Two Unprecedented Central Illinois Openings

published in The Octopus, Friday, September 12, 1997 (now called The Paper)

Heel of the Boot: Prints by Sue Coe

University Galleries, Illinois State University, Normal ,IL through Sept. 21

The juxtaposition of the artist's soft voice on the telephone with the vibrancy of her images urged this viewer to look closely at Sue Coe's exhibition, Heel of the Boot . Full of compassion, she delivers her perspective of the world surrounding her __ a world filled with suffering – into vivid prints based on either specific encounters or personal reactions to the news. If her images overwhelm the viewer, then we must remind ourselves of the sights from which she draws her inspiration: a dying AIDS patient in a hospital ward, or the horror of butchery. Raised next to a slaughterhouse in England , Sue Coe offers herself as a dramatic witness to the indifference cruelty can build, showing explicitly and compellingly the position from which she views our society. Although her paintings are as fascinating as her prints, Heel of the Boot is a retrospective of Sue Coe's prints, documenting her skill and technique as a printmaker from her Op-ed page days with the New York Times .

Appropriately titled, Heel of the Boot examines the mechanisms by which we are crushed at the foot of power: the huge leather-clad feet that kick us into complacency and inure us in our complicity, from the greatest to the least of us. With stark black-and-white images, Coe depicts the suffering and injustice she witnesses through uncensored graphic brutality. Using irony, metaphor and the iconography of tyranny, Sue Coe directs our attention to the complexity of power structures and the multiplicitous relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. Coe implicates the viewer as a perpetuator of suffering, locating us as possible points of resistance. She does not point her passionate finger at us personally, but at our participation in the system, in so doing she beckons to us, to our compassion, to our tempers, riling us into action. Aimed at the infrastructures we propagate, her critique attempts to draw us into the ever-growing numbers of people who refuse to contribute the continuation of pain.

A primary power structure that accounts for suffering, capitalism presents a monolith of dilemmas for Coe to articulate in prints such as Capitalism, The Tenant and The Landlord . Free-market law, rules by big business and its dictum of pure profit at all cost, leaves little choice for the poor who work in slaughterhouses or sweatshops and who are burdened by the hefty bills of daily living in late capitalism. Coe personally subverts profit-making and art elitism by using print –the preferred medium of capitalism –to distribute her work in huge editions to the populace cheaply – even for free! Capitalism demands consumption and efficiency to the point that chickens are forced into cannibalism. Livestock, which are less productive both economically and nutritionally than grains, are treated cruelly and callously because of the created demand for their meat. With chains like McDonald's pervading the ghettos, the strip, and even the ancient quarter of a medieval European city, no place is immune to the ravaging effects of capitalism. Even Coe's depiction of animals portray the complicity with which victims participate in their own suffering – animals objectifying the products of themselves in their innocence as we naively consume the products of our making – as can be seen on the cover of her book, Dead Meat , on in her CD-ROM of the same title (both of which are available for the viewer's perusal).

Brother to capitalism is the hierarchy of hegemonic power structures; patriarchy echoes many of the same problems and increases the cruelty of capitalism for women. Coe visually describes the exploitation of women in way, in a bar and in politics. Bomb shelter and Woman Tied to a Pole depict the female victims of war who serve as the only protection for their children in warfare and perhaps even as victims of torture -- innocence sacrificed in the name of power. Utilizing distorted perspectives to offset our narrow vision in her response to witnessed raped, Coe potently prints Rape, Bedford Woman Walks Into a Bar and is Raped on Pool Table by Four Men While 20 Watch and Rape, Bedford Romance in the Age of Raygun , which by historical reference and powerful line inform us that violence has a past and continues through the passive gaze of a dazed public.

Situating herself within an art-historical context of such renowned printmakers as Goya, Grosz, Koolowitz, Nast, Hogarth, Heartfield and others, Sue Coe legitimizes her work as part of a rich artistic tradition of social criticism. She points out that each problem she articulates has a history –perhaps suggesting a future, too, a future we can change. Coe reminds us of the passive indifference that perpetuates the brutalities that continue to abound in our transnational world.