Sarah Lucas

A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by art historian Linda Nochlin, this book was published on the occasion of the Sarah Lucas's solo exhibition at Gladstone in 2005. Using self-portraiture, found-object constructions, and collage, Lucas confronts the alternately grotesque and absurd euphemistic associations with the body and sex, humorously breaking down the camouflage of Puritanism, political correctness, and sexism from which these negative abstractions arise.

 

The bawdy tone consistent in both her sculpture and self-portraiture fights fire with fire, confronting the misogynistic tendencies of contemporary British culture. A careful balance of the blatant and the subtle, she ties lewd clichés and desultory slang to sculpture while exposing its linguistic meaninglessness. The pairing of humor, as evidenced in the titles of her work, and the rough-hewn aesthetic she favors not only matches in vulgarity the sexism she attacks, but serves to deflate the offense by holding a mirror to it.

 

Lucas incorporates a pared-down vocabulary to create taut and thoughtful works meditating on themes that have always held her interest: the double bind faced by contemporary women, the messy intricacies of sex and love, and the rickety concepts of domesticity and religion. Using Victorian bed frames, stockings, and bald light bulbs, she evokes the untidiness of the body, the futility of the conventions used to frame and control it, and in the end, the pessimism that notions of monogamy and life-long commitment stir up in the contemporary mind. Because of the light touch Lucas applies through humor, the responses these evoke are never so cut and dried: By towing the lines of vulgarity and thoughtfulness her sculptures provoke questions about the mediation of base humanity in society, as much as they try to resolve the inherently tangled subjects she queries.

 

Published by Gladstone, 2005

Hardcover 

ISBN 0-9703422-3-3