"Jimmy Carrying Veal"
Copyright 1991-Sue Coe
"The Landlord"
Copyright 1985-87-Sue Coe
"President Raygun Takes a Hot Bath"
Copyright 1984-Sue Coe
"Woman Tied to a Pole"
Copyright 1984-Sue Coe
All paintings
courtesy of
Galerie St. Etienne
Sue Coe and the Press: Speaking Out
-
by Judith Brody
Exploring with Sue Coe is no gentle stroll through cloistered
sanctuaries of art. She makes uncompromising demands. She demands
to speak freely. She demands viewers go eye-to-eye with the
equivalent of road kill. She demands unflinching openness in full
view of painful contradictions. Essentially, Coe demands that we
re-examine our assumptions. When reading her books or looking at
her images, the natural reaction is to turn away, to shut out
horrific truths. One cannot meet her work without encountering
resistance. This is inevitable, because this is her intent.
Over
time her topics have steadily encroached upon her audience’s
personal space. Habitually in our faces, her topics now invade our
gullets. We may be able to maintain sufficient emotional distance
from the racism highlighted by her South Africa series, or closer
to home, her book on Malcolm X. However with Porkopolis, a series
on animals and industry, she brings the "personal implications of
moral collusion as uncomfortably close as our next meal."(1) Short
of becoming vegetarians, how do we avoid facing complicity in the
suffering, hazards, and greed that garnish each cheeseburger?
One
way is to kill the messenger. A score of newspaper and magazine
critiques illustrate the demands she makes and the resistance she
encounters. Three of these critiques dismiss her work entirely.
Joanna Shaw-Eagle finds no room in art or art museums for politics.
She imagines she sees Coe on top of a "moralistic soapbox, "
presenting "depraved images" about "familiar socio-political themes
that questionably pervade today’s art" (2) (emphasis added). Hank
Burchard insinuates Coe’s motivation is money, not morals. He
thinks he spots an ungrateful and avaricious Coe who, after
enjoying a free education at (British) government expense, "found
that commissions were petering out and so hopped a plane for New
York City, the capital of capitalism, where virtually from the
moment she landed she found steady, well-paying work as a freelance
illustrator for, among others, the New York Times."(3) M.D. Carnegie
believes Coe must be a "raving socialist" with "the intellect of a
stone or the conscience of an amoeba."(4) What these critics share,
beyond publication in three Washington, DC newspapers, is the very
"bombast," "blather," and "self-righteousness" with which they seek
to paint Coe.
Two additional reviewers, both from The Washington
Post, while refuting the above contentions, still manage to keep
their journalistic eyebrows elevated. Martha Sherrill pitches us
the psycho-social Coe, the "‘hot’... leftist illustrator" thrown
into contradiction and agonies of "embarrassment by having her
paintings and drawings exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum, that
glistening shrine full of capitalist treasures! And in The New
Yorker magazine...how bourgeois!"(5) Sherrill elides the admittedly
honest concerns that inform the content of Coe’s exhibition in
favor of her fashion sense and small talk during lunch. The critic
gets her tongue out of her cheek long enough for the requisite
biographic interlude, but the art in this supposed review is
dispensed with in two brief paragraphs. In essence Sherrill finds
the exhibition "enough to make you want to run from the room."(6)
Sherrill joins with Paul Richard to create a bind worthy of Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22. Following their logic, if Coe’s works hang in
a museum and have been bought by "a docent who looks as if she
could be a member of the Chevy Chase Club [that is, a] full blown
capitalist,"(7) then "aren’t thoughts of malefactors’ wealth bound to impoverish the injunctions of [Coe’s] art?"(8) This reasoning
attempts to justify ignoring the message of political art when it
appears in the quasi-public space of a well-endowed art museum or
when juxtaposed with advertising in a cultural artifact like The
New Yorker. The implication is that Coe’s pictorial evidence belongs only in a contradiction-free context, that is, the art
collections of the poor, exhibitions in ghetto store fronts, and
illustrations in union newsletters. The truth is contradictions
are inescapable. While these contradictions enrich our sense of
the ironic, they cannot limit or otherwise define the function and
setting for art.
