in Discordia: Six Nights in Crisis Athens by Laurie Penny and Molly Crabapple (Vintage Digital, 2012)
Yiannis and Laurie were journalists, but as an artist I saw things they missed. While we walked from interview to interview, I lagged after them, scribbling furiously. In front of the old Parliament building, I lingered at the statue of General Theodoros Kolokotronis, a hero of the nineteenth-century War of Greek Independence. At the base of the statue, someone had spray-painted the words “Fuck Heroes—Fight Now.” I drew it as quickly as I could, before I was hurried along by that tiny, punk Laurie and long, slouching, Yiannis.
in Discordia: Six Nights in Crisis Athens by Laurie Penny and Molly Crabapple (Vintage Digital, 2012)
We dragged ourselves through the baking concrete of the working-class neighborhood Neos Kosmos to the offices of Eleftherotypia, a leftist newspaper. Once the second-best-selling newspaper in Greece, Eleftherotypia had filed for bankruptcy in 2011. Refusing to give up, the workers took over the paper. When we walked into the building, the paper’s eight hundred employees had not been paid for nearly a year, and they were living off donations from workers’ groups. Still, they kept producing the newspaper.
Under a halo of cigarette smoke, Eleftherotypia’s journalists banged out their copy. The Athens summer could liquefy your eyeballs, but the paper had no money for air conditioning. Yiannis introduced us. An older man offered us plastic cups of raki, then led us to the boss’s former office.
Laurie interviewed, Yiannis translated, I drew. Laurie asked about protest, financial corruption, the Golden Dawn. While she spoke, I sketched the paper’s financial editor—her blond curls and her eyes drooping with cynical glamour. Focused as I was on the lines, I could barely follow her rapid-fire tirades about who was fucking up this fucking country, but she sounded devastatingly smart. Once I finished her face, I drew Laurie’s furrowed little brow, the tilt of her head as she leaned forward to listen.
Artists are the dorks in the corner; drawing gives us an excuse to stare. As I made those pictures, I admired Eleftherotypia’s journalists with a ferocious ache. These were middle-aged professionals, broke, squatting in a sweltering office tower. They were investigative journalists, trying to expose bastards while their country collapsed around them.
After we finished the interviews, Laurie ran off to a protest in Nicaea, where the Golden Dawn had been harassing local Pakistani shopkeepers, advising them to skip town or risk seeing their stores burned. The Pakistani community staged a demonstration in response, proudly holding banners reading “Fascism, Never Again.” I followed her online as she tweeted about the fascists, the police’s refusal to protect the protesters, the Golden Dawn’s attack, and finally a picture of blood, red and sticky, on the streets.
Meanwhile, I was sitting at Radio Bubble, a café and anarchist radio station that broadcast English-language news from Greece. In the dark bar, I did my first interviews as a journalist, holding up a recorder as I’d seen Laurie do, to capture the mocking voices over the music. One protestor I interviewed told me that he’d met his wife in Syntagma. Mousi looked like every respectable white-collar professional, except for a scar across one cheek, which he’d gotten in the course of saving a South Asian street vendor from a Golden Dawn attack. He asked me not to use his real name or draw his face. The fascists were still looking for him.
On our last night in Athens, Yiannis led Laurie and me through the twisted alleys of Monastiraki, past walls covered with the Golden Dawn’s swastika manqué, to a bar called Cantina Social, whose owner had hired him to DJ. The bar’s makeshift garden was lit by candlelight and guarded by a dog large as Cerberus. Yiannis, half drunk already, stood in the DJ booth. Laurie and I kicked off our shoes. We danced until the cement cut our feet. The exhaustion and alcohol made the music swell until it encompassed everything. We laughed and threw back whiskey and danced some more.
We drank so much that hot night, in this city that was so unlike New York or London yet torn apart by the same economic forces. I didn’t then understand Greece’s resilience; I couldn’t know that in two years the Golden Dawn’s leader would be in prison, and the leftist coalition Syriza would be in charge, only to be defeated in turn. I just knew that, in that moment, the powers that be had won—both in the United States and here in Greece, where the stakes were higher.
