Season 21!!! We are back with an icon of art, the one and only Judith Bernstein (b. 1942, Newark, New Jersey) to discuss almost 60 years of art making.
Since graduating from Yale in 1967, Bernstein has developed a reputation as one of the most unwaveringly provocative artists of her generation. Steadfast in her cultural, political and social critique for over 50 years, she surged into art world prominence in the early 1970’s with her monumental charcoal drawings of penis-screw hybrids; early incarnations of which were exhibited at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooks Jackson Iolas Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA P.S.1, among other institutions. In reviewing Bernstein’s 2012-13 solo exhibition at the New Museum in NY, Ken Johnson, critic at the New York Times, referred to these words as “bravura performances of draftsmanship” and “masterpieces of feminine protest”. Bernstein was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery – the first all-female artists gallery in the United States – as well as an early member of many art and activist organizations including Guerrilla Girls, Art Workers’ Coalition and Fight Censorship.
We explore Bernstein’s first exhibition in London in over a decade at Emalin gallery. TRUTH AND CHAOS comprises works spanning thirty years of her practice. Direct and confrontational, they are inspired by outrage and violence, the American military industrial complex and the private scribbles of the Yale University men’s bathroom stalls. The exhibition presents historical works from her 1990s ‘word drawings’ series alongside the maximalist phallic screw drawings that Bernstein has been making since 1969 and that initiated her complicated relationship with censorship and popular recognition amidst 1970s second-wave feminism.
Judith Bernstein is concerned with the psyche of men and whatever men may stand for. She observes the scribbles and cartoons they leave behind in bathroom stalls, their furious impotence and possessiveness, the overpowering penetration of their violence and its statistics in war. Most of all, she watches their self-involvement: there is nothing beyond the raging ego, no depth to their own picture-plane. Detaching the symbol of an erect penis from any personhood and mounting it as a standalone totem of military violence and industrial extraction, she hacks with charcoal and oil paint at the abuse of power she witnesses. Symbols of American capitalism scratch their way into the work: guns are dicks, dicks are screws, screws are missiles, missiles are Mickey Mouse and the artist’s signature is an ejaculation. Words and forms are disgorged onto paper – Bernstein’s own subjectivity ejects mark-making.
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Judith's solo exhibition Truth and Chaos is now open and runs until 15 June 2024. Free entry:
https://emalin.co.uk/exhibitions/truth-and-chaos
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