Getting Up Close and Personal with Porn-Inspired Paintings

The first thing I notice about the BHQFU basement gallery is that it's hot. I don't mean that figuratively, though I might: The exhibition I'm there to write about features photorealistic close-ups of genitalia, blowjobs, cunnilingus, masturbation, penetration, and double penetration. But actually I mean it literally, because the night before my interview with the artist, Betty Tompkins, the heat came on in the building, and the basement, in addition to housing art, is home to the associated pipes. Possibly dumbly, I ask the outreach coordinator for BHQFU (which stands for Bruce High Quality Foundation University; it's an experimental art school associated with the collective of the same name), if this is going to hurt the art. He replies that it's probably fine.

Besides, Tompkins' attitude towards her work isn't exactly precious. This solo show is the artist's first in New York since 2009, and it was born of a prompt from BHQFU and of Tompkins' expressed willingness to experiment and fail. The exhibition's title, Real Ersatz, is also literal: It refers to the fact that the works on display are new, each situated somewhere on a spectrum that runs from 100 percent paint to 100 percent digital print. They're "real" works, belabored and finessed to produce Tompkins' new and particular visions, with the artist going over most of the digital prints with paint to add the detail that is lost when you blow Photoshop creations up. But the works are also, in some ways, substitutes, digital prints based on older paintings; the concept is a nod to the technological era just as it is a questioning of it. "I don't want someone going in [and] saying '[That one's] real, real, fake, fake'," she says. "What I want is for people to be a little challenged."

The more titillating aspect—that the works are all up-close representations of, for example, penises penetrating vaginas—is old news. To those who know Tompkins' work, the pieces might look familiar: They recall the artist's controversial Fuck Paintings, an explicit series that began in 1969 and ended, at least for a while, when Tompkins was famously censored from a group show in Paris. The original series was inspired by old porn magazines, images which Tompkins would zoom in on, collage, and crop to create an almost abstract image of "joined forms"—the original, less in-your-face title of the pieces. Despite their technological reboot—which is not, it must be noted, the first time Tompkins has returned to the Fuck Paintings since the 70s; she picked them up again around 2002—the Real Ersatz works are similarly beautifully disorienting, challenging your impulse to widen your eyes at the sex on display. Up close it's unclear if that vagina you're seeing is really a vagina—though from across the room, it's clear there's nothing else it could possibly be.

The experimentation on display in Real Ersatz is much subtler than the bold, explicit statements Tompkins was making with the original Fuck Paintings, of course, but for her the risk involved was still nerve-wracking, as well as exciting. Tompkins says she was "totally freaked out" about the prospect of filling a show with these new, digitally manipulated versions of her work; she had a panic attack, which she says she's not prone to, when she saw how big the BHQFU space was. (Perhaps she's an overachiever—the space is decent-sized, and she has definitely filled it.) However, after she assessed her studio in Pennsylvania, going through all of her finished paintings, she realized she at least had enough to fill a hypothetical show if her experiments didn't work out—perhaps not the show she imagined, but a show nevertheless. That gave her the mental space to "go have fun." "When you're inventing something," she says, "it's supposed to be fun." She says she's often at her best when she's "winging it."

Plus, she reckoned, "the investment" on these pieces is relatively small. When she first started working with digital prints, she showed a couple in a window gallery in Soho that didn't have insurance. The gallerist was initially apologetic about this, understanding if Tompkins wasn't willing to risk her work, but Tompkins, demonstrating the generosity I also notice during our meeting, was game. If a digital print didn't work out—or somehow got destroyed—Tompkins would only "be out a couple hundred dollars." "I can always have the piece reprinted," she says—which is kind of surprising, given the stereotype of artists as maniac perfectionists.

"I don't think people realize how practical artists are," Tompkins says. She offers an example: Her largest paintings are five-by-seven feet because when she started making them, she drove a Ford Econoline van, and that's the biggest canvas size she could fit in it.

Despite her go-with-the-flow attitude, though, I somehow doubt Tompkins would take kindly to her art being destroyed—she is not at all flippant about her practice or her work. Real Ersatz is also, inevitably, a kind of conversation with the past. After being censored from the Paris show in 1973, Tompkins, then only 27, found it impossible to place a piece anywhere, and she says it was absolutely crushing. "Despite the fact that there was no internet, the tom-toms for some reason let everybody know, 'Don't show this,'," Tompkins says. "It's so devastating that you can't believe it. It's just like, you're walking along, minding your own business, and somebody takes a baseball bat and hits you in the head." Instead of collapsing, though, she responded with works that censored herself, covering drawings and paintings of the original works with grids inscribed (and later stamped) with the word censored over the explicit images.

Like the art establishment—which has now grouped Tompkins with female artists like Marilyn Minter, who are finding a new appreciation after being ignored in the 70s and 80s—Paris eventually apologized, in its way; when the Centre Pompidou requested a "censored" and "very early work" from Tompkins, she happily obliged, and Fuck Painting #1, a high-contrast acrylic work depicting vaginal intercourse from behind, now hangs there. Nevertheless, in 2006, she was censored again in Japan—to which she responded by digging out her old rubber censored stamp. "I suspect, if I live another ten years, it's going to happen somewhere [else]."

Ultimately, it's clear that Tompkins is experienced at dealing with it, at responding to issues and moving past them. "You can't wait for the establishment before you; you have to do what you can for yourself," she tells me. Indeed, the invention in the show extends beyond the digital experimentation Tompkins is excited about. Although her works are monochrome, for example, they're not just black and white. She works extensively with adding colors to her blacks and whites—which she mixes herself—to create depth. She takes me over to a deep pink portrait of a vagina, showing me where she altered the digital print to soften the computer's hard lines, enthusiastically explaining that the rich color was originally a result of a strange fluke in translating the print to paper. It ended up almost purple, but instead of going back to the drawing board, she went with it.

Real Ersatz is on display at the FUG at 431 East 6th Street until October 17.