The Importance Of Wielding A Pen In The Political Arena

Jennifer Caban has a quaint handle in Molly Crabapple — but it's deceptive. The cult American artist, journalist and activist has covered everything from Guantanamo Bay's military commissions to the Syrian refugee crisis to the US justice system. Now she's headed to Australia for the first time to speak - and speak out - at the Melbourne Writers Festival and Sydney's Festival Of Dangerous Ideas (FODI).

Whether writing or sketching, Caban is a fearless correspondent. However, as contributing editor to Vice, Caban felt most unnerved when in 2014 she "confronted" Donald Trump in the United Arab Emirates — "a police state" with no free press — about conditions for those migrant workers constructing Dubai's Trump International Golf Course. "I kind of blagged my way into the press conference," Caban tells, speaking at high speed. "Looking back on it in retrospect, and looking at [the] incredible, obscene violence that journalists and protestors and just people of colour are subjected to at his rallies — it seems slightly trivial in retrospect to talk about this — but I think that I was probably more intimidated to publicly challenge someone at an event in Dubai, particularly a powerful person like him, than anything else I have done." Caban has since documented the Republican National Convention in Ohio, where Trump was formally endorsed as Presidential contender, for The Daily Beast. "It's horrifying — it's the rise of a genuinely fascist candidate."

"I was protesting the Iraq War very, very extensively when I was a teenager." 

Caban was born in New York to a Jewish illustrator mother and academic Puerto Rican father. After her parents divorced, she initially lived with Mum. Rebelliously imaginative, Caban troubled school teachers. Diagnosed (ludicrously!) with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), she was deemed "at-risk".

At 17, Caban went backpacking abroad. On her return, she attended art school only to drop out. Instead, while pursuing her creative dreams, she worked as a life (and fetish) model and burlesque performer. Caban was then appointed house artist at Manhattan nightclub The Box. In 2005 she launched Dr Sketchy's Anti-Art School, a cabaret-inspired alternative to staid drawing classes, in a Brooklyn bar. It took off, with the first of many international chapters starting in Melbourne. Though no longer involved, Caban feels "honoured" at its impact.

It's often suggested that, despite her subversive art practice, Caban experienced a political awakening amid the Occupy Wall Street movement. She made now-iconic protest posters - one subsequently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. In fact, Caban was "always" politically engaged, her dad a Marxist. "I was protesting the Iraq War very, very extensively when I was a teenager." Still, Occupy did give her a focus. "While there was what I saw as political content in my work, I kept it less overt," Caban says. "I sort of embedded it into the work, as opposed to making it explicit. Then, when Occupy happened, it just seemed incumbent on people to take sides - and I wanted to do that in my artwork."

Last December Caban, 32, published an illustrated memoir, Drawing Blood - a coming-of-age story set against social flux. She recalls the two-year writing process as "brutal". Caban scrupulously "fact-checked" it — "to make sure that I wasn't spinning some self-serving narrative." "I think anyone who writes a memoir who's honest with themselves will realise that they were an ass and a fool a lot more often than they thought they were." She is currently preparing another title, Brothers Of The Gun, with her Syrian journalist friend Marwan Hisham. "He's one of the sharpest and most sarcastic and the greatest people I know."

Inherently subcultural, Caban largely operates outside of the glittery gallery world. But even political artists like Banksy have found their work inevitably co-opted, and commodified, by the very privileged people they critique. Caban is resigned. "I think that the more important question is, How can you keep true?" she says. "It's not just, 'How can I avoid big money things influencing my thing?' It's just also that, as I get more successful, how do I avoid slipping into the sort of soft and comfy biases and hypocrisies that so many people do?" Indeed, Caban is "compelled" to declare that she was "really disturbed" to learn that Major General Jim Molan - "special envoy" for the Abbott Government's contentious Operation Sovereign Borders asylum-seeker policy - is on the board of The Ethics Centre, which co-presents FODI. (The Ethics Centre defends such controversial appointments on its site.) Nonetheless, Caban intends to catch FODI guest Henry Rollins, former Black Flag frontman. "I'm a huge fan of Henry Rollins. I think he's so cool. I've never met him before. I'm going to his session and I'm going to be a dorky fangirl because Henry Rollins is amazing."