‘Subtlety Is Not My Forte’: A Conversation with Judith Bernstein

Judith Bernstein’s third solo exhibition at Kasmin, New York, surveys her work from 1966 to the present, showing how she has fearlessly confronted militarism and misogyny in the US, from the Vietnam War to Donald Trump’s impending second presidency. She talks to Juliet Jacques about her use of genitalia and slogans, her involvement with the Guerrilla Girls and how art might be a weapon in a time of intense anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ reaction.

Juliet Jacques You’re interested in things outside the world of art. I’m thinking particularly of public toilet graffiti, with its irreverent humour. 

Judith Bernstein Yes. Bathroom scatological graffiti is more deeply psychological than you think because someone is there alone defecating, and they don’t have anyone to edit anything. While I was still a student at Yale in 1966, I took inspiration for my work from the bathroom, but almost all of it, I made up. I produced, for example, a drawing of Superman with his cock three times the size of his body, called Supercock [1966]. I also did Vietcock [1966], which contains a guy with a rope from his rear connecting to the Capitol Building. 

At that time, it was the Vietnam War, and everyone was horrified that they had to go. Get killed for what? I made the connection between the phallus and masculinity. The Fun Gun [1968] is an anatomical drawing of a phallus that had 45 bullets in the sack and a trigger coming out of the urethra. As crude as you can make it, it’s never as crude as the horror of war. A lot was going on at that time. We went to a lot of rallies and protests and all that kind of thing. And, eventually, it stuck.

JJ Your work is very overt. You’ve talked about confronting issues head-on and prioritising memorable visual imagery. What do you make of criticism of your work for being unsubtle?

Bad girls don’t get as much as bad boys. Bad boys get a hell of a lot.

JB I want to tell you something. Subtlety is not my forte. My work is about the political and the sexual, the combination. The phallus is a power image. So, I use that a lot. I also use it for women because there’s no reason they can’t use it in their artwork. Men don’t have first dibs on using a phallus.

While I’m working, I just work. I go into my subconscious. Later, I often figure out what I’ve done. I feel that my work is the psyche of the times. It’s gone through former US president Richard Nixon, who appeared in my work First National Dick [1969]. I detest Donald Trump, and I am not alone in that cause. It’s a very sad thing that someone who is the horrible calibre of Trump – a con artist, a crook, so many things – should be president of the United States at this time.

JJ Were you influenced by, or were you acting against, movements like abstract expressionism, minimalism or pop art?

JB I went to an academic university. They had people who made big forays into wonderful artworks. It was not a conservative school by any means. Abstract expressionism was before my time, but I always did what I wanted to do. There was always the political, the sexual and my rage at injustice. I was going my own way, and I was not following someone else’s path. That was great for me because, if you’re not successful, at least you’ve done what you wanted to do. And that’s the most rewarding thing.

JJ Yes, absolutely. Notoriously, your drawing of a screw resembling a phallus, Horizontal [1973], was excluded from an exhibition at the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum in 1974. Can we talk about that, its effect on your career, and how you responded to it?

JB The show was called ‘FOCUS: Women’s Work – American Art in 1974’. The organizers wanted to make a statement with the exhibition because the work of women was so ignored. There was a big censorship issue, and they didn’t want to include the piece. Almost all the show’s participants signed a petition because they wanted it reinstalled. They printed up badges that said, ‘Where’s Bernstein?’ Walter De Maria was a friend of mine. He said, ‘You can’t go to the opening. They’re going to say, “Where’s Bernstein?” “She’s right over there!”’ Nevertheless, the show went on and got a lot of coverage, which was wonderful. I didn’t want to close the exhibition down because it was so important at that point in time to show that women had a voice. They referred to my work as porn. It was hardly porn. But it was a much more conservative time. 

JJ How and why was it difficult to be a bad-boy feminist in the 1970s? Was there a framework for feminist art at the time? And what’s changed? 

JB I’ll tell you something. Bad girls don’t get as much as bad boys. Bad boys get a hell of a lot. But bad girls are still getting some things. It was not my intent to actually be a bad girl. It was what I wanted to say, and I wanted my voice to be heard. From the time I was a kid in a very rambunctious house, I was always screaming about what I wanted and what I needed, which is something that women did not do then. 

Women are the centre of the universe. 

JJ I wanted to ask how you became involved with the Guerrilla Girls and what the anonymity within the group allowed you to do.

JB The Guerrilla Girls were great. It was wonderful to have a group that called attention to the fact that so many galleries showed no women or that certain critics had only written about one woman artist but 20 or 30 men.

Galleries wanted to be politically correct, so they were embarrassed by it, which helped enormously. We wanted to do it anonymously because we thought that, since we’re already stigmatized by being women, we didn’t want to be double stigmatized by calling attention to critics and galleries that may want to get back at us. We postered at night. We used humour, which I love. It relieved a lot of our anger and strain from our work not being shown in the 1990s. It was a wonderful time to do that. 

JJ How do you feel about nostalgia for that period of radical feminist art and protest that lasted from the 1960s through to the 1990s? Does it box off the politics as something that belongs to the past but not the present? 

JB I’ll tell you frankly: I’m not into nostalgia. It must be current. It has to say what it has to say now. I think that my work is not sentimental. It’s hard-hitting. I like using the phallus many times as a feminist symbol. 

JJ More recently, you’ve used the vulva a lot in your work. 

JB I, for a long time, couldn’t figure out where to go from the ‘Screws’ series [1969–78]. They were so impactful, no matter what size they were reduced to. But I wanted to also go into the vagina. I wanted some self-reflection. The ‘Birth of the Universe’ [2010–13] series was about the explosiveness of the universe and what women contribute, which is extraordinary. Women are the centre. 

JJ Do you have any initial thoughts about how you might respond to the second Trump presidency?

JB I already did so many pieces criticising Trump. I just kind of had it. It blew my mind. I can’t sleep. I use a lot of phallic imagery with him. He’s a fool. Nevertheless, we’ll see what happens now. I suspect it will be much worse than what happened in the first term.

Now, I’m doing something more overreaching, reflecting the psyche of our times. It deals with the primal scream. The series is called ‘Death Heads’ [2022–ongoing]. I made many of these paintings with fluorescent paint so that they look completely different under black light, which gives them an enormous amount of power. I’m very interested in visual impact. This survey goes through my trajectory from 1966 to 2024, and you can see continuity in my interests. I have never stopped.

Judith Bernstein’s ‘Public Fears’ is at Kasmin Gallery, 509 West 27th Street, New York, until 15 February