Drawing Blood

by Molly Crabapple

  To some observers, Occupy may have looked like a scrum of middle-class white kids, so privileged they reacted with incredulity when cops beat in their ribs. There’s a kernel of truth to that: many white occupiers were shocked to find themselves on the wrong end of a police baton. But the demographics of Occupy were far more complex. One of Occupy’s strongest links consisted of homeless young people. Yes, they fought capitalism, but they were also fighting for survival. After the Zuccotti raid, many crashed on the floor of the sympathetic West-Park Presbyterian Church. But when some of the church’s property went missing, the church blamed the Occupiers and kicked them out.

  By January 2012, this core group was reduced to sleeping on the sidewalks near the park they had made famous. Except for their signs, they were indistinguishable from any other group of homeless people scratching out a life in this city.

  During that long winter, my friends and I drew closer. In the warmth of my apartment, we sat in circles on the floor, drinking whiskey and talking about the protests that still raged in other countries. We refused to believe Occupy was over. We had come so close. To what? We didn’t know.

  Always, I kept drawing. I drew posters for the destroyed People’s Library, for the rebellions in Bahrain, for the students marching against tuition hikes in Quebec. I drew jailed activists. The journalist Quinn Norton, who was covering the hacker group Anonymous, came to visit me. We drank whiskey, and I drew tentacles across the khaki vest she wore to demonstrations to identify herself as press.

  When George Whitman, who had welcomed me at Shakespeare and Company when I was seventeen, died that December, I drew his lined face, surrounded by the legend “Be kind to strangers, for they may be angels in disguise.” I wept as I drew, realizing I’d never told him how much he’d meant to me.

  Laurie came from London on a regular basis, often crashing on my floor. We didn’t just speak about changing the world. Laurie complained about the childlike men in her life, and we tried on lipstick and practiced teasing our hair big in the mirror. We talked about our goals, our hunger for travel and creation, which drove us to work harder than we imagined we could. We were small young women, so our ambitions threatened others. Unhealthily, we pored over conservative British message boards, where trolls talked about garroting Laurie to death, or tying me to a post and smothering me with shit. White men never seemed to provoke this sort of rage.

  I wanted to meld my two communities: professionally-gazed-at girls like Stoya, and professionally-listened-to journalists like Laurie and Tash. The world tells women they must choose between intellect and glamour, but I saw no such distinction. If we could sit in a room and drink till the world swam, maybe we’d create something new. I threw parties just for women at which we drank champagne from olive jars and mocked the men who had disappointed us. As dawn rose, Stoya, Tash, and I sat smoking on the fire escape. Tash tried to convince Stoya to write for The New Inquiry, but Stoya, who’d never been to college, worried that she wasn’t educated enough.

  “Fuck college,” I told her, suddenly furious. “Of course you’re smart enough. You know things none of these people do.”

  “Fuck college,” Tash agreed enthusiastically.

  The fire escape faced a wall, but from each end we could see the shining buildings beyond, beacons of the New York we were promised.

  On Saint Patrick’s Day 2012, I heard screams coming from Zuccotti Park. Not chanting, but rage. I ran downstairs, then fought my way to the front of the crowd, where I saw wounded-looking girls with bandaged heads being loaded into buses commandeered from the MTA.

  A policewoman shoved a barricade hard into my chest. I gasped, more with shock than pain.

  “Shame on you!” an older lady screamed at the policewoman. The lady’s face twisted with anger. She pointed at the policewoman, “I survived breast cancer. I’m not afraid of you.”

  The policewoman smirked back.

  “From Oakland! To Greece! Fuck the police!” the crowd shouted.

  A girl convulsed on the pavement apparently having a seizure. Her hands were cuffed behind her back. She looked so small, a bright fairy on the concrete, her skirt hitched over her waist. The crowd screamed for an ambulance. The cops wouldn’t call for one.

  Later I learned the name of the girl on the pavement. She was Cecily McMillan, an OWS organizer. That day, she’d been looking for a friend she’d arranged to meet in the park when a plainclothes cop grabbed her from behind. Instinctively, she elbowed him. When grabbed, most women would do the same. Photos taken later showed a hand-shaped bruise on her breast.

