Artists as diverse as painter Betty Tompkins and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe had been merging art and pornography since the '70s. But these last works, made in 1989, caused a local firestorm in New York (plus a few groves of academe), where arguments over women's subjugation were fierce.
Minter's work absorbs a glut of lessons from a variety of artists. There are the Photorealist fingerprint works of Chuck Close, Minimalist conundrums within Sylvia Plimack Mangold's figurative images, Bruce Nauman's video-clown having a temper tantrum, Sigmar Polke's half-tone hysteria, the hyper-realist razzle-dazzle of Janet Fish's still lifes, the feminine sentimentality of Mike Kelley's stuffed animal sculptures, Jeff Koons' cheerful vulgarity and more.