Janet Cooling is an outspoken young painter; her figurative subjects run the gamut from tender bunnies through fornicating women to Godzilla-like monsters. In her work she has shown herself to be a lesbian feminist, an environmentalist, and an antinuclear advocate, but whatever she may be and as powerful as her art is, the point that her imagery tries to make is not always clear.
The current work amounts to an art tailor-made for an urban/suburban apocalypse. The eight new paintings here are generally related to Cooling’s earlier acrylic canvases in that they are multi-imaged compilations of human figures, animals, and man-made objects, but many of them are executed on shaped gator board. Having abandoned the explicit carryings-on of lesbian couples that dominated her paintings for several years, Cooling now centers on one or more individual figures, usually female. These figures, often depicted as huge faces without bodies, appear to be drawn from magazine photographs of movie starlets or fashion models. The sometimes nasty, supercharged environments that once surrounded her oblivious lovers now surround her nonchalant ladies—and are even nastier, consisting of numerous symbols of male aggression and violence. The title of the show is a warning from Big Sister: “Woman is Watching You.”
Atomic Birth features a shriveled brown fetus surrounded by burning oil drums, nuclear power plants, automobiles, and jets dropping exploding bombs. Two women’s faces smile serenely in shades of cobalt blue and magenta. Radioactive Housewives has four women in ruffled evening gowns reclining amid eleven ranch-style houses, in a sinister takeoff on Roger Brown’s suburban tract-house landscapes. Two snakes undulate in and around the women and houses while the shape of the gator board’s outer border mimics their curves. The Corporate Ladder contains four glamour-boy-ish male faces up to their necks in water and stacked in a vertical row. Each head is encircled by slanting skyscrapers and lightning bolts. On each painting’s surface, the images converge against a black background in a style that is both self-consciously polished and pseudo-realistically bogus.
The stereotypical figures that grace Cooling’s wastelands are highly cosmetic, unrealistic sex objects. What Cooling risked in her previous work—that her potentially sexist male audience might be titillated by the proximity of overt sexuality (albeit lesbian) to weapons and other emblems of male hostility—was not really so dangerous since she didn’t make her couples appear particularly seductive. They served as a safe and secure refuge from the atrocities around them. The juxtaposition was so obvious that there was no question as to meaning or motivation. In the present work, however, there are many questions. While Cooling has removed any overt sexual activity, the appearances of the fantasy women and men here by no means rule out the possibility of the association of sex with violence by the viewer.
Is Cooling baiting her viewers or simply being satirical? Or is she playing both sides, giving either interpretation a nod and a wink? It’s an inescapable fact that she does not make her symbols of violence necessarily repulsive; on the contrary, many are exciting, attractive depictions of male power. Cooling may be caught on the horns of a moral and esthetic dilemma which is difficult to resolve—that of making a beautiful painting (and Cooling is a beautifully accomplished artist) on an ugly subject.
—Michael Bonesteel
