There are few contemporary artists who have explored the messy complexity of the body, gender and sex to the same extent as British artist Sarah Lucas. Coming to prominence in the early ‘90s as a member of the notorious Young British Artist group (other members included Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst) Lucas made a name for herself as an outspoken and subversive artist absolutely disinterested in making tame, crowd-pleasing art. Instead, her work is characterised by its brash, spirited humour and its audacious ability to overturn gendered stereotypes. Her 2013 exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, for example, presented room after room of penises — from ludicrous wallpaper to unctuous sculptures and stony monuments, Lucas compelled visitors to consider the tenuous state of masculinity. Exhibitions such as this one illustrate her unrivaled ability to wield laughter and disgust in order to reveal the fragility of the human condition.
Despite the frank and provocative nature of Lucas’ art, the New Museum is the first American institution to show a major survey of her work. Au Naturel, which opened on Wednesday in New York, presents an extensive exploration of her career over the past 30 years. For all its lewd suggestion and tongue-in-cheek perversion, it’s the masterful use of material that makes her work stand out. As the writer Maggie Nelson notes, “It’s a capacity to work with fairly plain materials until they shimmer into something uncanny and precise, akin to summoning a fetish”. As Lucas says herself, her work “jumps to life” — her art beats with a vital, queasy energy that encompasses so much of what it means to be a person, full of desire and shame and raw, untempered feeling.
On the opening of this exhibition, we take five of Lucas’ key works to ascertain why her work is still as gutsy and electrifying as ever.
1. Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs (1994)
Perhaps the definitive Lucas work, this iconic self-portrait represents much of what we have come to know and love about her art. In many of her self-portraits, Lucas appropriates the conventions of masculinity, drawing into question the stability of gendered identities through humour and performance. In this one, Lucas, dressed in ripped straight leg jeans, a black t-shirt and robust construction site shoes, slouches on an armchair with her legs outstretched — a bold iteration of what’s now known as the classic manspread. The cool confidence and self-assured attitude is crudely disrupted by the humorous insertion of two runny splats of fried eggs. Made at a time in the ‘90s when obnoxious beer-swilling lad culture was at a zenith in the British cultural imagination, Lucas’ portrait pokes fun at the perception of gender as solid and serious.
2. Au Naturel (1994)
Famously exhibited at Charles Saatchi’s scandalous Sensation exhibition in the Royal Academy in 1997 (later at the Brooklyn Museum), Au Naturel is one of Lucas’ most critically-lauded works, even lending its name to the New Museum retrospective. In this piece, a squashed, stained mattress lies on the floor. Two melons poke out of the folds along with a discarded bucket, a comically erect cucumber and two suggestively-positioned oranges. Like most of Lucas’ works, what you see is what you get. The meaning is exactly the connotation: objects as substitutes for genitalia — the brazen implication of sex. In its unflinching simplicity, Au Naturel not only captures the baseness of human desire, but also demonstrates Lucas’ capacity as an artist — as art historian Anne Wagner so succinctly puts it her catalogue essay— “to mine the semantic possibilities of everyday things”. The smartness of Au Naturel is in the suggestion, the wink-wink nudge-nudge in the deliberate placement of humble objects.
3. Bunny gets Snookered (1997)
“I made the first Bunny almost accidentally, meaning I didn’t have a clear idea of where I was heading with the tights I was stuffing,” says Lucas about how her famous Bunnies — uncanny corporeal forms made from stuffed tights — came about. Bunny Gets Snookered was first exhibited at Sadie Coles’ gallery in London, consisting of eight knotty forms positioned around a snooker table. The Bunnies are key works in Lucas’ canon, highlighting her keen engagement with Surrealism — notably Hans Bellmer’s eerie dolls and Louise Bourgeois’ cloth sculptures — and her ability to allude to the body through a deft manipulation of material. In these soft structures, nylon stockings become flesh, making apparent the shape-shifting fluidity of the body and the strange gendered connotations we ascribe to things —in this case tights as a locum for the female body. But, like with Au Naturel all the meaning resides in the material, as Lucas says herself, “Tights are so sexy in a way”. Her Bunnies would later transform into the solidified NUDS — plump, tangled sculptures evoking the fleshiness of the body despite their hard materiality.
4. Nature abhors a vacuum (1998)
Due to the bawdy irreverence of her work, Lucas’ corpus frequently demonstrates a cheeky toilet humour that sometimes manifests into versions of actual toilets. Nature abhors a vacuum is one such example of her interest in bodily humour and taboo, rendering a toilet out of cigarettes. Needless to mention, it’s a strange marriage of ideas, combining the scatological with the oral fixation of smoking. Of course, the implementation of a toilet in a gallery space is a typically brass-necked Lucas move, one which recalls Duchamp’s infamous urinal and the sticky issue as to what constitutes a piece of art in the first place. Nature abhors a vacuum is not the only work revolving around the dark abyss of the toilet bowl; in another famous piece, Is Suicide Genetic? (1996) she scrawls these chilling words around the filthy rim in brown paint. For Lucas, toilets “carry a lurid fascination” making us acutely aware of our own crude humanity.
5.Great Dates (1992)
In this final example, Lucas employs British tabloid cuttings to reveal the absurdity of gendered representations in the media. Back in the late ‘80s/ early ‘90s — the golden age of the red tops — titles such as The Sun, The Mirror and The Daily Sport splashed voluptuous, half-naked women across their pages. In a comic turning of the tables — by including her self-portrait in the collage — Lucas mocks this salacious culture by both participating in it (the typically suggestive action of eating a banana) and by subverting it (the look she gives the camera is more “Don’t mess with me” rather than come hither). Although Page 3 might be a thing of the past, the obsessive interest in women’s bodies has reached new heights in the age of the internet, and Lucas’ fearless commentary still packs as much of a punch today as it did in the early ’90s.
“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel” runs until 20 January 2019 at the New Museum.
All images courtesy of the New Museum and Sadie Coles Gallery London.