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Painted Landscapes of the Times: The Art of Sue Coe

A film by Helene Klodawsky. 1987. VHS video. 30 minutes. Color. Available from First Run / Icarus Films, 32 Court Street, 21st Floor, Brooklyn NY 11201. Website: http://www.frif.com

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A. E-mail:
ballast@netins.net.

The British painter, printmaker and illustrator Sue Coe was 36 years old when this film about her work was made in 1987. Born near London, she was trained at the Guilford School of Art and the Royal College of Art, then moved to New York in 1972, where she has lived ever since. She is not only an artist in the sense that she uses her art as a means to jolt us out of our complacency and, by that, to alert us to various social injustices. It's a venerable strategy, and she freely admits her indebtedness to any number of celebrated artist-protesters, including Francisco Goya, George Grosz, John Heartfield and Kathe Kollwitz. While today there is hardly a shortage of artistic protesters (or of injustices to fight), it has been evident for almost twenty years ago that Coe's potential is greater than that of most of her peers. In the art of recent decades, few paintings are half as compelling as a certain unforgettable few that she created in the 1980s, the finest and most enduring of which is a tribute to IRA martyr Bobby Sands. Then and in the years since, she has also made disturbingly violent images of racism, nuclear power, rape, muggings, South Africa, political villains (Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher), war resisters, the use of animals for scientific research, factory farming and other issues. According to her Graphic Witness website (at www.graphicwitness.org/coe/coebio.htm, through which she sells her original prints at affordable prices, then donates a part of the earnings to various causes), her current work includes a dreamlike vista of New York on September 11, 2001. This video documentary, which was filmed in New York more than fifteen years earlier, is comprised of informal, provocative scenes of the artist talking about her work (at a gallery) with a group of public school students, sketching on the subway, working in her studio, and replying to on-camera questions about her motivations. Despite their portrayals of suffering, Sue Coe's finest paintings are strangely beautiful. But there is nothing pretty about them, and her own spoken opinions are at times so inflexible that she subverts her own effectiveness. Yet, even if we disagree with her remarks or the stridency of her methods, this film is nevertheless terribly interesting and could serve as a way to raise issues about the relationship between art and social activism.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 19, No. 1, Autumn 2003.)

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Updated 1st September 2003


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