Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly.

Eric Drooker

Categorized in : Ifs Political Abstract

We used to call the 1% the ruling class, but America's never felt comfortable using that terminology. It was taboo to talk about class war. Americans are okay talking about it like this; everyone wants to be part of the 99%, even the cops are like, "No, no, man. I'm part of the 99% too." No one wants to be part of the 1%.

Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, "the question should be, what isn't political? Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly." I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.

Working people are working even longer hours, even though we won the eight-hour workday at the Haymarket General Strike in Chicago.

eight chicago people

There's so much tragedy in people that we see every day that we don't have to make anything up. We don't have to invent anything. There are two items on the menu: comedy and tragedy.

tragedy two people

We all know what tragedy is. "Yes, I'd rather not have any more tragedy, please. I'll have comedy, please." Comedy, in the Greek sense, only means that it has a happy ending.

tragedy greek mean

Doing art that has a happy ending, that doesn't seem really corny, is extremely difficult to pull off convincingly.

corny happy-endings art

When I was younger, when I was a teenager, the work was more satirical and funny and cartoony. And part of it was chops - if you have a more limited repertoire of stick figures and cartoon characters, they lend themselves more to humor than to tragedy.

teenager tragedy character

By the time I was in my early-twenties and was living there on the Lower East Side, I was so surrounded by tragedy that I think that inspired me to try to reflect it in the artwork.

tragedy trying thinking

As I developed as an artist and studied art history, I noticed that all the great works were dealing with the human condition. [Art] had humor in it. It had sex in it. But it also had sorrow running through it.

running sex art

Art is one of the few ways we have of dealing with things that fr... by Eric Drooker

Art is one of the few ways we have of dealing with things that frighten or anger us.

Art is one of the few places where you can put it in a constructive way where it won't burn you up inside or hurt anyone.

People don't work in factories, [they aren't] big muscular guys. The working class is flabby because they're sitting in front of a computer all day, but it's still their labor being extracted.

guy class people

With what we've been taught is the proper role of art, which is that you want to have it very neatly matted and framed and put on a white wall in some room where only a certain class of people are going to go in.

wall people art