Richard finds additional reasons to ignore the
message, while applauding its artistry. He concludes with a flurry
of "nagging questions." Referring to the art historical references
Coe draws and draws upon, he asks, "...maybe she expects us to
change our lives accordingly -- but how are we to do so while our
minds are grazing the history of art?"(9) One might suggest getting one’s "mind" out of the feed bag. Of course if her works were less
art and more political, picket signs for example, they would not be
fodder for art critics and thus could be safely ignored.
Richard
asks: "If the sexists and the racists and the awful rich are
everywhere in charge of the capitalist Establishment, why is it
that we so seldom see homophobic screeds, tracts against the
homeless, or rightist propaganda in commercial galleries, or in the
museums?"(10) Why indeed? Ask three more questions: first, who
needs museums and galleries to spew hate? There is now
well-organized support for it on a national scale in the guise of
a reactionary ten-point contract and a megalomaniac Speaker of the
House, who successfully plotted and then steered the 1994
Congressional yaw to the far right. Second, what happens to
exhibitions that present views in opposition to those of the
"Establishment?" Looking at Richard’s question through the other
end of his microscope, we see capitulation and compromise after the
outcry over the Mapplethorpe show and the multiple revisions of
history after the assault on the Smithsonian’s Hiroshima-Nagasaki
commemorative exhibit. Finally, who needs art anyhow? It isn’t a
power player in capitalistic circles. Richard has conflated the
predominantly humanistic precepts of those impelled to make art
with the capitalistic operations of those impelled to accumulate
and commodify it. Sadly, the inmates are not yet in charge of the
asylum.
Richard concludes, "If you try to ignore context (the
steak ads in the magazine, the Rothkos on the wall) and respond to
content only, you feel yourself a dupe. And if you take the other
tack, and look upon Coe’s pictures as fashionable commodities, you
have no heart at all."(11) Richard’s point about context is naive,
but let it stand for the sake of argument. He suggests that
content changes, chameleon-like, depending on shifts in background
context. This would explain the fact that government handouts of
money in the context of those who already have some are viewed as
incentive to make more but in the context of the poor is considered
a disincentive to get off welfare. Predictably, in a capitalistic
culture, one finds a dollar sign at the root of most arguments.
The rant and cant of these articles aside, residual subtexts of
rage and quizzical discomfort remain; little wonder these writers
are mad or uneasy, caught as they are between denial of reality and
admission of life’s ever-present contradictions. Coe’s vision
destroys an otherwise comfortable world view. Think of Coe’s image
of the family picnicking just the other side of the slaughterhouse
wall. They would not be so carefree if they recognized their true
position. At the very least, they would relocate. Coe reminds us
that we regularly dance on graves. The knowledge of that
transgression is an assault. If, as Richard puts it, we will not
"change our lives accordingly," we must either deny Coe’s vision or
view her as false or coopted. Richard appears to be blind to a
third and more obvious option. Political consciousness may grow;
accordingly, lives will change.
