Conversation with Betty Tompkins

Published in Figure/Ground magazine

Betty Tompkins was interviewed by Suzanne Unrein. November 19, 2019

In a career spanning five decades, Betty Tompkins (b.1945) has been celebrated and scorned for her provocative feminist iconography. By appropriating imagery created for male self-pleasure, Tompkins has reframed long-held taboos by challenging critical discourses around content, style and scale. Her large-scale, sfumato paintings highlight a particular tension with patriarchal conventions that continues to both stymie and stimulate Tompkins. In 1973, two significant paintings from her Fuck Paintings series were seized by French customs and, in April 2019, Tompkins’ Instagram account was deleted after she posted an image of a catalog reproduction of Fuck Painting #1, 1969, which is now in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou. In a 2017 New York Times article, Rachel Corbett wrote, “Part of what makes Tompkins’ work so enduringly potent today, and what made it too shocking for its time, is not just its frank sexuality: It’s that the art […] seethes with lust, ego, wisecracks and profanity. [She] demanded attention the way men did — through shock and awe.” Tompkins’ recent solo exhibitions include Talking, Talking Talking, Freehouse, London, U.K. (2019);  Fuck Paintings, etc, J Hammond Projects, London, U.K. (2019); Will She Ever Shut Up?, P·P·O·W (2018); and Betty Tompkins, Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland (2018). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Histórias da sexualidade, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), São Paolo, Brazil (2018); Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas (2016) and Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011), among others.

Photo credit by Grace Roselli 

What were you painting when you were in college?

My senior thesis was on paintings of sinks.  Everyone was very hoity-toity. They would talk about philosophy and theories and I would say, “but what about the paintings.  It’s the painting that counts.”  So one of my professors had attacked me for my attitude about subject matter, which is that how you painted it was more important than what you painted and after that discussion, I said, “I’m going to paint sinks.” It was so pedestrian.  So I did it.  Each one in a different style.

Like pop and realism and?

Yeah and I had seen a Robert Ryman so I did a white-on-white one.  It was a great riff.  And as a student, a great learning experience.  Then I got more into graduate school.  I started off with AE [Abstract Expressionism] because it was what I knew. I was in a totally foreign environment, so I went with my strong point.  The imagery thing came up really fast.  So I just stopped and began embracing imagery. I didn’t think very much about the content.  I didn’t have much of an idea about what content was in the painting.  When I would be studying Hans Hoffman and DeKooning and then Johns and Rauschenberg, the idea of what is the content of this painting became something that I couldn’t totally escape, so gradually I had to address it. And when I look back and thought about the sink paintings, I realized that was sort of brilliant because you make the content the process and not the subject.  And then I realized I have been pushing this idea around since I was a student – in one way or another.  I thought that was interesting.

Yeah, it is interesting.  Which leads me to when you came to NY.

Yes in 1969, right after graduate school.

Did you get married in grad school? 

No, in between undergrad and graduate.

That’s so young.

Yes, I was so young.  Someone should have arrested me.  I was the second wife of a professor.  I was a walking cliché.  I actually told him that “The odds of this marriage working out are very low.” I said, “You are twelve years older and fully formed and have a doctorate. “  I was 21, three days before, and not fully formed.

But you did it anyway.

Oh sure. My father always said he would cut me off as soon as I turned 21 so I skipped up in high school in order to graduate a little early.

Wow, that was very forward thinking of you.

Oh yeah.  I was a good survivor.  I’m very proud of myself for being a good survivor.

So, after this, you’re now in New York, and you are finding subject matter as process.  You are living here and you come across your ex-husband’s pornography.

Well I knew about the porn collection.  It came with him.

Right, but were you intrigued by it before you even thought to do anything with it?

No. To me it was porn.  You use it to get excited.

But nobody had it back then.

Right.  He would find ads when he lived in Washington State.  He would find these ads, probably in girly magazines.  He would rent a P.O. box in Vancouver, British Columbia, and send off these checks. And then he would wait a couple of months until he figured they must be there and he drove across the border to pick them up.  He would hide them under the cushions of the car and drive back.  At that time, it was 100% illegal to send that kind of stuff through the U.S. mail.

Oh, interesting. I was just reading this morning about when it became legal to have pornography here.

When was that?

Well it’s very sketchy.

It is very sketchy.  I can tell you that when he got them it was probably 1960 – 1962.

That was very, very early. 1969 was when it became legal in Denmark which was the first country to formally legalize it.

Well he got his from Southeast Asia.

I read that in 1968, the U.S. Congress formed a Commission that was supposed to look into the pornography situation because the industry was becoming so huge so fast and they were getting nervous.  The Commission came back with the unexpected result that the problem isn’t with pornography but is with the people.

