The Village Voice

Review of Street Posters & Ballads

"Drawing the Lines of Dissent"

by Sarah Ferguson

1999

It's been a long time since shouts of "class war!" resonated from Manhattan's Tompkins Square Park. Trolling the crowds of tourists and weekend barhoppers along Avenue A, it's hard to remember that just eight years ago, this street was erupting like clockwork in pitched battles between police, squatters, and bottle-wielding anarchists. Beyond the squats or the right of the homeless to camp in the park, the protesters were fighting to preserve the Lower East Side as a crucible of dissent, a legacy dating back to the "communist" riot of 1874 and the hippie be-ins of the 1960s.

Today, that legacy seems all but erased by the never-ending tide of chain stores, chic boutiques, and pricey condos sweeping eastward. But you can still get a taste of the heady idealism and Escape From New York drama that fueled the Lower East Side's rebels in the graphic works of artists Seth Tobocman, Eric Drooker, and Fly.

Eric Drooker's Street Posters & Ballads (Seven Stories Press) bears witness to many of the same cataclysmic events. The book is a collection of protest flyers he wheat-pasted on the Lower East Side over the last decade, interspersed with graphic narratives and his own Guthrie-esque ballads and poems. (The back cover features a photo of Drooker being hauled away by police while performing one of his folk ditties during a speak-out in Tompkins Square.) It concludes with an afterword by Allen Ginsberg, with whom Drooker frequently collaborated.

Where Tobocman's blunt narratives recall the propagandistic social realism of the 1930s, Drooker's wordless scratchboard etchings are more painterly, even mystical. His cover illustration evokes the spirit of the Lower East Side as a towering naked goddess standing guard over the squats before phalanxes of riot police. He personifies the NYPD tank that the cops brought to evict the East 13th Street squatters with almost Dr. Seuss-like humor, as it rumbles toward a crowd of protesters armed with drums and fanciful horns. Drooker documents contemporary events, but renders them as part of the tragic continuum of human history.

This mythic quality helps explain Drooker's widespread appeal. Despite his radical edge, his works have graced the covers of The New Yorker, and his apocalyptic 1994 graphic novel, Flood!, won an American Book Award. Though his posters have since been plastered over by slick corporate movie ads, Drooker's iconic images have a way of lingering. I recently spied one of his stark cityscapes tattooed on the calf of a young traveler.