This has its privileges. Unlike the builders working alongside us, Melissa and I were allowed to smoke and drink. We came in whenever we wanted. We needed no foreman, no management, and no discipline.
But art is labor, and labor is art, and both have a claim on the sublime. The construction workers and Melissa and I were all skilled craftspeople. They built the walls. Then, as they watched, I scrubbed pigment into their walls until pictures emerged. We all had dirty nails and aching backs. As an artist, I got credit for my work—even the stars Melissa actually gilded. The construction workers got nothing but pay. They were a team, unnamed, lost to history. But we all built that rich kids’ paradise together.
Stone carvers once chiseled their names below the windowsills of buildings they worked on. It was an artist’s signature, by people whose talent is seldom acknowledged. With that tradition in mind, I took some time in the Box’s tiled VIP room to draw Sharpie portraits of the construction guys, their hard hats and lined faces. Then, with clear nail polish, I lacquered them into the tile.
Those construction workers would never get past the doormen once the club opened. But in my pictures they partied forever. They were the room’s first VIPs.
That night, Melissa and I ran into Simon at the Groucho, a private club across the street from the Box. “I’m so sorry about everything, Molly,” he told me, his eyes wide. “Your art is so good and it seems so easy because you do it so fast. We got off wrong, and I just want to make things right.”
I was incredulous. Simon never apologized.
“Well, thank you,” I stuttered.
“Let’s do something fun.” He smiled. “Let’s to go to a brothel and ask the whores why they do it,” he continued.
“They do it for the money, Simon,” I answered, shaking my head.
“Oh.” He paused, as if he’d never thought of that. “Want to go to a sex club with me?”
“I have to work for you tomorrow.”
“Suit yourself.” He scowled, then stormed out.
The next day Simon walked through the site, his eyes bloodshot and his beard wild. Unlike Melissa and me, he wore a hard hat. To demonstrate his kinship with the working man, he picked up a block of sandpaper and flailed at the wall. After a few minutes he gave up, ordering his assistant to finish what he’d started.
After an afternoon meeting with the Box’s staff, I left for lunch. A hundred protesters from the antiausterity group UK Uncut were marching down Oxford Street toward the clothing store Topshop, carrying signs accusing its owner, Phillip Green, of tax dodging. “If you don’t pay your tax, we can’t pay the police!” the crowd chanted.
I watched them go by. As demands go, paying the police was a convoluted one, since police officers usually beat protesters. But I stared after them anyway, an ache in my chest.
Then I walked back to Soho. Patisserie Valerie was waiting. I climbed its rickety steps, sat at a small table, and ordered myself some cake.
While I was in London, I was summoned to drinks by Warren Ellis, a British comics writer and longtime Internet friend. Warren was the writer of Transmetropolitan, a famous series about Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter Thompsonesque figure who believes that “journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.” Transmetropolitan is a bit of an international token among weird kids, referenced in the forearm ink of Kurdish academics, in shout-outs from Greek journalists.
Warren liked to spread his fame around by promoting young artists. A decade ago, after noticing the class satire in my college drawing of a Victorian woman on the skateboard, he’d started championing my work. We started an on-and-off correspondence, threatening to murder each other by various depraved and sinister means. But we’d met only once, for a few minutes before his signing at San Diego Comic-Con.
in the Paris Review (theparisreview.org)
Melissa and I found Warren in the back room of a pub in Soho, holding court over a half-dozen comics creators he’d mentored, including Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. Warren was large, and bearded, angrily puffing on an e-cigarette as he cursed the indoor smoking ban.
“Hello, angel,” he greeted me. “You’re fucking late.”
When he embraced me, I barely came up to his chest. Then he turned to Melissa. “Is that a dress you have on or a belt?” he asked skeptically.
Though I’d corresponded with Warren for years, he intimidated me in person. His eyes were piercing, and I avoided his stare, afraid to come off as a dim fangirl if I met his gaze. He had a South End accent, his voice as deep and sweet as old whiskey. He asked me a few polite questions; I gave him a few not especially bright answers. In lieu of words, I showed him cell phone pictures of the walls I’d just painted.
As we settled in, my attention was caught by the one girl in the group. She had a black slash of hair and a red slash of lips. She was in her early twenties, but she was so short she looked twelve, with bangs framing her pointy face and a small body that she smothered in stained black sweaters. She introduced herself as Laurie Penny.
I’d heard that name before. In 2009, Laurie had written an article about her early experiences in burlesque—complete with a screamingly offensive headline that snarked about “stripping and grinding.” My burlesque friends circulated it incredulously. Were our jobs really that evil?
“Why the hell did you write that piece?” I asked. “I danced burlesque for years and don’t remember anything quite so dystopian.”
She laughed—an adorable, elfin laugh, nothing like how I thought she’d sound. “That’s what editors want from you when you’re a young woman. I pitched at least twenty straight politics stories before I got my first two pieces accepted in the broadsheets, and guess what they were about? Stripping and eating disorders. Both from personal experience. It’s ironic, really. Even as a writer they want you to start with your body, with your personal pain, before you get into the broader arguments.”