I looked up, through the trees, into the hazy sky. No time feels as precious as the moment you think things will break.
I flew home.
The details I’d struggled for as I was sketching Syntagma Athena now flew from my pen. My central figure would be a battered classical sculpture of Athena, covered in the Exarcheia graffiti I’d copied down. At her feet, a thousand Loukanikos dogs battled it out with gas-masked riot cops. A gas mask dangled from Athena’s finger; over her eyes she wore a coating of Maalox, the white antacid used to counteract tear gas.
My art for Discordia hit me just as hard. Sometimes you chase the muse, and sometimes she shows up at your doorway wearing black stockings and ties you to the bed. Using watercolor paper, I tried to capture the sticky heat of Eleftherotypia’s pressroom. In diluted ink, I sketched the clouds of smoke, under which the glamorous financial editor stared off into the distance. I gouged the paper with my pen to capture the violent stillness of the now-empty Syntagma. With clouds of gray wash, I concealed the faces of Greek hipsters kissing in front of the Parthenon. I used a micron to draw rows of riot cops, faces hidden behind gas masks, their bodies as steroid-swollen as ticks.
As I illustrated Discordia, I found that drawings, like photojournalism, could distill the essential. Unlike photography, though, visual art has no pretense of objectivity. It is joyfully, defiantly subjective. Its truth is individual. Picasso’s Guernica doesn’t explain what a body looks like after a carpet bombing, but it does show the agony of war. When I drew, I could see nothing more clearly than the space between my art and its subject. My brush drawing of Yiannis was not the real Yiannis, cackling at Laurie until his half-ruined glasses fell off. That laugh was gone; my page bore only an approximation of his mouth’s outline.
My final Discordia drawing was an homage to The Problem We All Live With, Norman Rockwell’s painting of Ruby Bridges, the young black girl who in 1964 desegregated an all-white school in New Orleans. In Rockwell’s painting, Ruby walks proudly in her starched white dress, guarded by two US marshals. She looks past the tomatoes thrown in her direction, past the racist slur painted on the wall behind her.
In Discordia, my Ruby Bridges was a young Pakistani boy at that antifascist march in Nicaea. He walks between two men gripping their anti-Nazi placards by the handles, like clubs, and he holds his own small placard in his small, determined fist. Behind him, the Golden Dawn had spray-painted their insignia. Instead of tomatoes, the street is stained with blood.
As we were working on Discordia, Laurie and I felt like we were chasing ghosts. The Syntagma protests lay dead by the time we arrived in Athens. On Gchat, she asked me if I felt we’d gone too late.
“I’m sad the year is over,” I told her. “I never wanted that fucking year to end, but it had to. Time has to pass. And you have to look into what comes next, after ecstasy, with courage and clear eyes and a taste for infinite hard work.”
A pause. Then Laurie’s response: “I WANT 2011 BACK.”
“Me too,” I answered.
When Laurie handed in the manuscript for Discordia, she closed it with me saying those words, and a line from the Bible: “The summer is over and we are not yet saved.”
Since June, we’d been sniping at each other, supposedly over work, but really because of jealousy. We both wanted to be the “Best Girl.” We had both fought so hard for our places in the world, and we were threatened by the same talent we loved in each other. We were both feminists, but still we’d absorbed patriarchy’s lie that there’s room for only one woman to win.
When I read Laurie’s manuscript, her words were so right that I forgave her every fight and petty jealousy and mo
ment of competition. Laurie’s words seduced me, and through them the idea of writing seduced me too. I wanted to whisper my thoughts silently into someone else’s mind. I looked up at my painting, Syntagma Athena. It couldn’t speak, only gesture. In that moment, I hated the muteness of art.
On September 18, 2012, the day after I was arrested, I started writing for real.
I wrote an essay about my arrest out of anger. Not anger for myself, though I still involuntarily shook when I thought about sitting alone in that cell. It was for all the arrests in New York—for weed, or jaywalking, or just because someone was black and standing outside. I typed fast, in a hot jag of rage. The first draft made no sense, but once I started cutting away at the sludge, I found insight and argument—even wordplay—there.
