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Sue Coe
Sue Coe, Bobby Sands, 1984, black & white photo-etching, 5 7/8 x 7 5/8". President's Fund for Art Purchases
About the Artist
"In the art world as elsewhere, we have need of the rogue artist, the uncompromising mirror of painful, hidden truths. Sue Coe is that rogue working within the system to confront the system, she is a lone voice howling in the vast expanses on the wilderness, a fierce and indomitable voice raised to the blank heavens." Linda F. McGreevy, Arts Magazine (1)
"However, for all of its power and inventiveness, there are problems with Coe's work as well, problems suggestive of the inherent difficulties of the union between artistic talent and political intentions. She sometimes degenerates into lame, ineffective caricature, as in the portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, fingers dripping in blood, in Bobby Sands. Her poster works, such as Union Carbide, Haiti, and Bothatcher (with Botha and Thatcher merged into a single spidery form), are tedious more than thought provoking." John Loughery, Arts Magazine (2)
"...it's my preference to work for the printed page with literal text - in an Op Ed page, for example, where one is drawing attention to the content of the article. I don't think art can fulfill the needs of giving information. Unless its really polemical, it's difficult for art to be successful in that way. And successful art has to contain mystery." Sue Coe (3)
Walking the line between art that provokes and propaganda is difficult. Can propaganda be art? Can art have a political message? Sue Coe is an artist who is working in a time honoured fashion, that of the artist as satirist, polemicist, and propagandist, her antecedents being Daumier, Grosz and Heartfield among others. "‘What distinguishes Daumier is certitude,' said Baudelaire"(4) and Coe's works exhibit certitude. However, certitude is not sufficient for a work of art to be compelling and intent cannot be a justification. They must be joined with the formal aspects of art to be visually compelling.
In Bobby Sands, the viewer is presented with the image of the IRA freedom fighter/terrorist as he wastes away from a self-imposed hunger strike in a British prison. This is not a work that is intended to represent the actual death of Bobby Sands but rather it is symbolic, in Coe's terms, of the oppression by the British state and Margaret Thatcher's government. As he was a symbol for those that fought for freedom for Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, Bobby Sands is taken by Coe and imbued the feeling of utter helplessness against the British. Margaret Thatcher, as a symbol of unbridled imperialistic capitalism, is in the same picture with him, alive and filled with energy, as he wastes away on his bed.A potent image, it also shows Coe's political bias.
In many ways, Bobby Sands is a brittle work, the characters are starkly outlined, in terms of their symbolic content. There are no shades of opinion, no gray areas, no possibility whatsoever of a different viewpoint. There is no "in" for those that disagree. In many ways Bobby Sands is most closely related to Heartfield's photomontages, done in Germany before and during the Second World War. There is an inherent difficulty in creating work as starkly drawn as this in the pluralistic and fragmented society of the latter half of the twentieth century. There is the risk that, due to the tone of the work, Coe will only reach those who agree with her political stance. If the work is meant to change society, it must also reach those who do not agree.
Agree or disagree with the content; that is not the issue - it is the artist's right to say what she feels has to be said and say it in the manner best fitting to that message. The question that does matter is whether or not the manner in which the message is conveyed is the most successful, whether or not it has the capacity to change people's ideas about the world or merely to reinforce them, both in those that agree and disagree with the political content of the work.
Notes
(1) McGreevy, Linda F., Arts Magazine (Art Digest, Inc., N.Y.), February 1987, p. 18
(2) Loughery, John, Arts Magazine, November 1987, p. 34
(3) Coe, Sue, Print Collector's Newsletter (Print Collector's Newsletter, Inc., N.Y.), Vol. 19, No. 2, May-June 1988.
(4) Holland Cotter, Arts Magazine, April 1985, p. 24 "Sue Coe: Witness"
Michael Stevenson
Research Assistant
Graduate Student - Painting and Drawing
Fall 1997