  In May 2014, a jury convicted Cecily of assaulting an officer. She spent fifty-eight days on Rikers Island.

  Just as the Smithsonian Museum once scoured Occupy encampments for discarded posters for their collection, the media scoured Occupy for its future celebrities.

  As Occupy’s high faded, it became clear who the winners were. They were not the people who had believed the most or fought the hardest. One veteran Occupier tweeted that she had spent thirty hours a week in her city’s encampment. She’d washed dishes, organized, fought through general assemblies, and been hauled off to jail. Now she was homeless. Meanwhile, people who’d spent one night at the park had book deals. People like me.

  That Occupier was right to hate a system that can commodify even its opponents. But the media fixates on individuals. Even a movement that fought the idea of having spokespeople would have them imposed upon it in retrospect. The shiny, clever, and opportunistic seized the credit for Occupy, as they always seize everything. The humble and hardworking were kicked to the bottom, as they always are, even here.

  My friends and I clung to our faith in the spring. When the weather was warm, Occupy would rise again like Adonis, or some other god who’d been killed by a wild pig.

  For May Day, the anarchists who helped create Occupy called a general strike. Natasha Lennard was involved in planning one of the actions, and she asked me to draw a May Day poster. John and I thought up the idea: a Latina woman, striking a match, surrounded by black cats that symbolized wildcat strikes.

  OccuCopy, an activist printmaking collective, ran off thousands of copies. Activists wheat-pasted them around the world. For the next year, I saw my poster fused to construction fences in San Francisco and Bushwick. Sometimes viewers drew dicks on my woman’s face.

  And yet, when May Day came, there was no general strike. A hundred anarchists ran through the streets of Chinatown, trying to evade police officers who had started arresting them before their action even began. Unions staged a planned march down Broadway. Sarah and I marched alongside thousands of protestors. She scrawled “All $ from labor” in red lipstick across a piece of cardboard, and held it as a placard. Fellow marchers banged pots and pans, in imitation of the antituition protests in Quebec.

  The sun warmed our faces as we threw victory signs to the crowd.

  But the parks remained empty.

  In February 2012, I started painting to remember.

  The previous December, as the Occupy protests dwindled in the cold, I looked at the art I’d made over the past four months. I leafed through my stacks of sketchbooks, staring at protest posters for the Bahrain uprising, now crushed, and drawings of construction workers holding protest signs in Zuccotti, now empty.

  As I flipped through those sketches, letting myself feel the loss, I longed to have made something more. I wanted to create paintings that were iconic, huge, gilded, and bright—as detailed as the scenes I’d scrawled across the walls of the Box in London, but devoted instead to the past year’s upheavals. I wanted to make them a cohesive body of work, one in which each piece would speak to the others.

  I made lists:

  2011 REVOLUTIONS: Greece, Tunisia, Spain, Occupy Wall Street, London Student Riots, Hackers.

  2011 VILLAINS: Goldman Sachs, Healthcare System, Debt

  Out of these lists grew Shell Game, my first major art show, and my love letter to 2011. Like many love letters, it was steeped in sad
ness, for the object of my affection was moving further and further away.

  At first, Shell Game frightened me. It was something I doubted I’d be able to accomplish. The murals I’d painted in London were rough, done for impact from afar. And the massive canvas I’d painted for that heiress’s Halloween party was performance art, more about the act than the image. I’d never done a large, detailed painting for its own sake—never mind nine of them, as I envisioned for Shell Game.

  The largeness of the concept scared me too. I didn’t know how to tackle subjects like the Tunisian Revolution or global debt: there was so much to learn, and there are so many ways to go wrong when you make visual symbols from the events of other people’s lives. I wondered if a style honed in burlesque clubs could convey complexity, or pain.

  I made more plans, as I always do when I’m afraid.

