Emalin is pleased to present TRUTH AND CHAOS, Judith Bernstein’s first exhibition in London in over a decade. The exhibition comprises works spanning thirty years of Bernstein’s 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...
Emalin is pleased to present TRUTH AND CHAOS, Judith Bernstein’s first exhibition in London in over a decade. The exhibition comprises works spanning thirty years of Bernstein’s 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.
To Bernstein, her work has always been a subjective, emotive response to the psyche of her current time, to the dominating ego and society’s zeitgeist. While the work’s aesthetics, symbols and slogans are confrontational, their subtlety and radicalism remain in the inversion of the origin of crudeness of the symbols used; they do not generate simplicity, but instead point out how reactionary and simplistic the imaginary of men in power can be. Meanwhile, in her own treatment of the phallic symbol, it becomes generative, fluid, dangerous. By the twisting motion of the screw, across the decades, the phallus has sometimes morphed into ocular, yonic, vortex-like shapes, sometimes exploding and transcending itself. Working in public and in private, for periods of fame and through times without recognition, she developed images from the phallic screws to penis guns, through to those she called ‘dick-in-the-head’ – to make the point that the sex, the ego, the abjection, is in the head.
The grievances of Bernstein’s practice with American power dynamics are almost ironically replayed in the trajectory of her artistic career across the past five decades. She rose to fame between the 1960s and 1970s for the uninhibited drawings and paintings of anti-war mockery of American machoism that paved the way for many future forms of expression for feminist rage. But the radicalism had its consequences – the edge of her criticism was confirmed by the censorship of her work from the large-scale exhibition 'FOCUS: Women’s Work — American Art' that took place across various museums in Philadelphia in 1974 with the ambition of presenting a definitive survey of American women artists of the time. Despite public outrage about the censorship of her drawing – and public letters of support coming from the most institutionally compelling names of the era, including Clement Greenberg, Linda Nochlin, Lucy Lippard, or Louise Bourgeois – the work was still removed by the reactionary council of a city museum.
Following the controversial censorship, Bernstein was sidelined in the art world and did not participate in nearly any exhibitions for 25 years. This period came to an end in the 2010s when she experienced the canonical moment of “rediscovery” and held her first major institutional retrospective at the New Museum in New York. With Bernstein in her eighties today – and in a final turn of the American canon - the very work that was censored in 1974 has now entered the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
