Taking Eric Drooker far too literally and all too personally
A loose encounter with a master of protest art
His first day in Berkeley, the artist Eric Drooker had a gun pulled on him in broad daylight by a blonde, white guy. Sometime in “the final days of the 20th century,” he recalls, he had become fed up with the city and had decided to leave the Lower East Side neighborhood where he had grown up and spent most of his life. By that point, most artists were no longer creative artists, and the art that existed was being driven by monetary capital. Drooker was more attracted to creative art, “and that kind of art pays less than commercial art,” he says. The precise moment—the signal to pack up his bags and leave—was when Rudy Giuliani was reelected Mayor of New York City in 1997 and the city started to feel like a dangerous and mean place. His “ancestral homeland,” that formerly multicultural enclave in the city, just wasn’t a place where he wanted to live anymore.
So he began his East Coast exodus and came to settle in Berkeley around fifteen years ago. He decided on a studio that is unassuming, forlornly decrepit from the outside, and includes the number ½ in the address. If, in trying to get to the studio, you miss it—like I did—don’t blame yourself. Google Maps can’t understand the ½ in the address. When I got there, I knocked on the door, unsure of whether or not he would hear me over the classical music playing from a small stereo somewhere within the depths of the very little house in which he works. He came to the door, offered me a mug of water, and showed me around the two rooms that make up his sparse studio. In the smaller of the two rooms his art hangs in thin frames on the pale walls. A brown wood easel displays a colorful nude, surrounded by boxes and stacks of papers that have been strewn about the floor in loosely organized chaos, souvenirs of a decades-long career spanning two coasts, that the beige and brown filing cabinets cannot contain.
In the main room, the space is much more open. A gallon-size plastic bag filled with silver coins of all kinds and a measuring cup full of pennies sit nearby on one of the three IKEA desks. The centerpiece of the room is way off into the corner on the left side, where Drooker’s easel stands prominently, illuminated by its attached lamp. The easel houses all the artist’s scattered thoughts and fragmented work, all in black and white. Little squares and rectangles of white paper with dark drawings on them are taped to the board of the easel, some of scenery and some of the human body. More black and white cartoons are taped above the easel onto the wall, showcasing the form of a naked woman shaded with such darkness around her that her body appears white on the white paper.
Drooker mentions that he used to limit himself more to black and white, and questions whether using a lot of dark colors is actually indicative of a dark outlook on the world. When he was younger he used more black — it was more his state of mind. He’s currently mulling over his outlook and these practices, cognizant as he is that a piece being too dark elicits a knee-jerk reaction. It’s seen as too negative, too gloomy. “Light good, dark bad,” Drooker says, assuming the prissy, prim voice of an art dealer delivering a message obnoxiously loud and clear. “It feeds into white supremacy, but more complicated than that,” he says. “First of all relax: it’s just a picture.”
As an artist, Drooker is conscious of the way he exists between the two realms of interactive protest art and purely visual art. He describes his friends as writers and teachers and unionists, the ones from whom he thinks you can learn real lessons in representation. His face contorts to look moderately appalled when I ask how the art scenes in New York City and the Bay Area differ. He’s not a part of any art scene. He makes art so that it will affect someone’s consciousness somewhere, and so he wants that art to be accessible and visible. His art isn’t gallery art, though it might appear in one from time to time. The art Drooker makes is meant to appear in magazines and on newsstands, where it can be seen across the mainstream. He got his start making posters and flyers on the Lower East Side for protests against rent hikes and greedy landlords. In keeping with that tradition, much of his work still has a gritty, dark, sketchy quality that seems to be reminiscent of those days.
For someone so concerned with accessibility, I find the way Drooker half-sits and half-leans against the tall stool in his studio odd. He never offered me a chair when he sat down to begin the interview, and so I never asked for one. I shift my legs a little because they’ve both fallen asleep since I’m sitting on the floor. He’s on a different level than me, looking out (but never really down at me) as he speaks loftily about the inspirations of his art, a conversation that further illuminates the divide between how socially and politically conscious art is created and received. Drooker struggles with how to communicate his progressive ideas through art that he feels can reach the masses. He doesn’t want to be a part of the mainstream, but he’s also working within the mainstream, doing his part—through his often satirical New Yorker covers—to shift its center. He knows that the artist still needs to pay the rent and that rent strikes and protests and posters don’t change that fundamental need. Artists need to be paid. “Everyone wants to survive,” he says.