Laurie edited my pages as I wrote. We worked until dawn. She helped me so much, slicing extraneous words until my intention hit the way I wanted. Art was broad, writing specific, but she teased out the commonality between them, and as the sun rose I had something I wanted other humans to read.
Five days later, CNN ran my essay, accompanied by my drawings of my jail cell.
After that, an editor at Vice asked me to write something about beauty. I spent a month thinking it through, then responded with a long essay, “The World of a Professional Naked Girl.” As I wrote, I remembered the words that ran through my mind while I smeared myself with jam for a lecherous dentist’s camera. My years of posing were years of silence, but many of those snarky pebbles remained lodged in my brain, and now I put them into a gem tumbler until they emerged shiny enough to show. Remembering Laurie’s example, I sliced, burned, eviscerated. I murdered my darlings, then posted their heads on pikes at the gates of town as a warning to future interlopers. Pressing delete soothed me. Writing for Twitter further taught me to cut down excess verbiage. I tried to make sentences taut as garrotes.
When the story of my naked model past went live on Vice.com, hundreds of people contacted me. Because I’d written about my life, they wrote to me about theirs, with an intimacy that humbled me. Young women especially emailed me, asking for advice, describing depressions, rapes, and abusive boyfriends. I wrote back to every one.
The essay was popular enough that Vice gave me a column. In November, they sent me to Madrid to cover a general strike that Spanish unions had called to protest against austerity. In a week, I interviewed countless Spaniards, many of whom had grown disillusioned with the country’s antiausterity movement for the same reasons that New Yorkers grew disillusioned with Occupy. With the help of local activists, I visited squats, occupied hospitals, and an Andalusian farm that had been seized by anarchists.
I ran after demonstrations on nights that smelled like fireworks and spray paint, and I watched thousands of masked students smash up banks with their hands. I heard the pop of rubber bullets for the first time in Madrid’s Plaza Real, as police officers chased mocking teenagers. Surrounded by militant, often violent protesters, I felt safe from the cops in a way I hadn’t in New York since Occupy. Protesters had each other’s backs, and they had mine as well. During the day of the general strike, the journalist Dan Hancox hoisted me up on a lamppost. From up high, I could see the dancing of hundreds of thousands of marchers. The streets belonged to them.
I wrote two reports for Vice, accompanying them with drawings of smashed ATMs and occupied theaters based on my iPhone photos. I made errors, and waxed vaingloriously romantic, but even my failures were getting better. Inspired by what I’d seen, I completed my eighth Shell Game painting, Indignada. The central woman’s body became a baroque Madrid building, hung with banners from the Spanish Civil War.
Writing became a joyful compulsion—and a way to clarify my own thoughts. In an essay for the Paris Review, I used the stories of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to explain how men were expected to do big art, about the wide world, while women were confined to work about sex, pain, and themselves. In Jacobin, a socialist journal, I tried to explain what Occupy had given my work, as well as the kinship I felt with construction workers.
I wrote about my abortion, and about how much I had hated being a child.
In blank tones I put painful bits of my past on the computer screen. As I wrote, these memories became external to me. They were art now, less a burden than a product. They couldn’t hurt me anymore.
Still, I was always a visual artist first. I marked the passage of time by the number of Shell Game paintings I had finished. Each piece took six weeks. Soon a stack of completed panels was piled up by our door, creating a wall that guests knocked into each time they entered. Each weighed fifty pounds. Some nights, I begged Fred to haul out all the finished art so I could see them at once. I lay on the floor and stared up at the paintings, ran my fingertips over their glossy surfaces, traced the curls of my icons’ hair.
Each day I painted until my eyes blurred. I worked naked, with slashes of red paint on my forehead, green on my breasts, burnt sienna on my belly and feet. I didn’t bother to wash off. The paint would just get on me again.
When I started Shell Game, I was painting the news, but as the months passed, news became history. Protesters on the street turned into dissidents in cells. The arrest of the LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond was followed in September 2012 by that of Barrett Brown, a journalist who worked closely with Anonymous. Prosecutors threatened him with a hundred years in prison for posting a link related to Stratfor.