Other reviewers, all of whom live
and publish beyond the Beltway, don’t have these problems with
Coe’s work. Holland Cotter says Coe’s rage is "a kind of anger
that is tough love, and which understands that the real power of
art to hurt is also its power to heal."(12) Donald Kuspit finds it
to be "an art of conscience...an original moral style of picture in
which social truth is hammered home without becoming artistically
trivial. She has a courage of conviction that is always special
wherever it appears, not only because it is rare but because it is
so necessary, both to make art and to survive in the world."(13)
Michael Brenson, referring to the factual underpinnings of Coe’s
art, explains that "[t]he specificity of her work serves a number
of purposes. For one thing, it obliges us to consider exactly
where we stand. For another, it presents issues in a way that is
intended to mobilize us."(14)
Though Coe expects the denial and
rages her work provokes, it also surprises her. She is, after all,
only telling the truth. In X she advises viewers upset by her
vision: Here is a
literary artist of such originality that it is not easy to
conjecture what special influences have gone into the making of
her. But the indwelling spirit of it all is a sweet enlightened
sympathy, an unsleeping sense of humor, and an exquisite
carefulness of detail.(16)
The wonder at such unique qualities of
heart and mind ascribed to Gertrude Stein, in the passage quoted
above, serves to describe Coe as well. In retrospect, Coe’s
development follows a logical path but hardly one that could have
been predicted in 1972 when she arrived from England as a young pen
for hire. She didn’t choose the topics she illustrated for The New
York Times Magazine and op-ed pages. She didn’t work in series.
She didn’t think of herself as politically conscious. But all that
changed.
In New York, she became involved with the "‘Workshop for
People’s Art,’...a volunteer association of artists who produced
posters and pamphlets for community groups. Not only did the
Workshop introduce overt social advocacy to Coe’s assignments, but
the adjunct Marxist Library provided her initial exposure to the
work of politically oriented artists such as Otto Dix, John
Heartfield and Jose Clemente Orozco."(17)
Occasionally she was asked
to compromise or otherwise censor her images. Just as rejecting
such suggestions reduced the number of jobs that art editors
accepted, so her developing political consciousness reduced the
number of jobs that were acceptable to her. Curiosity prompted her
endless questioning, and a burgeoning political consciousness
reinforced her commitment to social activism.
By 1974 she had
started to investigate topics of her own choosing. A series on the
Ku Klux Klan reinforced her choice to pursue an image-based
journalism. The same year, she began "her first directly observed
series, on Manhattan street life. With this Coe discovered another
important core of her art: to transform specific events into
shared ones through visual affirmation of them"(18) (emphasis added).
While the events may be current or historical, there is a
historical component to all her research, as in the series on South
Africa, the Ku Klux Klan, or Malcolm X. With increasing frequency,
Coe becomes a living witness to the events she depicts: street
life, sweat shops, slaughterhouses, AIDS wards. Her focus remains
specific, exposing what is otherwise often hidden or ignored.
How
to Commit Suicide in South Africa, co-authored with Holly Metz, is
an excellent starting point from which to explore Coe’s analytical
perspective as well as her development. Viewed in a historical
context, the book firmly establishes her as a late 20th century
heir to Goya and Daumier, kin to Kathe Kollwitz, John Heartfield,
and George Grosz. In Suicide her earlier work intersects the
methodological path she would take in future projects: the book on
Malcolm X, the AIDS series of paintings and prints, and Porkopolis,
issued in book form as Dead Meat. How to Commit Suicide in South
Africa defines with sonorous eloquence an activist role for art and
artist on behalf of social justice.
The central image on Suicide’s
front cover is a barefoot, bloody, and manacled man. He has just
been thrown head first out of a high-rise window by two thugs who
resemble, respectively, a denizen of Bosch’s Purgatory and a Nazi
Party regular by Grosz or Heartfield. Heartfield’s genius was
graphics. He pioneered the use of photomontage in the service of
unsparing political caricatures published in posters and the German
labor press during the 1930s. Coe is equally unsparing in her
riveting presentation of horrific truths. Her intended audience is
as proletarian as Heartfield’s, and like him, she often wields text
in companionable support of image.
The title chills as it informs.
A thin line of red ink from one letter raggedly bisects the image.
The red ink suggests a rivulet of blood or a lifeline that will not
hold even if caught. It becomes a sub-vocal scream, this drawn out
letter "i," pulled down to street level, where in a heartbeat the
man and the jagged shards of window will land. Looking up is a
ghostly human form, marking with its own shadow the probable
landing site of this South African "suicide." Perhaps this ghost
figure is a previous victim. Passersby have not yet taken notice
of the event in progress. The scene is an eye-blink of stopped
motion, the picture’s frame wildly careening and on edge, like the
rampaging automobile in the street below.