That’s right.

But many people were unhappy with this, including Nixon, because they had a much more puritan view of the situation.  So this is when you were getting started!

Well ever since I met my then-husband I knew this stuff was around.

It would just be sitting around?

Yes, sometimes.  And I knew where they were.  And that first year in New York, I was learning how to use an airbrush.  And in the meantime I was going around to tons of galleries, because here I was finally in New York.  The whole art scene was Madison Avenue from 57th street up to 86th street, where the Allan Stone Gallery was. Occasionally there were galleries on the side streets and that was basically it, and the museums.  It was small enough that you could do it in one Saturday. My problem was I didn’t like most of the shows.  I would say to myself that this guy, and it was generally a guy, worked two years on this show, and you couldn’t give it five minutes. I can’t force myself.  It made me think about things and the only thing that I knew about the art world was that there was a social aspect to it.  Where I went, which was Syracuse University and then Central Washington State College, you were there to learn the basics and when you leave, you ditch all this stuff, and reinvent yourself from scratch. So, I didn’t have the expectation that dealers would be waiting for me with open arms. And I did know the history of many of the artists, and I knew they didn’t have their first show until they were in their mid-40s or 50s.  They had all gone through this process of developing, which they could do in private.  Unlike graduates today who have to do it in public, and that’s a nightmare.   I didn’t have any expectations. I was unaware that I was the wrong age and gender, and perhaps I was interested in the totally wrong subject matter.  But I was good at going around and talking to people on a superficial level.  I was good at going out on a really rainy or snowy day when nobody else was around and when it was empty, and people would talk to you.  Then I started to make a push, out of curiosity, to have people see them. I mean nobody had seen them.

Can we go back to when you started making them. Why you started making them?

Yes.  Well I’m going around and I’m bored as shit. And I have dealers telling me to come back in 10 years.  My response to this was that nobody gives a shit as to what you do.  So just do what you want and I found that incredibly liberating.  Because I could see that the other alternative as a reaction to this situation was to be crushed. And that wasn’t my nature, So I said, You are free Betty.  You are finally out of school and nobody gives a crap whether you work or what you do. I hadn’t articulated what I was doing yet, it was a non-verbal process, and then one day I’m riffing through the porn photos and I took one out and I began thinking, Now, if you take that part out, and you take those feet out, what’s left? And bingo, it’s what I was looking for. Because here was an image that in abstract terms, was beautiful. I mean, to this day, how the painting works abstractly, is one of my main concerns.  And I said, Okay, this works. This is gorgeous.  It should be big. And the other thing was, this image has charge.  If I walked into a gallery, and I saw a painting of this, that is big, I would stand there for a really, really long time. And one of my reasons for starting to use this was, I felt that the image would grab the audience by the throat and make them stand there -this is probably very egotistical- and they could, if they stood there long enough, they could see what I had done as a painter to a painted surface.  And that was it. I had the most absolute conviction. So the next day after school, I went to the lumber yard and had them cut the wood.  We had a van. And the biggest, you could fit into it at an angle was something like 7’ x 5’ And so I made them all the same size.  I was painting in the bedroom of our apartment in this little room where I would have to jump over the bed to get far enough away to see the paintings.  For two years I was in that room.  And the first person that I had come over to see the paintings walked in and ran out into the living room where I was, and then backed into the room.  And I thought, my, my, my, what have I done.

Betty Tompkins, Fuck Painting #4, 1972, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 60 inches, Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York

So until that moment where you not really aware of how these paintings might affect an audience?

Not at all.  I never paint with an audience in mind.  I paint with myself in mind and I still do.  It’s a really good habit to get into.

So you were really thinking about it as a painter in terms of composition and forms. In other words, how political was it for you?

Not really.  Of course I knew what they were.  When I originally titled these paintings I called them Joined Forms and things like that.  But I always called them the Fuck Paintings to myself.  When I started to show them again, in 2003, I then called them the Fuck Paintings.

Oh, so they weren’t originally titled that back in the day?

Well no, when I would talk to Don, my then-husband about them I would say something like “This is the 5th Fuck Painting I’ve made” and he would roll his eyes. He was a budding academic and he was like “Look who I’m married to?”

But of course the images came from him originally. You might think he would be fascinated by what you were doing.

No, he didn’t make that connection.  He was totally horrified that people would find out and and he would get fired.

Really.