I smiled, in spite of myself. “I know the feeling. The main thing I get paid for is drawing sexy girls. You’re always selling girlhood, one way or another.”
“Yep.” She nodded. “Before you can be an artist, an activist—any kind of thinker—you have to be a girl first. And the right sort of girl, too,” Laurie said. “It pisses me off. Because the real story is always more complex than the one they want to hear. Even the story about being a girl.”
“What were those protests I saw yesterday, going down Oxford Street?” I asked, changing the subject.
Laurie’s voice sped with excitement. The marchers were part of a student movement against university tuition hikes that had been forced through the month before by David Cameron, the prime minister. The protestors had actually taken over a chunk of University College London. “Then they went out onto Oxford Street and started shutting down the big department stores one by one. You’ve got to understand—this never happens in Britain,” she told me. “Not in our generation’s memory, anyway. Everyone just grumbles and gets on with it.”
“What changed?” I wanted to know.
“Austerity is biting down hard,” Laurie explained. “Young people feel like they don’t have a future, like they’ve been cheated, and they’re right. Two weeks ago they stormed the Conservative Party headquarters and occupied it for hours. Smashed in all the windows, lit fires in the courtyard, held an impromptu rave—thousands and thousands of them, completely overwhelming the police. Nobody saw it coming.”
As we talked, the comics boys faded away.
We shared a final cigarette with Warren. I hugged him good-bye, regretful that I hadn’t said anything more clever. Then Melissa and I walked home, past the Italian coffee shops on Dean Street, through the narrow Saint Anne’s Court, I didn’t want to leave, but back at the Box, I had miles of wall left to fill. I promised myself to read more of Laurie’s work.
Before I returned to work I sat in the upstairs office, went to the New Statesman’s webs
ite, and looked up an article Laurie had written in mid-November about student protesters who’d smashed the Tory headquarters in Millbank. I read the first paragraphs.
One hundred years ago, a gang of mostly middle-class protesters had finally had enough of being overlooked by successive administrations and decided to go and smash up some government buildings to make their point. Their leader insisted that when the state holds itself unanswerable to the people, “the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics.”
That leader was Emmeline Pankhurst, and the protesters were the suffragettes.
I devoured the article. Then I read another. Then a third.
Laurie’s beats were protest and feminism. Her columns tied together the students on the streets and young women’s more personal rebellions. She wrote dramatically—as if the stakes were massive—with blood and honey and fire.
As I went back to painting my wall, lines from Laurie’s articles ran through my mind. She was so brilliant, so engaged with the world. She read all the books I’d never had time to even skim. She’d been to Oxford. She knew about politics and violence. She had thoughts worth writing down.
I scrubbed paint into the raw linen covering an alcove. The dancer started to flesh out, curvaceous and inviting. I daubed her lips red. I felt nauseated, like I’d eaten too many marshmallows. I was working on a grand scale, but what did the work mean? When I was seventeen and drawing at Shakespeare and Company, art felt closer than my skin. I’d cared about things beyond professional advancement. I used to think my pen could fight me into a new world.
But for the past few years, I’d let that part of me die. What had started as a scramble to scrape together enough resources so I could afford to draw had become an obsession with the resources themselves. I was twenty-seven, three years older than Laurie. I’d spent years—wasted years?—doing work for cash instead of desire. After ignoring the deepest parts of myself for so long, I wondered if I could even find them.
The next morning, I emailed Laurie:
Melissa and I would like to take a crusading journalist with a black bob out for a drink, if she has free time.
Laurie couldn’t make it out for drinks. She was living full-time now with the student protesters at University College London. Instead, she invited me to visit her.
“Come to the occupation,” Laurie wrote me. “There will be tea.”
The occupation of the university turned out to be confined to a far smaller area: the Jeremy Bentham Room, named for the school’s philosopher-founder. Several hundred students filled the columned space on UCL’s ground floor. Bored security guards stood outside, but otherwise left the students alone.
Piles of sleeping bags filled up one corner of the room; alongside tables full of drinks and snacks. The walls swarmed with homemade political banners. One bore a quote from Bentham himself: “Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward”—with the word merit angrily scratched out and replaced with wealth.
When I entered, I found the room crackling with conversation. In the room’s center, a few dozen students sat listening earnestly to a speech. To indicate agreement, they used a gesture from a consensus-based decision-making procedure: holding their hands up and wiggling their fingers.
But for all their passion, the occupation felt like playacting. Wasn’t this really just an occupation of a room, I wondered. The rest of the university seems to be going about business as usual. And if the authorities really want the students to leave, wouldn’t they just have security kick them out? They haven’t exactly barricaded themselves inside.
Through the crowd, I saw Laurie’s head, topped with a Russian fur hat. She darted up and hugged me hard. “Molly! You made it! Do you want some tea? Or some food? There’s loads of it—people’s mums keep turning up with supplies.” Then she scurried away, distracted by a handsome student organizer.
I grabbed a biscuit from the overflowing table. These food ziggurats would be ubiquitous at every occupied newspaper, school, and workplace I later visited, augmented constantly by supporters trying to show solidarity.
