SUE COE'S work is about anger, about making art that cannot be absorbed into a system she abhors and about art with the power to provoke political action. In her graphic images, the narrative and expressive currents of contemporary art, as well as the present widespread identification with animals and nature, are channeled into political statements.
Using collage and the vocabulary of outrage developed by Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Goya, George Grosz, K"athe Kollwitz and the Mexican muralists, Coe pieces together images that are direct and unequivocal. Her mixed-media works on paper and canvas are filled with black-and- white contrasts, abruptly shifting perspectives and human and spatial dislocations. The nearly naturalistic is juxtaposed with the satirical. Most of the images contain words, sometimes written in blood red, which make the content unmistakable.
The more than 40 works in the show at the P.P.O.W. Gallery, 216 East 10th Street, through May 12, give the impression of a cruel, claustrophobic, nightmarish world divided between ruthless oppressors and helpless victims. The sense of black and white, good and evil, blessed and damned is as emphatic as it is in doctrinaire and religious art. The ''bad'' - Ronald Reagan, the State, Capitalism - are grotesquely evil. Their victims are martyred and angelic.
Coe was born in London. She moved to the United States in 1972. By immersing us in a tide of local and international issues, she intends to make it as difficult as possible to see any issue as an isolated problem or an aberration. Coe's subjects include police brutality, exploitation by landlords, teen-age prostitution, capital punishment, vivisection, violence in Northern Ireland, apartheid, the Central Intelligency Agency and the nuclear arms industry. Some of the bitterest anger is directed toward the control and exploitation of women. Coe illustrated the cover for Germaine Greer's 1984 book, ''Sex and Destiny. The Politics of Human Fertility.''
The distinguishing characteristic of Coe's work may be its absoluteness. There are no questions asked; there is no curiosity about the other side or doubt that everyone is either part of the solution or part of the problem. The 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. By making her position so unequivocal and her rejection of the existing power system so categorical, Coe also intends to make it extremely hard for that system to assimilate her.
This is not work that is going to speak to anyone who does not share its point of view. Coe is not an artist who will reassure anyone who is troubled not only by the complacency and exploitation of the right but also by the inflexibility and exclusiveness of the left. But she has produced a passionate, uncompromising body of work through which it is possible to approach many issues engaging political art now. And Coe's images will reinforce anger about some or all of the issues with which she is concerned.