The news wasn’t much better abroad. Katia, the migrant-rights activist we’d met in Athens, posted videos on Facebook that showed Golden Dawn members rampaging through a hospital, dragging out patients who they suspected were immigrants. In Egypt, soccer hooligans held the frontline of the 2011 revolution, but in February 2012, seventy-two fans died in the Port Said stadium in a riot many deemed a police massacre.
While I was painting Degage, my homage to the Tunisian revolution, gunmen shot leftist politician Chokri Belaïd in the street. I listened to the news as I shaded the eyes of Degage’s central woman, an icon for a revolution whose future seemed more fragile than ever.
As the news grew grimmer, the paintings began to take on an irony. Large projects often made me sad, but as I painted Shell Game, the scale of the work and the scale of events conspired to send me into a black depression.
What was the point of art, in a world so full of hell?
Most nights, I drank myself to sleep.
Fred and I worked all day, but we bracketed those days with each other. Each morning I woke up on the canopy bed. Fred’s naked body was big and warm against mine. I kissed down his hair-covered chest. He’d grab me, pin me down, and push himself into me. Afterward, he fell back to sleep. I staggered over to the kitchen, made espresso, then faced my painting.
Each night, I poured two shots of whiskey, one for me and one for Fred. Sometimes we shared a cigar. Then we fell into bed, and afterward he would go back to work. I slept, the light above his drafting table glowing against my eyelids.
On March 22, 2013, I finished painting Shell Game.
The final piece was a five-foot-wide wheel of fortune. With tiny brushes, I rendered a dozen nasty fates that could befall the spinner. When I finished the last slice of wheel, I lay on the rug. Fred bought me a glass of champagne. Then we hauled out all the paintings and I walked between them, from one end of the apartment to the other, letting my hands trail over the characters. I stared into the women’s eyes, then pressed my cheek to their cold polished faces. I’d made them, but now they were their own beings, as independent as children. I was so happy that I sat on the floor and cried.
For the first two weeks of April 2013, Shell Game took over Smart Clothes Gallery, a small storefront in the Lower East Side.
Fred and his friend Richard Clark framed the paintings, and Melissa arranged for professional art handlers to hang them. She rented a claw-foot bathtub, then filled it with money I’d designed—hundreds of green bills graven with cats and tentacles. On April 7, the day before the show, we watched art handlers mount the
last piece on the wall. It was the first time I’d seen Shell Game as it was meant to be seen: each painting speaking to the others, unified by their shared language, bright, gilded, swarming with detail, reminiscent of old political cartoons yet giant, surrealist, and new.
The exhaustion that had been weighing on me drained away, replaced by gold-leafed celebration. We needed joy, even as the police smashed all we’d built. I looked at the paintings and saw monuments to two years of friendship. I remembered Melissa gilding the stars, Quinn Norton advising me on how to portray hackers, Fred cutting the frames, Sarah Jaffe posing next to Our Lady of Liberty Park while patiently explaining the mechanics of debt bubbles so I could draw them right. I remembered Laurie editing my work, and Paul Mason telling me to go to Exarcheia. And I remembered John Leavitt, and all the nights we’d spent a decade ago dreaming up impossible schemes—schemes like this one.
I stood in the center of the room, ignoring both Melissa and the gallery owners, filled with gratitude. I was so lucky to be alive, in this city, with these friends, in this world.
We launched Shell Game with three nights of openings. The first was for my friends. The second was for Kickstarter backers. The third was for everyone.
I’ve been to many art shows, and most are dull—bad wine in a white cube, attendees chatting according to a strict social hierarchy while only occasionally pretending to look at the art.
I didn’t want that. I wanted my worlds to blend together, as they had during those nights on the fire escape with Tash and Stoya.
Hundreds of people came: Walmart labor organizers, John Waters, gold-haired models, the woman who had pretended to be J. T. LeRoy, $pread writers, a hacker who’d worked with LulzSec, an Occupy Sandy activist with a bright blue beard. Old ladies grabbed my arm and told me I’d done good.
To keep me company during my long nights working on Shell Game, Kim Boekbinder had written a song for me. I asked her to perform it on opening night. Wearing black silk, her hair teased into a magenta cloud, Kim sang:
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