Sue Williams began using painting as a feminist tool in the early 1990s, looking to the human body as a site for her investigation of gender and relationship issues ... not in a dry or academic sense, but in a probing, biting way. Her early paintings look torn from a cartoonist’s sketchbook, with graphic black-and-white images of women in violent and abusive situations, accompanied by tough and witty text. In the mid 1990s, color entered the pictures, along with more-wide-open use of line and space, as Williams began to make canvases covered in a tangle of erotic imagery. From a distance, they looked like elegant calligraphy or gestural de Kooning paintings; up close, like "vast daisy chains of sexual mayhem," as they have been described. That mayhem yields "naughty surprises, a secret underground of penile heads and buttock clefts and full-frontal noses," according to critic Deborah Solomon, who included Williams in her round-up of the art world’s favorite bad girls in the New York Times in January 2002.
Paintings by the edgy eroticist will be on view in the exhibition "Sue Williams: On the Surface," opening at Harvard’s Carpenter Center on March 6. But don’t be expecting overt nasty bits; Williams’s new paintings maintain a playful line between abstraction and sexual caricature. The anger and the genitalia are less evident, but think about what’s going on below the surface here. Solomon quotes Williams as saying, "There are sliced-up penises in some of my paintings. It’s kind of a Bobbitt thing."
Who needs The Vagina Monologues when we have the Carpenter Center? Come hear Carolee Schneemann, a pioneer of the genre where sex meets performance art, lecture there on March 6. Probably best known for her milestone 1975 performance "Interior Scroll," in which the naked young artist stood onstage slowly pulling a long scroll out of her vagina, Schneemann has been making events and "happenings" since 1960, and has been a generally provocative and fascinating trailblazer on the art scene for more than 40 years.
Of course, women are not the only ones obsessed with sex and sexuality in art. Artist Matthew Barney shot to international prominence in 1991 when he debuted a video showing himself, naked, scaling the walls and ceiling of a chic New York gallery with the aid of a rock-climbing harness and titanium ice screws. And Barney has remained a riveting figure, even leaving aside his romantic involvement with also-pretty-darn-interesting rock cutie Bjšrk. The focus of Barney’s work since the early ’90s has been an epic five-film series called "The Cremaster Cycle," and the latest and last work in the group — Cremaster 3 — is showing at the Museum of Fine Arts on March 1. Be forewarned: it lasts almost three hours, and includes often impenetrable scenes involving molten Vaseline, dental surgery, and a gorgeous creature who is half-cheetah/half-woman (not to mention Richard Serra). But "The Cremaster Cycle" has attained legendary status — most recently in a lavish New Yorker profile of Barney — and there aren’t that many chances to catch it around here.
UP AND COMING: on February 24, intriguing young painter Kehinde Wiley is at the MFA to give a slide lecture as part of the Museum School’s "Visiting Artist Series." Wiley paints attitude-full portraits of contemporary African-American men, using poses inspired by Titian and Gainsborough — very landed gentry, full of swagger, and so hip!
"Sue Williams: On the Surface" is on view at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, from March 6 through April 13, with a reception for the artist on March 12, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Carolee Schneemann speaks at the Carpenter Center on March 6 at 6 p.m., with a reception following. For information on Carpenter Center events, call (617) 495-5666. Cremaster 3 will be shown in Remis Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, on March 1 at 6:30 p.m. Visit or call the box office at (617) 369-3770. Kehinde Wiley speaks in Remis Auditorium at the MFA on February 24 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., for free. Call (617) 369-3718 for information.