Open the book out to
make a tent, cover side up. A single painting enfolds the
contents; the story begun on the front cover continues on the back.
The window from which the man has been thrown belongs to an
interrogation chamber, with one barred door and blood stains on the
floor. The thugs are uniformed, truncheon-equipped guards,
directed from a distance by a solemn man in a business suit. A
skeletal hell hound leaps through the outer darkness, in pursuit of
the falling, manacled figure. Mirroring the front cover, a thin
red crack bisects the back cover and the dog. Far below, the dog’s
shadowy outline echoes the human shadow on the ground.
This cover
is a waking nightmare. While in no sense photo realistic, it
depicts a specific, especially grotesque crime -- just one in a series
of repeated horrors.
Coe describes the impetus to choose this
topic: "I first got involved in South Africa when I read about
Steven Biko in 1976...When I found out how many people had died in
detention, many of them young idealists, I became enraged. Holly
and I wanted to make a record of all the people who died in
detention who supposedly committed suicide. We both believe that if
people know the facts, they’ll change the system. When divestment
became an issue on college campuses, students read the book. It
became an organizing tool, which is our highest ideal of how the
book could be used."(19)
Not surprisingly, Coe’s pointed images,
whether early or more recent, are often combined with text. "Words
[are] necessary to smooth over art’s inherent ambiguities and
transform it into an organizing tool."(20) The collaboration of text
with and within the image conveys information, drives the story and
engages the reader/viewer. Her text supports a variety of
functions and is employed in a variety of formats.
In Suicide the
text is organized into four chapters: 1) a chronology of South
African history; 2) a description of living and working conditions
for the non-white majority representing 84% of the population; 3)
the workings of BOSS (Bureau of State Security) reflected in news
reports about the torture and murder of detainees, including a list
of deaths whose official explanations generated the book’s title;
and finally, 4) the free world’s political and economic connections
supporting apartheid.
Most of the text is typeset; white letters
emerge from a black background, in well-footnoted vertical columns
or in horizontal blocks beneath the images that fill each page.
The reportage argues from factual, dispassionate evidence and
yields an explication of the reality that was South Africa at the
time. Occasionally, a newspaper clipping with headline, photo, and
text is inserted into a drawing or is re-drawn and put into the
hands of one of the figures.
Hand drawn text is often integral to
her images, and some text appears like graffiti on a wall in the
depicted landscape. "Peoples Republic" is an answer to a scrawled
"white republic," effaced by a large red "NO." In another image,
"HARLEM U$A SOWETO $A" appears as if chalked on the sidewalk in
the foreground, balancing a background sign proclaiming "Europeans
Only Dry Cleaners."
Sometimes these words function as headlines or
titles, that is, "cops fire into a crowd of UNARMED demonstrators
KILLING 70 wounding 200 SHARPeViLLE," or, most starkly in the
book’s centerpiece illustration, "S O U T H a F R I C A," where
each letter appears crudely clipped out and re-set, like a ransom
note.
Coe appreciates and employs a caricaturist’s sense of humor
to deliver her truths; a momentary assurance of something fun
before the gravity of the information takes hold. What we might
otherwise deny or avoid has breached our defenses, and little by
little, as we laugh, we learn. Suicide is not a funny book, but
the inside front cover prepares the reader for a darkly humorous
journey using "illustrations and copy from assorted South African
tourist brochures." They extol "a world in one country, where
summer is four seasons long." Coe unerringly skewers the
contradictions inherent in this hyperbole. The pretty pictures and
holiday phrases are transformed into a compendium of terminal
social ills, by no means limited to South Africa: racism, sexism,
monetarism, and the attendant clash of economic classes. Pictures
and captions float on a sea of dollar signs. This might well be
the world in one country but only for those who can afford it. The
bikini clad models luxuriating poolside demonstrate that "You can’t
be too thin or too rich" -- the title of one image the reader will
find inside. Another model presages Coe’s animal rights
investigations. She wears an annoyed expression and an anomalous
fur dress; given year-round summertime, the fashion appears silly
at first glance. A second glance conjures up class, caste, and
bloodshed.