  First I’d spend a solid month researching the subject of each painting. I’d read every book, then seek out people who’d participated in the actual protests, interviewing them as a journalist would. But I wouldn’t just ask about facts. I wanted trivia, emotions, and visceral memories: favorite signs, scenester gossip, the times when the cops threw tear gas directly into the medical tents. In their complexity, I wanted the paintings to resemble the bits of dreams that cling to your eyelids when you wake.

  I sketched out a loose framework for the series. Each Shell Game painting would have the same composition, inspired by the artwork I’d once done for the Box: An iconic woman would stand center stage, curtains to either side, crowd below. In the paintings based on protests, this woman would represent the ideal behind the protestors’ fight. In the paintings based on crises, she would be villainy embodied. The stage curtains would represent the country where the events of the painting took place.

  At each woman’s feet was a gaggle of symbolic animals—attacking, protesting, scheming, acting out real events while surrounded by sumptuous versions of protest detritus. Dogs represented the police. Cats were rich people and politicians. Each nationality of protestors got its own animal: Tunisians were sparrows, Americans mice, Brits foxes, Spaniards rabbits, Greeks yellow street dogs. Hackers, who lived online, became bees. My research also manifested itself in visual symbols: baroque ornaments that referred to computers, barricades, and the tools of arrest.

  After choosing my symbols, I did a rough sketch, then a detailed sketch, then a two-foot-by-three-foot pen-and-ink rendition, with each line of the final painting planned in swirling detail.

  Then I started to paint.

  Borrowing from Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article of the same name, The Great American Bubble Machine was my first Shell Game painting. In this article, Taibbi described Goldman Sachs’s airy financial fraud and its devastating effects on the American economy. Drawing on Taibbi’s imagery and narrative, I inked fat cats gamboling onstage, blowing and popping bubbles. Three cats manned an elaborate bubble maker, out of which grew Capital’s bubble queen. This pale goddess held a pin in one hand, a bubble wand in the other. As a hat, she wore a vampire squid.

  As with all my large paintings, The Great American Bubble Machine was a collective effort. Melissa ordered a four-foot-by-six-foot panel from a lumber yard; Yao Xiao gessoed it; together, we sanded it smooth. I printed my working drawing on Mylar, then projected it onto the wood panel, where my mom traced my lines.

  Then I attacked the board.

  I painted eight, then ten, then fourteen hours a day. I painted in glazes, meticulously, with the compulsion of picking lice. I used zinc white to catch the shine on each cat’s eyeball. In diluted red, I outlined each sucker of the vampire squid. In the month it took to finish the painting, I hardly ate, drugging myself up and down with coffee and whiskey instead. Since I seldom left the apartment, I stopped bothering to dress. Instead, I wore Fred’s paint-stiff work shirts. Late each night, Fred carefully looked over my day’s work and gave me notes on how to improve it. I fell asleep staring at the panel, each mistake glowing bright inside my dreams.

  Then, one day, it was done. Fred told me to put down the brush or else I’d overwork it, and he was right. He took the panel off the easel and laid it on the floor. I was too short to handle a roller on such a large piece, so Fred rolled on the final glaze of gloss medium for me. As the gloss dried, the paint layers married, till they were as translucent as sugar candy. The details stood apart, yet they coexisted, coming together into a world so convincing that I wanted to walk into it through the fourth wall of the panel.

  As a final touch, Melissa gilded the stars on the stage’s American flag curtains.

  I’d researched The Great American Bubble Machine as exhaustively as any journalist, but as an object it most closely resembled a religious icon. Swirling, opulent, and surreal, it was the best piece of art I’d ever done.

  It didn’t seem right to make an art show about the way the financial elites screwed the world up, and then price the pieces so that only financial elites could afford them. Gold-encrusted artwork was magnificent, but so was populism. I wanted to fuse the two. Refusing to give anyone else creative control over the show, I decided not to pitch it to galleries in advance. Instead, in March 2012, I funded the show through Kickstarter, financing my supplies by selling rough sketches, prints, and even the fake money I’d designed.

  With these practicalities settled, I set about painting the next eight pieces.

  My next painting, The Hivemind, was a love letter to dissident hackers.

