Anyone who is wondering, “What the hell is Judith Bernstein’s problem?” need only look at the world around them.
Since the late 1960s, Bernstein has channeled the sexually violent id of a puritanical nation—the United States—with imagery as crass as its ever-devolving politics. Bernstein’s enduring art serves to highlight misogyny’s metastatic persistence and influence on the daily lives of those navigating its effects and deprivations within the cacophonous morass that is America. Humor and gestural rigor are at the heart of Bernstein’s approach, which she has only sharpened through decades of practice, deploying hardy strategies for fragile times.
The artist’s most recent missive to the masses arrived in an exhibition of recent paintings at the Box, curated by her pal, Paul McCarthy (the show marked Bernstein’s sixth solo outing with the gallery). In addition to the artist’s comically large signature (her trademark), the works bore a range of texts, both familiar and new, such as GASLIGTING (purposefully misspelled and sometimes appearing as GASLITING), TRUMPENSCHLONG, and WE DON’T OWE U A TOMORROW, which was also the show’s title. The phrase looked as though it was inhabiting a deflated spiral—a brain-like fold articulating a ghastly cranial boundary. The statement’s nihilistic charge, combined with a maddening tonal informality, begs a number of questions: Whose tomorrow are we talking about here? And what, exactly, is expected or owed?
In the run-up to the US election in 2016, Bernstein created her Trumpenschlong character, a kind of reincarnation of the artist’s Cockman from the 1960s. Her version of the titular faux mogul is rendered as a limp-dicked dictator, whose face resembles a wilted, overtanned scrotum. While he appears with less frequency in Bernstein’s work today, his presence lingers like a noxious “hamberder” fart. Gasligting (We Don’t Owe U a Tomorrow), 2023, depicted two Trumpenschlongs—each with a swastika cheek tattoo, red lips, and Hitler mustache—that anchor the composition’s lower-left and upper-right corners. In another part of the picture, a “cuntface” (another creature from Bernstein’s menagerie) holds court and is dressed in the same patriarchal, fascist accessories as the Trumpenschlongs. A second and more abstractly chthonic cuntface, its eyeholes blotted out with flat orange and purple shapes, radiates rageful lines of color from its center and seems closer to the artist’s original intentions for the figure, which she described in a Brooklyn Rail interview as “a black hole [with a] celestial inside.” The cuntfaces, one complicit with authoritarianism and the other seemingly ready to obliterate it, articulate two different responses to living in a poisonously misogynistic country, which is becoming more polarized—and certainly more terrifying—by the minute.
Also notable here were Bernstein’s subtle material innovations in Pink Gasligting, 2022, and GASLIGTING (Blue Ground), 2021, which were made on dyed, not painted, canvas grounds. The shard-like patterns produced by the dyeing process made manifest the psychological violence of the paintings’ ostensible subjects. GASLIGTING (Green Ground), 2021, was perhaps the most airy, even bucolic, of the works on display. In it, skull-like faces shout at and slime one another with a bile-like ooze. The heads have open voids for eyes, recalling the manner in which Joyce Pensato (1941–2019), a contemporary of Bernstein’s, would sometimes draw upon the blank existential horror embedded in American pop-culture characters (such as Bart Simpson or South Park’s Kenny McCormick) for her own art. Yet Bernstein’s figures are aggressively, unequivocally splenetic; and, because they are rendered with a limited number of brushstrokes, they often appear deathly, skeletal. These beings speak from the beyond and, apparently, could give a flying fuck about our future. Understanding the toughest parts of Bernstein’s work makes you realize that if you think the present we currently inhabit is at all normal or acceptable, you do not deserve a better tomorrow.
