Sticking it: beginning with the controversial "Supercock" drawings she did at Yale during the Vietnam War, Judith Bernstein has sustained a bold feminist critique of masculinity fetishized into militarism

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Judith Bernstein's recent show at Mitchell Algus Gallery, a kind of mini-retrospective titled "Signature and Phallic Drawings: 1966-2008," leaves us impatient for a fuller treatment of her career, as well as a robust presentation of her current work.

Her "Supercock" drawings, done when she was a student at Yale (September 1964-May 1967), were based on such irreverent returns of the repressed as bathroom graffiti. Adopting the flying-penis-as-superhero cliche, she attacked the proprieties of the very institution that would be faced with the task of assessing and accrediting these works. She also threw a gauntlet down before the masculine culture that still dominated art schools across the country during the U.S. debacle in Vietnam. The charcoal-and-oil-stick drawing Vietnam Garden (1966) shows a sprouting of phallic mushrooms, each emitting an American flag from its tip and equipped with pubic thatches of real steel wool.

A cross on one and a Star of David on another suggests that these figures are also to be taken as gravestones in a military cemetery, the "garden" of the title. For all their raunchy scruffiness and slapstick comedy, these drawings signaled a rebellious, mordant sensibility. They were, in effect, social performances--a rambunctious acting-out--as well as send-ups of those allegedly masculine fixations, low-end pornography and patriotic militarism.

In advance of the feminist assertions of the early '70s, Bernstein's appropriation of the penis--whether erect, spent, mechanized, laughable, threatening or simply absurd--was both timeless (art history offers many ancient examples) and vanguard. The raucous humor of the "Supercock" drawings also expressed a heartfelt fury during a period that, in its esthetic disposition, increasingly valued cool strategies over such energetic "misbehavior." The notable exceptions that may have been on her mind are, foremost, Nancy Spero's poignant protests (also on paper), Lee Lozano's screw paintings and Louise Bourgeois's psychologically charged imagery in various mediums.

In 1967, for her diagrammatic rendering of penile plumbing in the painting The Fun Gun, Bernstein presented real 45-caliber bullets tracing a course through the medically labeled genital apparatus depicted on distressed canvas. In place of the mechanomorphic slyness of Duchamp, Picabia, et al., she went for a directness closer to Warhors "Dance Diagrams" of 1962 and may also have been indebted to his untitled anatomical diagram (dated ca. 1960-62 in the catalogue for MOMA's 1989 Warhol retrospective). The subsequent 1969 installation at Yale of Claes Oldenburg's phallic visual pun, the monumental Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, may well have provided her with encouragement and validation.

By 1973, still using what was to become her signature motif, Bernstein emphatically upped the ante with Horizontal, a 9 1/2-by-12-foot charcoal drawing. While its image, a giant, rightward-facing phallic screw, is an extension of Fun Gun, the work's sheer presence, its obdurate surface and gestural intensity resemble nothing so much as Richard Serra's oil-stick drawings. Bernstein's time at Yale came immediately after the graduation of Serra and Brice Marden, whose intensely compacted graphite drawings of the period also ought to be cited as precedents. Furthermore, there is a trace of Yale's pedagogy (as shaped by Jack Tworkov, Bernard Chaet and others) to be seen in Horizontal and in the infamous vertical screws that followed. In both formats, Bernstein manifests a firm control of volume through her spiraling cress-contour strokes and precise control of tone. The abject funkiness of her cartoony student work had by this time been replaced by an aura of unassailable authority.

Horizontal was censored from "Women's Work--American Art 1974," at the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum, thus entering the august company of James Joyce's Ulysses, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover and so much other work before and since that has ignited the civic indignation of the public's serf-appointed protectors. The censorship provoked outraged pretests from a wide range of artists and writers.

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In One Panel Vertical (1979) an enormous iconic screw, its edges alive with jittery pubes, is shown thrusting downward through the declivity formed by encircling arrows that contain a dense scribbly scrim. The graphic attack upon the surface emphasizes the performative aspect of Bernstein's work, while deftly establishing the play of light glinting off metal. Set on a vertical scroll whose top portion is rolled and whose bottom curls out a bit just above the floor, the paper physically enacts the spiral theme and engages the architecture of the room. This effect took on a particular power when a similar scroll was first shown as one of a series of five at A.I.R. gallery in 1973, lined up in Minimalist fashion as though to appropriate the authority of that largely male art movement.