Yes.  And in the mid-70’s I couldn’t get into a group show and I couldn’t get anything going, the days of slides. And I said to him, “I’m going to relabel the slides, and just put Tompkins. You’re a Tompkins. Take them around.” And he refused to do it.  So I have no idea. I was starting to have a glimmer of an idea, that my age and my gender were working against me but he wouldn’t do it.

So you were able to show them a few times and then nothing? 

I was in two groups shows. One at the Warren Benedict Gallery.  The other at the LoGuiduce Gallery. I would get recommended to go see people but it was a 99% rejection. I did get into those two shows. It was famous people and me.  Nobody bought anything, of course they didn’t.  So I’m very happy that I managed to hold on to them for another 30 to 40 years.

So what were you doing during those 30 to 40 years?

I got really discouraged. And I was young.  Young people are ambitious.  While I had no expectation for a career, I was ambitious.  Which is the only way you can survive in this art world.  It is cutthroat.  So, I just started to do other things.  I made word pieces. I did animals and seascapes and law pieces.  I wanted to watch the Winter Olympics, so I would spend the time making grids on these papers and painted a base color, and, wrote the word “law” in each square. And after the Olympics were over I went back in with the letters. So all words.  When you take those tests that are right brain or left brain I always end up exactly in the middle.

So it doesn’t sound like you were particularly political in the beginning, when you first started working as a painter. You mentioned that you weren’t invited to the feminist groups, that they didn’t accept you. Did you think of yourself as a feminist?

Of course.

Did you think of your work as feminist work?

I didn’t think about that context, because if you were one that was enough. The politics went along with your belief. Since the choice was between being a misogynist and a feminist there was just no question, so yeah of course I was a feminist. Yeah, but totally rejected by the feminist movement and never invited to attend anything.

So when you were rejected by them – –

I was so rejected I didn’t even know I was rejected.  That’s how rejected I was.  I found out in 2016 that they didn’t like my subject or my source.  They were polite enough, but they were also older than I am. I put it down to the youth factor.  I didn’t really pay attention, I had other things to do. The feminists in New York were a tight and very small group. They perceived the world as being so against them, that they had to protect their territory.  They would help their few friends with teaching jobs and exhibition opportunities but they didn’t let people in. Every new voice was a threat, because they perceived their situation as being so tenuous. I always do it and to this day. Because, to this day, I have never heard of anybody getting thrown out of a show because they recommended someone else for the show.  I don’t know how I had this spirit, this generosity, but I did from the beginning.

No, you’re right.  No one has ever gotten thrown out of a show for recommending someone else.

Their perception, was probably more real, and they riffed off of that.

Were the people that were looking at your work back in the 70’s saying very different things about it than they did 30 years later?   

I can see that they look at it differently.  People actually didn’t say very much to me about it back then.

What about the guy who ran out of the room?

Well his mouth was so open and I kept thinking, What have I done?

Did you ask him, “What have I done?”

No, I was too stunned and too surprised.  When he went back in ass first, he did spend a fair enough time in there.  Since that’s what I wanted, for people to spend time with those paintings, to me that was a huge success.  He was looking at them seriously.  He clearly did not want to engage in a critical conversation.  Which was probably just as well. I was so young. I was still in my 20s.  I was so inexperienced about talking about my work, what would I have said, “Yeah. You like it?

So then you were doing these word pieces that weren’t sexual at all.

Right.  I crawled back into my work in a circle.  When I was finished with the word pieces I wanted to just paint. So I stretched big canvases.  I was a body builder at the time and I was painting body builders with animal heads and I found out later as I find out most things – later – that that’s an incredibly old tradition of animal heads on human figures.  Mythology.  But I found that out later.  I would do dog heads.  I love to paint dogs.

Me too!

Good!  I would paint dog-headed figures and they were all body builders.  For the first three I put the word “man”. And I would paint the bodies with the word “man” on top of the figure.

And were they bodies of men?

Yes, they were men.  And one day, I looked at the painting without the words on it and I thought that’s a nice painting.  I’m not going to put words on it. And I didn’t. And so I never did again.  And then I got really involved in mythology.  I have tons of books on mythology, symbolism. My favorite book was “The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.” Oh, if you haven’t seen it, it’s a wonderful book.  I did a lot of pieces with mythology.  At a certain point I split what I had been doing into two things.  So then there could be a whole animal and a figure or statue.  I did that for quite a few years.

Are any of those here?

I kept them on stretchers for years, but then one day Bob Nickas came over and said, “You know Betty, people are starting to want to come to your studio.  They aren’t coming to see that.  They are coming to see this.”  So immediately I took them off the stretchers.

Let’s talk about the Women Words series. So in 2002 and then 2013, you started this new body of work.  How did that come into your head?  Do you know?

