ART CITIES:N.York-Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas’s practice is characterized by irreverent humour and the creation of visual puns and vulgar euphemisms. Spanning sculpture, photography, and installation, her work evokes the body in its physical, cultural, and psychic dimensions. In her compositions, Lucas often uses everyday objects as a substitute for the human body: furniture, food, tabloid newspapers, tights, toilets, and cigarettes are usually coupled with slang and crude genital innuendo.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gladstone Gallery

New soft sculptures and bronzes by Sarah Lucas from her ongoing body of Bunnies, which she began making in 1997 are on show in her exhibition “Honey Pie”. Expanding her unique visual language of pantyhose, stuffing, and chairs, to include concrete, bronze, and steel, that Lucas has employed since her rise to international prominence in the mid-nineties, the works in this show demonstrate the artist’s powerful ability to transform utilitarian materials into conceptually complex objects that pose urgent questions about gender, sexuality, and identity. Throughout her career, Lucas’s works have dealt candidly and humorously with the body while grappling with themes such as a sex, death, and the notion of Englishness, and the Bunnies masterfully capture these core elements of her practice. Comprised of stuffed pairs of tights placed ungracefully on chairs, the figures are meant to evoke splayed legs, highlighting the awkward, absurd, and vulnerable positions and situations these figures inhabit. While the Bunnies signify Lucas’s earliest examples of works that use stuffed stockings to create anthropomorphic human forms, Lucas began to expand their scope by creating a body of work entitled “NUDS”, which consists of abstract knots or contortions out of similar materials while also introducing gold-hued bronze and concrete. The “NUDS” started to take the shapes of slouching humanoid forms placed atop concrete brick pedestals transforming the suggestive knots into recognizable bodies. In this installation, Lucas has merged these contortions, also adding shoes into the mix, to create plump and luscious figures both de Sadean and mod. Each lump and seated torsion of perverted fun and twisted discipline is an affective and narrative turn: these are sweetened-up honeys, haus fraus out for a thrill, hens gone mad. Questioning conventions and highlighting the absurdity of the everyday, Sarah Lucas is as humorous as she is critical. One of Lucas’ most famous works “Two Fried Eggs and Kebab”, parodies the traditional still life and evokes similarities between itself and feminist Judy Chicago’s infamous piece “The Dinner Party”. Feminist reviews often describe Lucas as attempting to add female artists into the canon of art history through her analytical work that predominantly discusses the female body and voyeurism. Appropriating masculine constructions, Lucas does so by confronting and dissecting their nature. Her pieces represent a fantastical world and playfully employs unrealistic ideals to unearth obscene paradoxes created by those very constructions. Specifically, she is concerned with the casual misogyny of everyday life and employs the conventions of middle class or ‘street’ language to enact her concepts. Her appropriation of masculine symbols such as the phallic banana or ‘fried eggs’ in conjunction with her fearless and dominating gaze, takes ‘female work’ out of the feminine sphere and disrupts the patriarchal power dynamic of the gaze. Works such as “The old in Out” (1988) is a clear reference to Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917) and “Two Fried Eggs and Kebab” (1922) has been linked to Édouard Manet ’s “Olympia” (1863). While Lucas continues the artistic legacy of feminist artists such as Hannah Wilke, Cindy Sherman, and Rachel Whiteread, her visual language empties femininity of meaning and thus removes her from such a clear ‘feminist art’ title. Sexuality is not apparent in her works and a lack of association with morality leaves viewers at the free will of her humorous narratives. Lucas takes on the role as a source of reflecting sexism, but not overtly commenting on it. She has stated that, “I am not trying to solve the problem. I’m exploring the moral dilemma by incorporating it”. Her works are both literal and conceptual evidence of Lucas searching for meaning. Whether its through recognizable forms or her own mythologized fantasies, her ideas constantly build and transform. She appears to never be satisfied with her outcome and scours every imaginable medium for an outlet that is fitting. To her, the artworks she make “…carry on talking and thinking with other people”. Lucas’s practice is then not compulsive ramblings or automatic depictions, but a conscious yearning for a personal sense of happiness.

Info: Gladstone Gallery, 130 East 64th Street, New York, Duration: 6/3-25/4/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com