The Art of Occupy: A Mini Blog Salon with Sam Hurwitt by / Sam Hurwitt

Welcome to The Art of Occupy, a mini blog salon taking place all this week. Today, two invited Bay Area guest authors discuss aspects of the art of the Occupy Movement. These authors then begin a dialogue about their ideas, which readers can continue and develop. What compels you about the Art of Occupy?

Right now, there is a lot of talk about the Occupy Movement's varied and vibrant works of art, in all media – and how these artworks have reactivated fierce debates about the possible intersections of art and political action. Today's guest authors are Theatre Bay Area staffers: Editor-in-chief Sam Hurwitt and Clay Lord, director of communications. Their blog pieces jointly address memes and meaning, and the difference between entertainment and political efficacy. Read on:

Author: SAM HURWITT

Title: PEPPER, MOSTLY

On November 18, a University of California police officer lackadaisically pepper-sprayed a group of Occupy protestors at UC Davis as the students sat peacefully in a line, so unthreatening that the officer stepped casually over them before walking up and down the line spraying these kids in the face. There were plenty of people with camera phones all around, and videos sprang up on YouTube almost immediately, spreading across Facebook, Twitter and blogs like wildfire. As shocking as the cop's casual cruelty was, almost more striking was the way the crowd encircling the police spoke in unison, echoing a single voice as a "human microphone": "We are willing to give you a brief moment of peace so you can take your weapons and our friends and go," they said, referring to the sprayed and arrested protestors. "Please do not return. We're giving you a moment of peace. You can go. We will not follow you." Now looking frightened, the police backed away and left.

Almost no sooner were the videos posted than industrious hackers revealed the name of the cop in question: Lieutenant John Pike, along with contact information for him and the UC Police Department. At first this drive to "make this guy famous" had the express goal of making sure that his actions had consequences. Pike and UC Davis police chief Annette Spicuzza were put on paid administrative leave, and there were calls for Chancellor Linda Katehi to resign.

But it's the nature of the anarchic, amorphous mass of the Occupy movement that it doesn't focus on any one goal for very long. The energy and attention of local Occupiers, for instance, have often veered away from the big banks and Wall Street fat cats that are supposedly its object to get caught up in squabbles with local civic government over camping rights, with generally supportive alternative news media that's not uncritically supportive enough, or with other segments of the 99% of have-nots who disagree over tactics. Combine this with the Internet's short-attention-span tendency to turn any viral video into a quickly replicating parody meme that's just as quickly forgotten, and for every serious Occupy-related link that may dominates your Facebook wall for an afternoon, there are half a dozen "Occupy Narnia" or "We Are the 99-cent" parodies.

So it was with John Pike. The Pepper Spray Cop quickly became the flavor of the minute, as straight photos of him with added captions ("Don't Mind Me. Just Watering My Hippies") gave way to "Casually Pepper Spray Everything," a meme of inserting Pike into every famous painting or historical image that Photoshop-wielding wags could think of: Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Leonardo's The Last Supper, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Munch's The Scream, the Ali-Liston fight, Beyonce's "Single Ladies" video, The Wizard of Oz, Picasso's Guernica, the JFK and Lincoln assassinations, the Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon LP covers, and on and on and on. In the blink of an Internet, the dynamic went from "let's make this guy famous" to "this guy is famous, and that's hilarious." Pike became the Antoine Dodson or Double Rainbow Guy of this November.

The potential downside of all this hilarity is that turning Pike into a joke may turn him into just a joke, minimizing the seriousness of his torture of unarmed, peaceful protestors. Certainly the shock of the image has long since worn off by the time he's turned into a Christmas sweater pattern. The last thing anybody wants is for Pike's newfound notoriety to become something that this thug could benefit from in any way. After all, Dodson has tried hard to capitalize on his sudden Web superstardom after other people turned his unintentionally hilarious newscast testimony about a home intruder into an Autotune hit. That's fine for a guy who's just trying to protect his family—less so for a police officer who thinks nothing of brutalizing inert students.

It's fine to make Pike a dramatic chipmunk, as long you don't make him a John David Stutts. One of Saturday Night Live's shining moments was a sharply satirical multi-part 1983 sketch about the assassination of The Little Rascals' "Buckwheat" character, in which a complaint on a news program about how irresponsible it is to turn killers into "instant celebrities" is immediately followed by the newscasters immediately making Buckwheat's killer Stutts a household name, despite being completely unknown mere minutes ago. When the killer himself is assassinated, à la Lee Harvey Oswald, Joe Piscopo's Ted Koppel says, "And so two famous men lie dead: Buckwheat and John David Stutts."

Sure, make Pike notorious. By all means, make his name and face known so that's harder to quietly put him back on the job once all the fuss has blown over and everyone's moved on, not to the next viral video but the umpteenth one after that. Hold him and everyone up and down the chain of command responsible for this one of many police abuses in response to the protests, by no means the worst of them but certainly among the best documented. Make sure that this cavalier use of pepper spray calls into question the lack of regulation by law enforcement that classifies it not as a weapon (of torture, no less) but a "compliance tool." Push for a change of policy. Turning Pike's image into an icon of shame and ridicule may help with that. But if that guy gets his own reality show out of the deal, a Fox News commentator gig or even his own Cafepress store, all those Tumblrs of John Pike images may not look quite so funny anymore.

To read the companion piece in this salon, click here.

Sam Hurwitt is editor-in-chief for Theatre Bay Area. He is also the author of The Idiolect, a blog about theater, movies, comics, media and the decline and fall of Western civilization.

The views represented in this Chatterbox Art & Opinion post are those of the individual author, and do not necessarily represent the views of Theatre Bay Area or its staff.