Oh yeah.  I went into this period where I was tired of being the only one in on the piece.  It must have been 2002, and at that time a lot of artists were doing collaborations. I made an email saying, “I’d like to do another series using language,” to which I was referring to the cows and horses and the sea.   I decided I wanted people to send me words and phrases about women, and if it’s in foreign language, please give me an accurate translation. I got 1500 separate words with a lot of repetition, and I organized it all in a list alphabetically. When I would have repeats, instead of retyping it, I would put another asterisk against the original word. And I was surprised at the number of pejorative terms.

I was too!  You didn’t go into it asking for pejorative terms you only asked neutrally for a description, right?

Yeah, just tell me your words and phrases about women. Right. And when I did it again in 2013, I also added to the email, “Anonymity guaranteed.” And that opened up a lot of interesting avenues.  Incredibly insulting.

Were the insults from both men and women?

Yes.

In equal amounts?

I didn’t track it but my impression was it didn’t make any difference.

And you used these for the 1,000 Paintings piece.  Did you keep the same percentages of pejorative to nice that you had received from the emails?

No I didn’t try to do that but every once in a while I would say to myself, It’s been a little sweet around here Betty.  It’s time to get a little nasty.  I would make sure that there were positive things in there, but if it stayed sweet it got boring. What’s interesting about the language is the insults.

Installation view of Betty Tompkins: WOMEN Words, Phrases, and Stories at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2016. Photography by Genevieve Hanson, ArtEcho LLC. Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York

Were you surprised?

Yep!  I was surprised by the whole thing.

What did you think was going to happen? Did you have any sort of idea?

No idea.  I wanted to use language and I wanted it to be about women and I had no preconception.  I would do a group of pieces and then the next pieces would be in reaction to those so it was like an interior monologue.  That was really interesting to me. I would say, These are the most dangerous paintings you’ve ever done. Because it’s language. And we all know what all this means, right, and the hair on the back of my neck would stand up.  I would get chills. This is really offensive.  But at a certain point, because I’m doing it for part of the day, for hours every day, you get insensitive to it and I would have to push it away.  I couldn’t stay that freaked out forever. Right?

Right.  How many years did it take?

Two and a half years of working a couple of hours a day on it every day.  At a certain point, I saw the [Gerhard] Richter documentary where he was doing the paintings with the squeegees. It looked like a tremendous amount of fun. It was clearly very arbitrary. He would decide after each layer if he needed another layer.  I really absorbed what he did.  I thought, This is a nice idea to take over some of these big boys and feminize them.  My next was Jackson Pollock. I did 100 Jacksons.  And I loved doing them. I don’t know how he maintained an alcoholic depression, because I found the gesture totally joyous. I mean, I loved it. I would do them to wake myself up for the day, it’s such an upper. Then somebody on Twitter was posting Barnett Newman and I did a bunch of his.

So you were having fun with the painting part, even though you’re adding some words that possibly could be disturbing.

Well, I had decided to do this because the words in just a painted field would have looked boring.

Were you interested in having them talk to each other in terms of what they were saying as well as visually?

Yes, both.  From then on to the end of the series it got very interesting to me because I had to think about two things at the same time.

It’s interesting to me that back in the early 70’s, the feminists would not include you and now, based on this project alone, I think you’re very much in the forefront of feminist art.

Right!

Did you realize it when you were doing it?

No, not when it first started, but then yeah, as soon as I started to see it. I said there’s no getting away from it. There is no rationale for not saying, yes, this is 100%, political.  Look what it’s saying.  I liked that it came from out there to me, and I did something to it and gave it right back out there. I was like a channeler.  There was no way to say this is not political work, it would have just undermined the whole piece.

Right, and the same with your pornographic work.  That was also already out there.

Absolutely.

When you are painting, do you ever think about the people behind the images?

Not in the sense that I think you mean it. I wouldn’t use an uncropped raw image where I thought the people weren’t having a good time. The first time I ran into the exploitative argument, which had to do with my sources, and that those models are being exploited, I said they look like they’re having fun to me.

What about with Women Words.  Do you think about the people that wrote those words?

Yes, I do.  In 2018 I did a series of what I called Insults and Laments because that’s what they are, no middle ground here for sure. I was in the inaugural show for the University of Virginia Art Center.  The first couple of times I showed it I wanted it to play forward.  I wanted people to participate in it.  We would put the signage on the wall where I actually gave a little history, and a table with a thing of markers, index cards and push pins and invited people to add, you know, which they could and nobody signed them. They were anonymous.  It was actually really hostile stuff that came out.

More than before?

