ART-PRESENTATION: Sarah Lucas-Au Naturel, Part II

Sarah Lucas arrived on the English Art Scene via the 1988 group exhibition “Freeze”, alongside several other young British artists coming out of Goldsmiths, University of London. Lucas is a feminist who uses humour, irony and sexual paronomasias to explore the everyday English culture and sexual and psychological tensions. Her works reflect and satirise misogynist norms in general life, tabloids and pornography (Part I).

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: New Museum Archive

Over the past thirty years, Sarah Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. The first major survey in the United States of the work of Sarah Lucas entitled “Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel” spans Lucas’s entire career, bringing together 150 of her most iconic works and series from the late 1980s to today. The exhibition address the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power, along with the legacy of surrealism, from her clever transformations of everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the familiar and the disorienting or absurd. The title of the exhibition is taken from her sculpture “Au Naturel” (1994) in which two melons and a bucket alongside two oranges and a cucumber on an old mattress are used to represent a heterosexual couple in bed. Lucas’s shift between high and low art and culture operates as a shift between “high” aesthetic ideas about the art object as a metaphoric play of meaning and its “low” associations with the materiality of the literal object and its allusions to the genitals and sex. Applying the term to Lucas’s greater body of work, the title speaks to the immediacy, intimacy, and directness of her images and speculates on the possibility of a natural state, perhaps without the limitations of established social structures and gender conformity. In her photographic self-portraits, starting with the seminal “Eating a Banana” (1990), she adopts a confrontational macho or ‘butch’ appearance while acting as an object of male desire through sexual euphemisms and suggestive body language. Sometimes this involves produce such as an uncooked chicken, fried eggs, bananas or fish acting as substitutes for male or female sexual organs. The same principle is extended to her installations, including “Au Naturel” (1994). Alongside perishable produce, a common early motif in the artist’s work was cigarettes. Whether the cigarettes act as the material of her work, as in “Self Portrait with Cigarettes” (2000), or are seen in hand during one of her more vulnerable self-portrait photographs, such as “Human Toilet Revisited” (1998). This use of commonplace items is typical of Lucas’ sculptural practice. Following in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp, Lucas sees the ironic and euphemistic potential in certain everyday objects. Her “Is Suicide Genetic?” (1996), made from a toilet bearing writing, may be seen as a direct nod to Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1971). Combinations of such ready-made items were sometimes used by Lucas as stand-ins for fragmented or whole bodies, as in “Bitch” (1995), where a table, T-shirt, two melons and a vacuum-packed smoked fish mimic a female body. Lucas positioned these ambiguous forms to resemble parts or the whole of the human body in sexual poses and emphasise organs associated with sex and desire. A hallmark of her more recent sculpture (since 2009) has been the fleshy, human-like, long tubular forms made with stuffed tights and wire. These are arranged provocatively to reinforce their representation of sexualised female limbs. The way they twist and curve, sometimes engulfing themselves, is evocative of an intimate embrace. Lucas first began experimenting with the stuffed stockings in her ‘Bunny’ series (started in 1997). Alongside the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking “Bunnies” (1997- ) and “NUDS” (2009- ), the “Penetralia” series (2008- ), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never been shown together in the United States. Lucas is also creating new sculptural works for the exhibition, which are exhibited in an installation on the New Museum’s Fourth Floor.

Info: Curators: Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 26/9/18-20/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org