These images and tourist come-ons frame a poem that
also urges a visit to South Africa, but here the perspective has
shifted: "...come/feel free/to admire jim crow’s big brother whose
superfine head/is a gold bullet, come/to where the white in your
flag is the law, come/be comfortable/in the land that provides
yours with/the diamonds you wear and want, come/to where friendship
with other colors is il-/legal/as we know you know it should be,
watch/how enforcement-en forces this and glance/at a deformed
justice successfully justifying, come/...to south africa."(21)
Coe
maintains "...you don’t take the particular to analyze the whole;
you take the whole to analyze the particular."(22) To understand a
condition, one must look at it in its larger context, yet this
vastness is not easily grasped. A specific event may be
comprehensible, but its meaning cannot be adequately analyzed
without recourse to the wider perspective. Moved by outrage and
sustained by research, Coe and Metz focus on Steven Biko and others
who died while in detention. These specific, personal tragedies
are seen to be inevitable, given the larger context of impersonal
economic evils that legislate apartheid, promote racism, and
promise monetary glories.
The inside back cover provides a
practical list of specifics: a thoughtful bibliography "meant to
spark further interest and action." There are notes on sources and
the addresses of relevant organizations. Such resource lists are
central to Coe’s activist motivation; they encourage and facilitate
the reader’s independent inquiry.
In the Porkopolis series, she
focuses on frightened and bewildered animals, shackled and conveyed
along slaughterhouse disassembly lines. Her compassionate gaze
rests on the workers as well, workers who sacrifice their fingers
and lives to the speed of the line. It gets very specific. The
egg industry’s superfluous male hatchlings are efficiently plowed
under the soil, whether alive, dead, or dying. The specifics
inevitably lead to broader concepts like sustainable economies and
ecologies, but these are not what Coe draws. Instead, she invites
the viewer to "look through her eyes, to see things as she sees
them. Thus viewer and artist are implicitly joined in a shared
exploration of reality, a search for meaning."(23)
She prefers the
editorial page to the museum exhibition as a venue to indict
economic and political crimes. She would put her artistic
evidence, literally, into the hands of the jury, believing people
are the ultimate source of justice. She believes that once an
injustice becomes public knowledge, rectification follows. "Of
course I’m an optimist -- how could I do this work if I wasn’t? If
I wasn’t an optimist, I’d deny it existed, because I wouldn’t think
it could be changed. But I think it will change -- it is
changing."(24) Her democratic stance combined with forceful and
original work, much of which first appeared in the press, has led
to gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide and a demand for her as
guest artist and lecturer. She has created more than 100 print
images, both large and small editions, that she frequently gives
away or sells, as she says, "cheap, cheap, cheap," for the benefit
of progressive causes.
Art Young (1866-1943),
a political cartoonist and one of the original editors of The
Masses, were he still alive, would applaud Coe’s approach and find
humorous those critics who think otherwise: "These propagandists
against propaganda amuse me. Propaganda is a kind of enthusiasm,
for or against something that you think ought to be spread that is,
propagated. Your propaganda may be wrong or not worth while from
another’s viewpoint, but that is a personal matter...There never
was a real work of art in which it is not plain that the author
wants you to share his loves and sympathies and his ideas of right
and wrong"(25) (emphasis added).
The notion of political art
continues to raise hackles and "difficult questions."(26) Is the
concept valid? Michael Brenson thinks it is, and valuable, but he
cautions that "the best political art...should be art first and
political second."(27) Brenson includes Coe among the few
contemporary artists able to successfully transform their political
passions into art.