More overtly misogynistic.  But at the University of Virginia, they didn’t have empty space for me to do this trick, and they said well would you set up a Gmail account. And we’ll post that. So I said sure. So, you know that takes five minutes. And I got the account set up, and I started posting pieces that were in that show. I said, I’d love to see your words, phrases and stories, send them to me at WomenWords1000@gmail.com. So people started sending me things. And, you know, I promised anonymity.  I would basically transfer what they sent me to an index card or a list. I would trash the emails.  That guaranteed it. I have no idea who these people are.  This one came through that.  This basically just scratches the surface of their anger, and their experience. And I did the piece. I knew right away I was going to do that piece and I did it, and I posted it up on Instagram. And the woman who sent it got in touch with me and I wrote her back. I said, “You’re very fortunate. You lived.”

Betty Tompkins, My ex’s favorite…, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 42 x 54 inches, Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York

I have to read it now… Wow, that makes me sad.

It’s really horrifying.  And I said, “You survived and I don’t know how you did it. Congratulations.”  And she said, “Do you ever do prints. I’d love to have a print like this.”  So, I thought well I have no idea what this woman has been been through, but I know where she came from and she’s still here, right.  So, I did two digital prints. And I just sent it to her as a gift. And what’s really interesting about this one is, and pretty similar with the other one is that when men are looking at this, they start out smiling.  There’s something that they think is light and so they smile.  Then they get to the part that says “Well he had hobbies too.” And their smile starts to get away.  And I’ve seen enough men read this and they have had second to second the same reaction.

Really. 

Yeah.

What about the women?

They do just what you did.  They know from the beginning,

Yeah, you know it’s not going to go well. 

Yeah, and I sent it to her, and she wrote to me that she had managed to get back to school. Despite this. That she had just graduated with her undergraduate and she was going to England for graduate school.

Hopefully she left the man.

Oh, totally.  You can’t write something like this, if you’re still in it.  For one thing, it’s too dangerous, he’ll kill you.  For another thing, to be able to at least say what you had been in makes the environment for you untenable.  You have to leave. And fortunately she didn’t have children.

Wow, what a strong piece.  You probably didn’t realize something like this was ever going to come from this whole thing.

Yeah. Who knew.  I had people write me emails saying all these are nasty, when are you going to do a nice one.  One of them says “I’m going to Jackson Pollock all over her face.”  People have been incredibly supportive of this series.  One of the early ones said, “Stop telling me to fucking smile”.

I know, I hate that!  It’s so insulting and men don’t get it and women get it, of course. The men don’t know why you are insulted.

Part of the insult is you are walking down the street minding your own business and some guy gets in your face and says “Smile.”

Right, as if you’re there to make him happy or please him or look good for him.

Yeah, right.

It’s beyond me.

And me.

I love that you started doing the series with the old master paintings.

Oh yeah.   I started with using pages from old, very soft-core photo books.  This one on top of the guy peeking from behind the tree is really creepy.  And creepy is my friend.  I really like that.

It reminds me of Fragonard’s “The Swing”.  Did you do that one?  

Of course.  And Bouchers. I still had those books and the remnants from them.  I took out maybe 15 pages.  From there I went to Weegee who I recently discovered.

I love Weegee.  If you like creepy that’s a good one to work with.

Yeah, absolutely.  I realized I didn’t know anything about photography.  And it seemed to me I was writing on top of photographs.  I thought to myself, okay, this is a fun series, you get to do maybe 40 or 50 and that will be it. For me as an artist if I’m not pushing an idea then I’m done.  I really like not know what I’m doing.  I was beginning to think, Well, okay, we’ve done a couple of these and I like all the photographs, but don’t really personally relate to them except for the creepiness. Then one day I woke up and I said, Art history!  I just got so happy because I opened up, thousands and thousands of images.

That you love! 

That I love!  And the only criteria was I had to find them in a book because part of what I like about the series is that I’m not taking a photograph. I’m not taking a painting and defacing it. I’m taking a page from a book and that context is totally different.  So, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve done about 180.

Betty Tompkins, Apologia (Caravaggio #3), 2018, Signed, titled and dated recto., acrylic on book page, Framed, 12 x 17 5/8 inches, Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York

Do you ever wonder what those artists would think if they saw this series?

I specialize in dead people.  At a certain point I did wonder.

I think they might be so fascinated actually.

I think they would, if they’re generous in spirit.  Artists come in all types. Some would probably say I was defacing their work. In fact, what I think is I am disrupting their work. And I’m changing the work, entirely into something that’s mine. What I say is if you want a short definition of me as an artist, it’s that I like to take something that exists in the world, do something to it and put it back out.

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