Betty Tompkins at Mitchell Algus

Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Steven Vincent

It was Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who in 1964 articulated this famous definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." One wonders what the good judge would have made of painter Betty Tompkins's salacious exhibition of seven acrylics on canvas and four pencil-on-paper drawings that depict sexual acts, erect penises, exposed vaginas and coitus continuous with an explicitness one associates more with old 42nd Street than with Chelsea. The result--at least in the typically politically correct, pristine environs of an art gallery--was rather startling.

For example, visitors to the gallery immediately confronted Blowjob Painting #1 (all works 2004), a highly graphic depiction of a pair of luscious lips and a tongue fellating the tip of a large penis. One proceeded to encounter three works successively and matter-of-factly titled Fuck Painting #10, #11 and #12, which offered peep show-worthy penetration shots. For more elevated tastes, Tompkins included Cunt Painting #3, a graceful sepia and white rendering of a vagina, and Fuck Grid #16, a delicately wrought pencil drawing of a simultaneous act of vaginal and anal sex.

Arousing? For this critic at least, yes. Mais est-ce que c'est l'art? I'll venture a second yes, if for no other reason than the wit and awareness with which Tompkins produced her work. After first sketching an outline based on commercial porn photographs, she defined the contours of her subjects' groins, orifices and appendages by marking the canvas with tiny words like "blow job," "suck," "kiss," "fuck." What might seem a gimmicky device actually gave the images a gritty, almost totemic quality, which, along with Tompkins's judicious use of incarnadine hues to represent flesh, captured the essentially turgid, repetitious and artificial language of pornography. Like a musician strumming a one-string guitar, Tompkins managed to tease a thin strand of art from smut--or perhaps vice versa.

More often than not, when an artist attempts to depict sex, the result is embarrassingly unerotic, like watching your parents trying to dance to rock music. It may be a dubious achievement, but Tompkins, who first created X-rated art over 35 years ago, got inside, so to speak, pornography, infusing her V-chip-activating pictures with a hetero-masculine mindset that mingles an obsession with prowess, size and repetition with a not-so-subtle fear of ridicule and performance failure.