Sarah Lucas was part of a group of Goldsmiths graduates who revitalized British art in the 1990s. In her work, jokes that seem to be one-liners segue into a serious interrogation of cultural representations of sexuality. Lucas specializes in what has become a staple feature of the tabloid press, innuendo about women's bodies. Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992) is an arrangement of foods whose names are slang terms for the breasts and vagina, on a tabletop. But Lucas de-stabilizes the role of the sexes in such humor. Writing in 1905, Freud argued that the smutty joke functioned as a form of exchange between men, enabling them to bond with each other, while, at the same time, excluding and objectifying women. In Lucas's work, a woman is making, rather than just taking, a joke. And, representing the penis as an arrangement of a cucumber and two oranges in Au nature! {1994), she plays on the long history of male artists, notably Gauguin and Picasso, representing women as or with fruit.
Photographs are an important part of Lucas's practice. She has made self-portraits, picturing herself with fried eggs laid on her chest, cigarettes hanging from her mouth, standing by women's underwear flapping on a washing line, or wielding a salmon. With her deadpan stare, heavy boots, jeans, lank hair and no make-up, Lucas resolutely refuses a femininity founded on decoration, in favor of barefaced aggression and ambiguity.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, installed at London's Freud Museum in 2000, Lucas played on the psychoanalysts' account of the interdependence of male and female sexuality. Chairs 'wearing' male and female underwear were linked by a long strip-light, symbolizing an erection. Lucas's work was tongue in cheek, but, by emphasizing the constructed, social nature of Freud's theories (she used furniture and clothes, not bodies, to represent masculinity and femininity), she exposed them as forms of representation. Joking aside, she has made a series of works featuring limbs protruding from chairs that are unsettling in their fragility and pathos. In the Tate Collection's Pauline Bunny, the skinny black-stockinged 'legs' dangle, splayed, in a failed attempt at sexiness. Lucas has also exhibited cakes. Covered with pictures of her work in edible ink, featuring her face, her cigarettes, her toilet, they subverted a most 'feminine' of activities, cake decoration; a punchy commentary on cultural consumerism. |
