SLUT (#1) is the first painting that the feminist artist Betty Tompkins created for the show Women: Words, Phrases and Stories at the Flag Art Foundation (until 14 May 2016). The 1,000 works on view come from a project the artist started in 2002 when she asked people in her address book to email her words that could be used to describe women, ranging from the playful to the pejorative.
Tompkins received more than 3,500 responses from men and women in seven different languages, from Arabic to cockney British slang. Many responses were “horrifyingly misogynistic—creepy, hateful stuff”, the artist told The Art Newspaper. The four most repeated words were cunt, bitch, slut and mother, while others include dyke, kurva (a Czech and Yiddish word for whore), and the phrase “please remove me from your contact list”.
In 2012, the artist and two actresses read aloud 1,500 of those words during a performance in Vienna organised by the feminist artists collective, FF. “It’s very hard to say ‘schwanzlutscher,’ the German word for cocksucker, with a deadpan face”, Tompkins says.
The same year, she repeated the email experiment via Facebook, with surprisingly homogenous results. Starting in 2013, she dedicated 33 months to translate 1,000 of those words onto canvas. While some of the paintings contain only text, others are complemented by backdrops that allude to Tompkins’ well-known Fuck Paintings series, which she first started in the late 1960s. Some were inspired by the work of the “big boys of the art world and how much fun they were having painting in their time—Pollock, Fontana, Flood,” she says.
Although Tompkins says that painting some of the words and phrases “made the hair on the back of my neck stand up”—the least offensive are terms like total babe or girly girl—she hopes that this body of work will challenge women to reassess how they view themselves. “The responses show a deep level of misogyny but a lot of the words, phrases and stories came from women,” she says. “They have misogyny so embedded in them from childhood that it takes a special effort to question it, or to look at your own misogyny and see what’s involved. If the show does that for any person, I think it’s wonderful.”