Rutgers, New Brunswick, New Jersey: The Review, October 14, 2003
"Anything Worth Doing Eventually Gets Crusty" Erika Lopez's Hard Times
"We made love to everything, and afterwards we drank sherry and farted in the silk sheets."
Once upon a time, Erika Lopez was on her way up. After doing some time in art school, she made the dangerous decision to write books, mixing stories of road-trips and revenge with her signature visual mayhem. She decided to write books because she loved the way they looked on a shelf or in someone's hands: so cute and complete, the total package. Crazed rubber stamp and clip art complemented tales that rang so true and hilarious that you couldn't put them down...and when you did, it was only to pick them up again to use as graphics source-books for countless flyers and zines. When the illustrious Ms. Lopez came to Rutgers last year with an early version of her one-woman show Nothing Left but the Smell: A Republican on Welfare, Lauren and I hesitated only a moment before showing her some of those flyers. Her eyes lit up as she told us how much she liked them, and how she encouraged people to use, rip off, or otherwise appropriate her work. In fact, she continued, she had ripped off a bunch of rubber stamp clip art herself.
"Anyone who wants to be a writer should sit down at a typewriter, pick up a fork and gouge their eyes out."
Too many messed up publicity dates can make a girl mighty pissed off, and Erika was sick and tired of dealing with the bullshit that came along with promoting the snazzy hardback edition of her fourth book, Hoochie Mama: The Other White Meat. Writing hadn't turned out to be quite the cute, complete package she planned on, because when you publish you have to deal with nasty people like editors and publicists. Erika wanted out of the big time. After saying what was undoubtedly a carefully enunciated "fuck you" to Simon & Schuster in or around 2001, Lopez posted an exuberantly furious tantrum on her website asking people not to buy her book in stores: "In fact, it's all I can do to NOT suggest that when you're in bookstores, re-shelve it BACKWARDS in the U.S. HISTORY and PRE-NATAL sections so that NO ONE will EVER even have a chance of finding it....I'd love it if you'd show up at a few of the readings I've already set up, buy a few books if you want, but I urge you to basically go to the library. Save your money and go buy groceries."
With this questionably effective promotional strategy, Lady Lopez realized that she may have dug herself into an even deeper hole. But had she shot herself in the foot? "Nah. I have so many holes already, as they heal up, I've gotta shoot some more just to recognize myself." So she started the most DIY of enterprises: a one-woman show complete with the kind of merchandising that would make the most die-hard capitalist proud. She's got t-shirts, posters, stickers, hand-painted beer glasses (just $10 a pop!), and her new mini-line of welfare cosmetics, with crack-ho lip balm and brother-can-you-spare-a-dime soap (with an actual dime embedded in it). There's also welfare body mist which smells just like a freshly mown lawn: "the scent of the middle class." And all available from the Art-Chick Sweatshop section of her website.
"A good welfare queen should have just enough cellulite to be interesting."
Nothing Left but the Smell was born out of Erika's experience waiting in the welfare line, and apparently, "writing a book and getting it published was easier than going on welfare." Like any good writer or artist, Lopez used hard times as inspiration for her work, scribbling crib notes to twisted fairy tales in the margins of her food stamp application. The show weaves all these tales together into one long and hilarious rant, peppered with unsettling descriptions and observations to make you cringe and laugh out loud.
The book version of the show has not and will not be released commercially. It's what you might call an "artist's book," if things by that name weren't usually so tidy about their arty-ness. Erika makes no such attempt or pretense at restraint. She's made 200 of her books, each different ("ingredients...some or all: copper spiral; country-mad red or brown pages; baked Fimo breasts painted in acrylic / nail polish; bottle cap cameo on thread, covering painted acrylic balsa wood title; often in hand-dyed and ironed drawstring muslin bag with carved block print"), and the one she performs from is oversize like those children's books your kindergarten teacher used to read to the class, but covered in animal-print fabric. With this "art-chick book" and the photocopied Welfare Coloring Book that she hands out to her audience, it seems Lopez really has no need for fancy or formalized publishing. She is her own best publisher and promoter, and since she does it all, she has it all.
"I hope this show doesn't cause anyone to commit suicide."
Prowling in front of the cozy fireplace in the NJC Lounge last Monday night, Erika seemed right at home: "I feel like Alistair Cook here, with the fire." It was just like one of those presidential fireside chats, but I'm pretty sure Roosevelt never paused, stuck his hand down an oversized black shirt, and said, "I'm gonna fix my tits, 'cause this bra sucks." Sure the show was about welfare, but when questioned after the performance as to whether she was angered by media and government portrayals of welfare queens, Erika looked a little bewildered. "Welfare is tough, but I'm also in a very DIY mode right now." For some, hard times are a welcome perversion of the American dream, and "there's something kinda' cool and almost religious about losing everything."
Maybe the greatest thing about an Erika Lopez diatribe (in whatever form) is that the obvious is rarely stated. A show about welfare is clearly a show about politics, but the point of this show is not to provide you with deep, well-informed opinions about the welfare state, or make you fuming mad at the government who lovingly nurtures these systems. The goal is not to make you dig deep in your college-kid pockets to contribute to any kind of poverty relief other than Erika's own. Even the whole "Republican on Welfare" gag from the show's title barely a footnote (we eventually learn that Erika is not a Republican, she "just has the rabid self-entitlement of one"). The politics are quietly in the mix, but the hold the whole thing together.
"Now you realize: the world is everyone else's oyster, but who cares? Having an oyster is a lot of work."
When you're on welfare and pushing your latest art project in an attempt to pay the rent, what it means to "have it all" obviously require some redefinition. Erika's multiple artistic ventures are living proof that there is more than one way to define ambition, and that success in America is not so much a myth as a misnomer. She's traveling around, sleeping on people's floors, and spreading her gospel like butter onto an audience who soaks it up like it's FDA approved. Speaking her novels to a captive (and sometimes squirming) group of people for an hour is Erika's new fetish, and damned if she doesn't love every one of her seventeen fans to death.
--Eryn Loeb
Photos by Jean Sompayrac (click for larger view)
FULL script
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Erika Lopez P.O. Box 410011 / San Francisco, CA 94141