After a few minutes, Laurie reappeared and grabbed me again. “I should show you the Slade! You’re an artist, you’ll be interested. They’ve given up all their projects to work on collective art. Most of it’s very silly, but the principle is endearing.”
The Slade was a famous art school, adjacent to the main buildings of University College London. She led me out the door and through the paths over to Slade’s neoclassical exterior. Student protesters had hung banners there reading “Artists Against Cuts” and “Slade Occupied.” As we walked, Laurie rolled cigarettes and puffed on them as she talked.
“The police are getting an injunction to evict the students,” she told me. “Last I heard, their plan was to get naked and cover themselves with lube to make it as awkward and slippery as possible for the police to manhandle them out the doors. I like it. Resistance as performance art, I suppose.”
She led me up the stone steps, through the door, then up a wide staircase to see the studios belonging to the master’s students.
The studios were fairly large, but the art was comprised mostly of amorphous brown paintings and bits of fabric tacked to the wall—the sort of work John and I once mocked at FIT. “If only I got free studio space at art school!” I laughed. “I would have killed for a place to work like this!”
“In the UK, the whole reason we had such incredible art and music for so many decades is that kids from working-class backgrounds were given space and time to study art for free, or at very low cost. The Beatles came out of the London art schools. So did Bowie.”
We stopped to talk with a group of Slade students by a wall of windows overlooking the lawn. One young woman told me that the administration was constantly threatening the students with eviction, but the security guards didn’t really want to carry out the orders. Guards were working people too.
The Slade was one of a dozen occupied universities, from Bristol to Edinburgh, where students were aiming to prevent what one young protester, in a BBC interview, called “savage cuts to higher education and government attempts to force society to pay for a crisis it didn’t cause.” The nation’s guarantee of cheap university education—even cheap art school—was part of a humane system that treated humans as something more than workhorses.
Outside, Laurie smoked the last of her tobacco. She pointed to a sign on the lawn that read “This Is Actually Happening.”
“It feels like everything is changing,” Laurie said. “I think that’s how you start to change the world. First, you change the terms on which you relate to the world. And nothing’s ever quite the same.”
On breaks from painting, I checked Twitter on my laptop in the Box’s upstairs office. With each new update, the student protests seemed to be getting more daring and more dangerous. On November 30, police officers kettled students in Trafalgar Square. Trapped there in the snow, some burned their placards for warmth. Hundreds more ran through the streets, trying to evade beatings from police truncheons. “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Thatcher,” they chanted. Protesters from UK Uncut superglued closed the locks of Vodaphone and Topshop stores, forcing them to shut on the busiest shopping days of the year. At the Tate Britain, students in dunce caps disrupted the Turner Prize.
In one photo, an organizer for UK Uncut stood in front of Topshop, demanding the store’s owner pay his taxes so the government could preserve low-cost university tuition. A heckler had accused him of wearing a Topshop shirt, so he had ripped the shirt off, revealing a chiseled torso. I sat there in the Box’s office and drew him—the first time in ages that I’d drawn the present instead of taking refuge in a curlicued past. I needed to drop the ruffles, to draw something more violent and vivid. I grabbed a fat marker and scribbled in simple black lines, letting emotion guide my strokes. I drew to spite my caution.
That small drawing was the start of something new, but I didn’t know it.
I refreshed Twitter,
scanning the accounts of the occupied universities and UK Uncut. Finally, I slammed the laptop shut. The wall was calling. We had vast sections to fill.
What did it mean, my garden of pigs and gold? What was I doing here? As I sat on the platform, blasting the Pogues, the city outside was throwing kids in cages, in the opening salvos of a battle that still hasn’t stopped. What was I doing on a job site? What sort of compromise was it to work with the Box, hiding my subversion between the cocaine and breasts? Sure, there was satire in my mural. Sure, the staff would get it. But wasn’t it just cheeky wallpaper for the rich drunks who filled the club?
Which side was I on?
Before work, I drank cocktails at the Groucho. Simon staggered in, a girl on each arm. “You’re fired,” he screamed, at no one in particular.
“They don’t work for you, Simon,” I hollered back.
“You’re fired too,” he snapped.
“I don’t care,” I responded.
Simon staggered out.
My last two walls at the Box flanked a dark passageway next to the VIP room. I’d planned to fill them with balloons made of rococo women, but that final night I couldn’t lift my arm.
Melissa had wandered off to take selfies against her wall of stars. When she came back to check on me, she found me curled in a fetal position. “Get up!” she ordered.
I pried myself up.
“It’s either you or me, you fucker,” I said to the wall, then grabbed my palette.
I thought of Diego Rivera painting the Palacio Nacional. For six years he attacked the walls with his tableaus of workers, soldiers, and lush naked women whose bodies somehow represented communism. Diego, who worked for Rockefeller, and painted revolution, and apparently saw no contradiction. What were my two weeks next to his years?
I forced myself onward, relying on muscle memory. I closed my aching fingers around my brush, unable to tell where it started and I stopped.
Drawing Blood Page 20