Art historian Ralph Shikes, in his book The
Indignant Eye, asks and answers a similar question: "At what point
does a caricature or satirical political cartoon transcend topical
comment and become ‘art’? Probably when its draftsmanship is
superior and controlled, the composition inherently striking, the
impact of the conception immediate, the message of lasting
interest and perhaps when the artist’s reputation is secure in art
history books."(28) Shikes maintains that social realism as an art
form has lost much of its impact and relevance, thanks to the
development of photography, television and a "contemporary
eye...accustomed to abstraction. [T]he contemporary mind with any
sensitivity to the compelling problems and injustices of today
boggles at direct confrontation with social realism. A glancing
blow, an indirect expostulation, is more bearable."(29) Though apt,
that bleak image of social realism’s relevance in 1969 was offset
by the hope Shikes offered. In retrospect, he appears to have been
prescient: "...[I]t would be premature to assign realism
permanently to the graveyard of art styles. It is always possible
that there will appear a representational artist of sufficient
power and masterful draughtsmanship to overcome prejudice against
[her] images."(30)
She has appeared. Coe seems to take Walt
Whitman’s advice as her personal credo:
Coe’s work outrages even as it garners praise, a
sure indication we have struck Art -- alive and enduring.
(1) Susan Geer, Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1991.
(2) Joanna Shaw-Eagle, The Washington Times, March 24, 1994.
(3) Hank Burchard, The Washington Post, March 25, 1994.
(4) M.D. Carnegie, City Paper, Washington, DC, April 29, 1994.
(5) Martha Sherrill, The Washington Post, March 19, 1994.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid.
(8) Paul Richard, The Washington Post, March 19, 1994.
(9) Ibid.
(10) Ibid.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Holland Cotter, Arts Magazine, April 1985.
(13) Donald Kuspit, Artforum, 1985.
(14) Michael Brenson, The New York Times, April 19, 1985.
(15) Sue Coe, from X, 1986.
(16) Anonymous review of Three Lives by Gertrude Stein, Kansas City
Star, December 18, 1909, p. 5.
(17) Jane Kallir, 1991.
(18) Jane Kallir, 1989.
(19) Susan Gill, ARTnews, October 1987.
(20) Jane Kallir, 1989.
(21) Bernadine, from "where the sun always sits on your shoulders,"
in How to Commit Suicide in South Africa, 1983.
(22) Sue Coe, interviewed by Mark Scala, New Art Examiner, April
1987.
(23) Jane Kallir, 1991.
(24) Kristine McKenna, Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1991.
(25) Art Young, On My Way, 1928.
(26) Michael Brenson, The New York Times, April 29, 1984.
(27) Ibid.
(28) Ralph Shikes, The Indignant Eye, 1969, p. xxvi.
(29) Ibid. p. 392-393.
(30) Ibid.
(31) Walt Whitman, cited by Paul Berman, The New Yorker Magazine,
June 12, 1995.
Are these pictures all too dark for you?
Too much black?
Too much blue?
Too much squalor? Too much crime
in this landscape
of our time?
Then open your eyes,
X out their lies,
and work
with your minds,
your hearts, your sinews for a better world.
Evolution continues toward Freedom by any means necessary.
BY ANY
MEANS NECESSARY!(15)How the Subject Became Slaughter
The Politics of Art
This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms
to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote
your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning
God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your
hat to nothing known or unknown.(31)
Footnotes
Bibliography
Anon. art review, The New York Times, Friday, October 13, 1989.
Adams, Brooks, "The Coldest Cut: Sue Coe’s Porkopolis," Art in America, January 1990.
Brenson, Michael, "Can Political Passion Inspire Great Art?" The New York Times, April 24, 1984.
