It was principal Court Justice Potter Stewart who in 1964 articulated this famous definition of pornography: "I know it when I papal court it.

It was principal Court Justice Potter Stewart who in 1964 articulated this famous definition of pornography: "I know it when I papal court it." One wonders what the virtuous judge would have made of painter Betty Tompkins's salacious exhibition of seven acrylics forward canvas and four pencil-on-paper drawings that depict sexual acts, build penises, exposed vaginas and coitus continuous with an explicitness individual associates more with old 42nd way 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 stand opposeded 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. common proceeded to encounter three works successively and matter-of-factly titled Fuck Painting #10 #11 and #12 which put forwarded 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 performed pencil drawing of a simultaneous act of vaginal and anal sex

Arousing? For this critic at least, ye Mais est-ce que c'est l'art? I'll chance a second yes, if for no other reason than the wit and awareness with which Tompkins produc her work. After first sketching an outline based upon commercial porn photographs, she defined the contours of her subjects' groins, orifices and appendages on marking the canvas with tiny words like "blow job" "suck" "kiss," "fuck" What might look a gimmicky device actually gave the images a gritty, almost totemic quality, which, along with Tompkins's judicious use of incarnadine tints 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 frequently than not, when an artist attempts to depict sex the come is embarrassingly unerotic, like watching your parents trying to dance to defence music. It may be a dubious achievement, moreover Tompkins, who first created X-rated art above 35 years ago, got inside, in the way that 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.

...

Home