When he talks about his work “Shopping Days,” the cover image of the New Yorker issue from December 14, 2015, it’s the work’s tension that stands out. “I realized it was inflammatory or disturbing, pushing the envelope,” he says. “It’s more appropriate for a punk album, like something the Dead Kennedys would do.” He thought the satire was on America’s consumer culture, but its publication just 12 days after the shooting in San Bernadino cemented the tragic prevalence of America’s gun culture. I was surprised to learn that Drooker had completed the work a few years prior, and had even sent it into the New Yorker for publication. They found it too controversial to publish then, but by December 2015, something had shifted. Roughly 23 mass shootings later, the American obsession with guns had passed into greater recognition—and so even the person passing a newsstand could grasp the core of the twisted joke that is “Shopping Days.”
“People tend to take pictures far too literally and all too personally,” Drooker says. “They project onto your image—context is everything. At least 50% of a painting is context and projection.” He believes in the conditional quality of art, meaning that the way a work is received is almost completely dependent on its viewers. Being aware of this reality is supposed to give him more control over his work, leaving as little room for interpretation as possible. Drooker acts like he wants his art to be readily available to move the audience in whatever way they need to be moved, but he really wishes to manipulate their understanding of his work. Consider how “Shopping Days” was situated. The art’s context was the mass shooting that had just taken place, but in the media that shooting had been taken out of its original context and transformed into a terrorist attack. The religious affiliation of the assailants meant that, to mainstream America, the shooting was an act of terrorism. Yet in Drooker’s work, the happy couple smiling as they shop for firearms are white. And because white society is too often conflated with American society, the cover suggests poignantly, while sliding in and out of historical context, that this is a problem with America, not just a couple of radicals.
Work that’s too abstract bores Drooker. He thinks that it leaves too much room for error, giving the viewer all the power. When a work is rooted in a specific contextual reality, it asserts itself more fully, and it becomes harder for the viewer to project an individual narrative onto the art. Sequential art, the formal word for comics, is an optimal form for Drooker because of his penchant for storytelling in all its ironies and intricacies. “Oh no, I’m a graphic novelist by profession,” he says in the prim and grumpy voice he likes to assume whenever he takes on the persona of someone who seemingly knows more about his art than he does. All art to him is narrative art. The story and the emotions the art is capable of elucidating are what allow him to keep trying to tell a story. To illustrate his point, Drooker quotes Duke Ellington: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” The form has to mirror the content, or even be more captivating than the content itself. “It’s the basic principle of aesthetics,” he says. “Style is the aspect of the artist’s work that everyone can recognize except the artist herself.” He notes that he is totally blind to his own style. But he has recognized some of the elements of his style, asserting that darkness and eroticism are found frequently within his work.
Hunting for a new and gratifying creative endeavor, Drooker has embarked on his latest work in progress, “O Muse,” an ongoing series of nudes. In lieu of payment for his models, he presents them with a print of the work. He draws people for the nude series in whatever mood they’re in, doing yoga, doing homework. If part of the artist’s job, as he sees it, is to affect the consciousness with images, then it’s a flattering exercise to be able to depict people in a way they’ve never seen themselves before. For an introverted guy, art isn’t just means of self-expression; that would be too narcissistic a modus operandi. This art, sequential or not, is a language meant to communicate. In the case of the nudes, Drooker communicates the self-love and bodily beauty of his models, aestheticizing for the sake of appreciation. It’s provocative in a way that satire isn’t by being humbling, as well as self-satisfying.
A decade-plus after settling into a studio just a few blocks from where his friend, Allen Ginsberg, had lived on Milvia Street in Berkeley when he was writing parts of “Howl” in the 1950s, Drooker finds that the Bay Area is becoming “inhospitable.” It was pure coincidence that Drooker ended up so near to where Ginsberg had written as a younger man. Later in Ginsberg’s life, he collaborated with Drooker on a book of illustrations for “Howl,” an experience the artist describes humbly and earnestly as being “a blast.” Ginsberg was always a character in the New York City neighborhood where Drooker grew up, the embodiment of what it meant to be a creative artist who earned a long and full life making a living communicating.
Drooker himself is a purist in his art and an idealist in the way he imagines art is received. He reminds me, too, of what would happen if Mark Cohen from Jonathan Larson’s Rent grew older, left the bohemian artist enclave that is the Lower East Side in favor of the bohemian artist haven that is Berkeley, and gave up filmmaking in favor of visual art. In his black Columbia fleece and blue jeans, Drooker looks a little awkward, as if he’s just gained control over his limbs. He’s finding that the Bay Area is becoming increasingly upper class and hostile toward people of color, two of the reasons that had prompted him to leave New York City.
Eric Drooker called me ‘R’ in the first email he sent to me. When we met, he wanted to know if I was Rachel in the biblical sense — not one of those Stephanie’s who go by Rachel to make themselves sound more Old Testament-y. He then wanted to know if he could interview me sometime about my background.
I realized as I left, trudging into the darkness and hoping no blonde guys with guns were waiting around the corner to mug me, that I never asked him what the miniature trampoline was doing in the middle of the room in his studio.