___. The New York Times, April 19, 1985.
___. X, The New York Times, C20, November 14, 1986.
Burchard, Hank, "Capitalizing on Capitalism," The Washington Post, Weekend, p. 57, Friday, March 25, 1994.
Carnegie, M.D., "The Coe War," City Paper, Washington, DC, p. 43, April 29, 1994.
Cotter, Holland, "Sue Coe: Witness," Arts Magazine, April 1985.
Dorsey, John, "Sue Coe dispenses the strong medicine of polemical art," The Baltimore Sun, p. 1L, Sunday, March 21, 1993.
___, "With Sue Coe’s art you get the message clearly," The Baltimore Sun, Friday, March 26, 1993.
Geer, Susan, "‘Porkopolis:’ The Nightmare Vision of Sue Coe," Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, July 23, 1991.
Gill, Susan, "Sue Coe’s Inferno," ARTnews, October 1987.
Hess, Elizabeth, "Sacred Pigs," The Village Voice, p. 103, October 10, 1989.
Kuspit, Donald, "Sue Coe: P.P.O.W.," exhibition review, Artforum, September 1985.
Lewis, Joe, book review, How to Commit Suicide in South Africa, Artforum, April 1984.
McKenna, Kristine, "Slaughter of the Soul," Los Angeles Times, Sunday, August 4, 1991.
Negin, Elliott, "This Little Piggie Went to Market," City Paper, Washington, DC, February 16, 1990.
Nesbitt, Lois E., "Sue Coe: Galerie St. Etienne," exhibition review, Artforum, January 1990.
Princenthal, Nancy, "Sue Coe: P.P.O.W.," exhibition review, ARTnews, September 1985.
Richard, Paul, "Painting Herself Into a Corner: The Rich Contradictions of the Raging Leftist," The Washington Post, D1, Saturday, March 19, 1994.
Scala, Mark, "The Dictates of Conscience: An Interview with Sue Coe," New Art Examiner, April 1987.
Shaw-Eagle, Joanna, "Sue Coe’s Show Falls Victim to Victimized Orthodoxy," The Washington Times, C22, March 24, 1994.
Sherrill, Martha, "Painting Herself Into a Corner: Sue Coe is ‘Hot.’ Does That Make Her a Hypocrite?" The Washington Post, D1, Saturday, March 19, 1994.
Tallman, Susan, "Sue Coe and the Art of Abuse," Arts Magazine, p. 21-2, April 1989.
Yau, John, "Sue Coe," Interview, Flash Art, May/June 1986.
Barter, Judith, and Anne Mochon, "PORKOPOLIS: Sue Coe’s Jungle," exhibition catalogue, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA: 1993.
Coe, Sue, Dead Meat, Introductory essay by Alexander Cockburn, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995.
Coe, Sue, Police State, Texts by Mandy Coe; essays by Donald Kuspit and Marilyn Zeitlin. Richmond: Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1987.
Coe, Sue, X, Text by Judith Moore. NY: Raw Books and Graphics, #6, 1986.
Coe, Sue and Holly Metz, How to Commit Suicide in South Africa, NY: Raw Books and Graphics, #2, 1983 and London: Knockabout Comics (second printing), 1983.
Coe, Sue, and Mandy Coe, Meat: Animals and Industry, Vancouver: Gallerie Women Artists’ Monographs, 1991.
Gettings, Frank, "Directions," exhibition essay, Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1994.
Heller, Steve, Innovators of American Illustration, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986.
___, and Gail Anderson, The Savage Mirror, the art of contemporary caricature, NY: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1992.
Kallir, Jane, "Porkopolis -- Animals and Industry," exhibition essay, NY: Galerie St. Etienne, 1989.
___, "Political Document of a Decade," exhibition essay, NY: Galerie St. Etienne, 1991.
Morreau, Jacqueline, ed., forward by Marshall Arisman and introduction by Russell Mills, Paintings and Drawings by Sue Coe, Metuchen and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1985.
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