  The persecution of WikiLeaks in 2010 had politicized Anonymous, the group of pranksters, hackers, and Internet assholes whose previous experience of activism had consisted of bedeviling the Church of Scientology. Since then, they’d lent their support to a dizzying array of movements, including the Tunisian Revolution and Occupy Wall Street. The primary weapons in their arsenal were the dox (leaking personal information, or documents, about a target) and the DDoS (“distributed denial of service,” bringing down a website by flooding it with a massive number of automated hits). They wore trademark Guy Fawkes masks—concealing their identities behind a symbol of revolution lifted from a graphic novel by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore.

  Anonymous often described itself as a swarm, so I painted the hackers as bees. Light shimmered through their elaborately patterned wings. Together, the bees bashed ornate computers, spied on each other, ensnared themselves in wires, and flew around a wire goddess, who represented the network. On the painting’s curtains, I wrote an Anonymous saying in binary code: “None of us are as cruel as all of us.” Some of the bees wore Guy Fawkes masks. Others wore top hats and monocles, like those worn by the character representing LulzSec, a brilliantly ruinous hacker collective, who became folk heroes after leaking emails that revealed how the private intelligence contractor Stratfor had spied on activists on behalf of both corporations and governments.

  What the hackers didn’t know was that the Stratfor hack was a trap, planned by a snitch under the FBI’s direction. On March 5, as I added highlights for the bees representing LulzSec hackers, more than a dozen cops broke down the door of an anarchist named Jeremy Hammond and arrested him for the hack on Stratfor.

  My maniacal work on Shell Game spurred me to more intense creation. I washed a swath of board with yellow dye; then, in sepia ink, I drew a woman from the lips down, using my finest nib to draw a nightclub partying across her neck. On March 7, International Working Woman’s Day, I drew a smirking woman striking a match, wearing a shirt that said “Deeds not Words.” I sketched the murdered teenager Trayvon Martin. As I dried the watercolor with a blow dryer, the brown dye I used to paint his skin flew outward, toward the edge of the page, like an explosion.

  I drew Dante Posh, my dominatrix muse from Week in Hell. With markers, I took an actual Guy Fawkes mask and turned it femme, giving it lipstick, eyeliner, and curls. Jacob Applebaum, a hacker who volunteered for WikiLeaks, wore it at a party he threw at my apartment in late April. That night I also met Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who helped bring Edward Snowden’s st
ory to the public.

  My sketchbook pile grew. Occupy! Gazette, a newspaper put out by the literary journal N+1, ran my drawings as back covers. Sometimes, during the protests, I saw them held aloft like signs.

  One morning, during one of Laurie’s visits, we took our coffee out to the fire escape, where we sat shivering in the April chill. The London student protests had been crushed, and I wondered if Occupy would be as well—and if anything would be different when it was over.

  “Things did change,” Laurie said. “The conversation around what people deserve out of the system has changed forever. I just wish they’d been given more time.” She drank the last of her cold coffee. “I wish we’d all been given more time.”

  Down the block, Occupiers kept laying out their signs in Zuccotti Park. It didn’t matter that the police threw them away at the end of each day. They kept coming back.

  One sign, beautifully drawn, showed a riot cop swinging his baton at a dandelion. As he beat it, the seeds flew. “An idea cannot be destroyed,” it read.

  Another, scrawled across a deconstructed pizza box, put it more bluntly:

  “We’re still here, you bastards.”

  The next night, Laurie brought me to a salon hosted by The New Inquiry, where she was editor at large. The journal, founded by Rachel Rosenfelt in 2009, had come into its own during Occupy. Its writers were mostly young, their ideas lacerating, their prose more sensuous than the vast majority of criticism.

  Rachel considered a hidden bookstore called Brazenhead Books to be The New Inquiry’s spiritual home. Brazenhead was run out of a residential building in the Upper East Side. When you first entered the store, the owner Michael Seidenberg’s pipe smoke embraced you only moments before he did. Books filled the walls, floor to ceiling, and more books lay piled atop each chair. In carefully mocking voices, Malcolm Harris, Rachel, Laurie, and the rest of the New Inquiry crew read aloud from mainstream magazine articles.