Eric Drooker Quotes

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

Eric Drooker

Art, Way, Art Is

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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I find it very difficult to be funny, it's much easier to do tragedy than it is to do comedy.

Eric Drooker

Tragedy, Comedy, Easier

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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.

Eric Drooker

Art, Hurt, Way

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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.

Eric Drooker

Art, Real, Thinking

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If you make a street poster and literally paste it on the street in a city like New York, where it's such a mixed population and so densely populated, and it stays up for a full week and doesn't get covered up by something else or pulled down, you will have fifty thousand people who will have seen it. It will be the poorest of the poor - some homeless man who lives on the street will see it and probably appreciate it, or some businessman or landlord will see it. Everyone will see it. And whether or not they even realize that they saw it, on some level it's affecting their consciousness.

Eric Drooker

New York, Men, Covered Up

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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The client isn't quite satisfied and then the prostitute is always unsatisfied but is doing it just to make ends meet. And if you're doing fine art, if you're doing it for a gallery or a museum, it's so sterilized. It's such an antiseptic environment.

Eric Drooker

Art, Museums, Clients

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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Most visual artists, just like most writers, tend to be solitary. While they're doing the art, that is. They may have a crazy orgy that morning, but at a certain point they kick everybody out, and say: "Come, go home. Yeah, I had a great time too." And then you're alone again, and then you're freshly inspired and energized.

Eric Drooker

Art, Morning, Crazy

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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The poster art over the years, art with social critique in it, has always been on class war theme. It's been trying to make that point - that we are larger than they are. They may have guns and pepper spray and helicopters and F16s and the whole U.S. military on their side, but when it comes down to it, we still have the numbers.

Eric Drooker

Art, Military, War

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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Artists always live in the cracks anyway, whatever culture they're in. They're usually accustomed to not having much money, to kind of roughing it.

Eric Drooker

Artist, Cracks, Culture

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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In the U.S., ironically, people work longer hours in the U.S. than they do in Europe or in any other industrialized country. They seem utterly oblivious to May Day, don't really know what it is - our own history.

Eric Drooker

Country, Europe, People

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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.

Eric Drooker

Art, Real, Fall

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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.

Eric Drooker

Two, People, Tragedy

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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.

Eric Drooker

Running, Art, Sex

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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%.

Eric Drooker

War, Men, Cop

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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We had collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on one of his last projects just before he died in the spring of '97, a book called Illuminated Poems - it was Allen's poems and songs and I illustrated them. Or, I illuminated them with paintings and drawings that bounced off of them. You want the picture to relate to the text without it slavishly regurgitating it or merely illustrating it, because that's redundant. You want to show another angle of what the text is saying.

Eric Drooker

Song, Spring, Book

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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Illustrators are usually illustrating something big or commercial if not outright advertising. It's a form of prostitution, but that's cool because we don't have any moral hang-up about it.

Eric Drooker

Moral, Advertising, Form

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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Art makes people do a double take and then, if they're looking at the picture, maybe they'll read the text under it that says, "Come to Union Square, For Anti-War Meeting Friday." I've been operating that way ever since - that art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself. In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.

Eric Drooker

Friday, Art, School

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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What's that Regina Spektor song? Museums are like mausoleums. Having your work in a museum is something we as artists aspire to, but I don't think that's something we need to worry about while we're alive. Typically your work will end up in a museum after you're dead. And maybe that's the function of a museum. It's an archive of your work after you're dead. But while we're alive, I like to see it in places where it's connected to day-to-day life and making a difference.

Eric Drooker

Song, Artist, Thinking

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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When I was in my early twenties I was doing tenant organizing - rent strikes, specifically - in my building. I think that was how I started doing poster art. It was something very concrete.

Eric Drooker

Art, Thinking, Twenties

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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I think for an artist there are so many things to make pictures of now, that everyone else may be suffering, but at least artists will just be stimulated by it all.

Eric Drooker

Artist, Thinking, Suffering

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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If I do a picture, I want the audience to be the people I was just packed against on the subway or on the street, walking on Fourteenth Street. I don't want it to be some narrow public that I myself feel alienated from.

Eric Drooker

People, Want, Subway

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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I'm accustomed to just working by myself, alone in the room and cranking up the music and just working and getting all into an obsessive state where I'm focused on this thing, and it's the one thing that I feel like I may have a little bit of control over in my life.

Eric Drooker

May, Littles, Rooms

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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There's the fact that animation is extremely time-consuming, tedious, labor-intensive, and therefore, extremely expensive as an art form to really do it right, to really do full animation.

Eric Drooker

Art, Facts, Form

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

Eric Drooker

Eight, People, Chicago

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.

Eric Drooker

Art, School, Sake

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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Latest quotes from interviews

"The poster art over the years, art with social critique in it, has always been on class war theme. It's been trying to make that point - that we are larger than they are. They may have guns and pepper spray and helicopters and F16s and the whole U.S. military on their side, but when it comes down to it, we still have the numbers."

- Eric Drooker,

www.guernicamag.com, added Nov 14, 2017

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