark, satanic mills" and remarks on the visual arts ability to chronicle historical social change through depictions of workers taking over the means of production in the U.S.S.R., as he puts it, "the workers no longer as slaves but as having taken over the machines." Drooker concedes that industry may be interpreted within the jargon of geography but to him it's just what he grew up around. (9)
New York City's landscape not only
nurtured Drooker's perceptions of the world by instigating his activism
as it did his family members before him, but the stark contradictions
present in a space festering with the contradictions of capitalism
forced him to act on what he saw and experienced. The downtrodden
street dwellers, musicians, and artists known to him as friends
constantly battling it out in the struggle for free space in the urban
environment appear throughout his work as protagonists opposed to the
antagonizing power of police and military. Drooker believes that all
that people can afford: musical instruments, paintbrushes, pens, "are
our only weapons" available to draw attention to the oppression
inflicted by those who intend on maintaining themselves as dictators of
control and power in New York City. In Drooker's megalopolis, music is
the universal language of social change that all people can understand
and that he aspires to with his wordless narratives aimed at pulling
stigmatized characters out of the life-breath robbing urban landscape.
1. Allen Ginsberg and Eric Drooker, Illuminated Poems,
xii,1996.
2. Rob Walker, "Mean
Streets," World Art (Australia), no. 17, 56-9. 1998. Walker also
titles this same interview with and observation of Drooker, "A Brief
Tour of Eric Drooker's Megalopolis." It is found on Rob Walker's
website: http://robwalker.net.
3. Carl Jensen, Stories that Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th
Century, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), 15. Jensen notes
Sinclair's early memories were of waking up in the middle of the night
to kill bed bugs with his parents.
4. Harcourt Trade Publishers. "Between the Lines: Interview with Eric
Drooker."
2002.
www.harcourtbooks.com/authorinterviews/bookinterview_drooker.
asp
5. Eric Drooker, Interview, October 24, 2003.
6. Walker, "Mean
Streets," World Art, 59.
7. Allen Ginsberg , Howl, (San Francisco:
City Lights, 1997), 9.
8. Drooker, Interview, October 24, 2003
9. Drooker, Interview, October 24, 2003