'These are your community guidelines, follow them, do better.'
Betty Tompkins plays simultaneously by, and against, the rules.
In 2019, the artist Betty Tompkins had her Instagram account suspended for ‘violating community guidelines’. Since joining the photo sharing platform in 2015, Tompkins’s posts of her own artwork had been repeatedly removed and cited as inappropriate by Instagram’s algorithm but this more ominous sounding suspension led her to study the platform’s community guidelines in full for the first time. On learning that depictions of nudity in painting and sculpture were not actually a violation she appealed to Instagram with the statement: ‘These are your community guidelines, follow them, do better.’ Her account was quickly reinstated and although she still occasionally has to deal with erroneously deleted posts and temporary account shutdowns, she continues to post her work from it today.
I was unfamiliar with Betty Tompkins and her work until I followed her on Instagram sometime in 2017, which written down has an annoyingly millennial inauthenticity. Is this how people feel when they announce that they met their spouse on Tinder? All of those mildewed hours we spend scrolling in stasis have to amount to something, don’t they? Lucky for me a year later I unexpectedly came across Fuck Painting #6, an original from Tompkins’s controversial 1969 Fuck Paintings series hanging in a summer exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. I think because my first encounter with Tompkins’s work was around the same time that she began her turbulent relationship with Instagram, somewhere in the depths of my internet-addled psyche I had her pinned as an online artist despite the fact that she started painting in the middle of the last century.
Standing before her work irl I was forced to reckon with the constraints and disappointments of having spent a large chunk of my life experiencing art and culture almost exclusively through a palm-sized screen, something which has since been exacerbated by a global health crisis. Viewed close up, it was difficult to tell exactly what Fuck Painting #6 actually was. The canvas more closely resembled an overcast sky than human anatomy, but from a few paces back there was no mistaking what Tompkins had wielded layer upon layer of painstakingly intricate airbrushing to depict. Tompkins devised her Fuck Paintings by extracting magnified tableaux of coital penetration taken from her husband’s contraband 1950s pornography collection and scaling them up in airbrushed hues of black and grey that, when viewed from a distance, portray an unsettling photorealistic fuck.
It’s hard to figure out how to consume a giant pornographic cock as it lingers at the precipice of an equally giant cunt, ringed with dark lines of pubic hair in a public gallery context. Through the lens of a greasy phone or laptop screen the impact of such a painting might be dulled slightly by the fact that the internet is the de facto home of pornography, but in the gallery its presence was so raw that I felt compelled to alter my posture. I stood up straight with my shoulders thrown back and tried my best to look nonchalantly at the large-scale graphic sex displayed in front of me. I placed the back of my hand to my cheek and felt a clamminess that meant my face had flushed pink. I’m normally unphased by depictions of sex and often revel in the drama of the obscene, but something about the trickery of Fuck Painting #6 made me feel momentarily awkward in the same way that my mum reaching for the remote with lightening speed to flip the channel anytime anything more intimate than hand holding passed the television screen did. I felt like I’d been caught watching porn in public. I wondered how many of us in the gallery had taken the few steps back to reveal this bigger picture. Surely there were people around me who had yet to take in the full scene. Was I being forced to admit that the sex I was seeing was not, strictly speaking, real? I was blushing hotly; I wanted to burst out laughing to pierce the tension. Fuck Painting #6 made my blood run hot despite the icy gallery air-con and I wished I could see more.
Unsurprisingly the Instagram saga was not the first instance of censorship around Tompkins’s paintings. In her essay ‘Don’t Fuck with Betty Tompkins’, featured in Raw Material (2021), the first and long overdue monograph published on Tompkins’s career, writer and curator Alison M. Gingeras tells the story of two of Tompkins’s Fuck Paintings that were seized at the French border on their way to an exhibition in Paris in the early 1970s on the grounds that they violated the country’s obscenity laws. She writes: ‘Instead of basking in what should have been her breakout moment, Tompkins belatedly learned of the seizure.’ Despite the contentious content of her paintings, Tompkins never intended to become embroiled in the polemical sexual discourse of the time. However, the impact of the incident at the border and the subsequent battle to retrieve the paintings began to permeate her work and by 1974 she had embarked on a series of intricate pencil drawings taken from the same pornographic source but with the offending parts blurred and repeatedly stamped over with the word ‘censored’.
This pointed reaction to her critics did little to endear Tompkins to her contemporaries in the second-wave feminist art movement, whose uncompromising anti-pornography stance left Tompkins firmly on the outside of a community of artists who would have otherwise embraced her. In 1973 feminist and artist Anita Steckel founded the Fight Censorship Group with the manifesto:
If the erect penis is not ‘wholesome’ enough to go into museums – it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women. And if the erect penis is wholesome enough to go into women, then it is more than wholesome enough to go into the greatest art museums.
Although the group’s intention was to fight for women’s right to make and display explicit erotic art, they objected to Tompkins work on the basis that she utilised pornography—in effect, sex work—as her primary source material. On her exclusion from the Fight Censorship Group and other collectives and exhibitions of the time, Tompkins writes: ‘Being excluded from the feminist art movement gave me a lot of freedom. I read the books and articles, but I was free to pick and choose. I wasn’t subject to any social pressure. I’m better off for it.’
Although the discourse around the feminist implications of pornography have shifted and become less fundamentalist in my lifetime, I have always found discussions around the delineation between art and pornography to be fruitless and banal. In Tompkins’s case, her detractors were labouring under the assumption that men oppress women and therefore penetrative sex must be misogynistic, a view that ultimately limits women’s agency in the context of hetero-erotic portrayals of sex.
I don’t doubt that the intentions of the Fight Censorship Group were coming from a good place. But their ridged stance on what was an “acceptable” depiction of sex made them sound a lot like conservatives. By putting limits on how female artists are allowed to use sex in their art, they unwittingly aligned themselves with the reactionary mindset they were supposed to be rebelling against. Art can be pornography as much as pornography can be art, feminist ideology of the moment notwithstanding.
Worn thin by her continuous battle with exclusion and censorship, by the close of the 1970s Tompkins had relegated her Fuck Paintings to storage where they remained until 2002, when she was invited to exhibit them in full at a gallery in New York. After much support and praise from influential art critic Jerry Saltz among others, Tompkins’s work finally prevailed and she found herself written back into multiple revisionist histories of the twentieth century feminist art movement that had ostracised her for so many years. In an interview featured in Raw Material with art critic and writer Anya Harrison, Tompkins recalls an experience of walking through a gallery in two minutes flat, underwhelmed by the art despite knowing from her own experience how painstaking it can be to create. Of the impact this had on her own work, she states: ‘if the Fuck Paintings had anything, they had charge.’ I can wholeheartedly attest to this ‘charge’ as I remember very little else from that exhibition I visited in 2018, and yet I can recall Fuck Painting #6 and all of the feeling it stirred in me in vivid, visceral detail.
Tompkins’s Fuck Paintings have a charisma that extends far beyond their initial shock factor and potential to offend. They have a depth that invites as much intrigue and delight as it does censorship. The purpose of the Facebook/Meta-owned platforms that pander to those looking to be offended is to push engagement for the sake of their advertising revenue. Social media algorithms are only prudish enough to avoid a reaction that would drag the platform itself into the argument and threaten their bottom line. Tompkins, on the other hand, is a risk-taker and a revolutionary, resourceful with wit and scorn with a rich back catalogue of work to prove it. I’m glad she’s still on Instagram, ready and waiting to be discovered by idle scrollers like me. But more so, I’m glad she’s out in the real world making work and out of storage for good.