Sarah Lucas was one of the original Young British Artists who impressed and dazzled in their 1997 ‘Sensation’ exhibition. Born in 1962, Lucas was a youthful stroppy 35 at the time of that exhibition, and her works made an immediate impact for their laddish, in-your-face, disrespectful jokiness about sex and sexual stereotypes, which felt blunt and working class, lacking all bourgeois pretence.
Lucas was very photogenic and her most memorable early works feature herself in laddish, ‘yeah, so what?’ kinds of poses, taking the mickey out of sexual stereotypes, but also just looking winningly young and carefree. Several of these images have become popular postcards, the kind you find alongside countless images of Frieda Kahlo in arty shops in the boujee parts of any English town.
‘Self Portrait with Fried Eggs’ by Sarah Lucas (1996) NOT included in ‘Happy Gas’ @ Tate Britain
Happy Gas
This is a relatively small (just four rooms) retrospective of Lucas’s career, which features works across a range of media including sculpture, installation and photography.
‘Happy gas’ is the slang name for the nitrous oxide which kids these days snort out of those shiny metal canisters you see scattered round the streets. Like lots of the other everyday objects she puts in a gallery, this common-or-garden slang phrase acquires all kinds of new resonances and implications when turned into the title of an exhibition. The curators suggest it is just the latest in her many, many insistences on the intrinsic worth of English working class culture, its words and phrases, images and unashamed chav vitality.
Sara’s quotes
A distinctive thing about the exhibition is that all the captions and commentary are provided by Lucas herself. An important part of being a contemporary artist is having the right kind of thing to say (see the career of the extremely articulate Anthony Gormley). On the evidence of this show, Lucas has perfected the art of quotes-with-attitude. What she says is not only always interesting but highly flavoured; feels like it comes from the punky, ‘street’ attitude she’s embodied right from the start.
Her comments are also consistently funny, droll, in their blank factuality, in the way she accepts the glum seediness of working class life and makes it funny. Or is surreal in a wonderfully English, cup of tea, kind of way. Thus of one sculpture she writes:
‘Reasons for making a penis: appropriation, because I don’t have one; voodoo; economics; totemism; they’re a convenient size for the lap; fetishism; compact power; Dad; why make the whole bloke?; gents; gnomey; because you don’t see them on display much; for religious reasons having to do with the spark.’
Gnomey, lol.
Room 1
You open the door into a long wide gallery space and are immediately assaulted by the massive photo at the end. A ready-to-cook chicken is placed on the groin of a young (?) woman wearing sensible knickers. The gaping hole at the bottom of the chicken, where it is traditional to put the stuffing, is carefully situated above the woman’s vulva. It’s titled ‘Chicken knickers’ (1997).
I burst out laughing when I saw this, which was my reaction to lots of the rest of Lucas’s art, but I suppose there are still lots of people who are so uptight about sex that they might be offended.
Installation view of room 1 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain
In the foreground you can see two old wooden chairs, sitting on a plinth of grey breeze blocks. On one chair is a wax effigy of a dildo or penis, on the other a pair of false teeth. The work’s title is ‘The old couple’, from 1992, and it is a visual gag. Maybe the teeth have to be removed to allow the penis to get a good gumming. Or they are images of age and decay. As an older person I find it both a funny schoolboy gag and also touching. But note the presence of a) the chairs b) the concrete. We’ll come back to those.
Turning round you see the door you just came through has a lovely photo of the young artist in typically scruffy student clothes standing outside what appears to be a Men’s toilet and holding an enormous dead fish. Is this a riff on the feminist saying from the 1980s, ‘a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle’? The work’s title is ‘Got a salmon on’, from 1997. Is that a joke reference to having a hard-on?
The back wall of room 1 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain
More than anything else, it just looks like a typical crappy, derelict London street to me, with a scruffy student in front of a typically locked-up toilet.
Covering the entire right wall is a set of three enormous blown-up images of tabloid newspapers from the 1990s. Lucas doesn’t have to manipulate them in any way, they just are what they are, horrific, hilarious, messages from another time. Similarly, she hasn’t given them fancy titles but just used the headlines themselves, from left to right: ‘Pairfect match’, ‘Sod you gits’ and ‘Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous’.
Tabloid pages about boobs blown up to huge size and framed in room 1 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain
Let’s quote Lucas herself:
‘I didn’t give feminism much serious thought until my mid-20s. I came across a book by Andrea Dworkin called Intercourse and another called Pornography. I was drawn to the titles. And they… trawled through pornography and other atrocities committed against women. Fighting fire with fire… It caused a schism in my feelings towards men. At that point I started using tabloid newspapers. And really I didn’t have to add any comment. I just blew them up and put them in a gallery. And people, most of whom must have seen this stuff every day of their lives, felt in the self-conscious atmosphere of the gallery, that I was criticising them in some way. Maybe I was.’
I was talking about her super blunt use of language, at least in the works themselves. Thus, on the right in the second photo you can see a very funny sculpture of a mannekin’s hand and arm set at an angle over an old chair and attached to a machine which makes it perform a monotonous up and down motion is simply titled ‘Wanker’ (1999). This is related to the 2000 work ‘Max’s Wanking Armchair’, where a similar masturbating mannekin arm is coming out of an old armchair.
On the subject of language, there’s an easy-to-miss work on the opposite side to the huge tabloid pages, which is called Five Lists. It is simply five pieces of paper, each one containing a list of very rude swearwords. As Lucas explains:
‘When I compiled my Five Lists … I was spending summer in Rome. Impossibly hot and I had no equipment to speak of so I set myself the task of just pulling things out of my memory. It was 1990 so I must have been 27. I made five lists one for women, one for men, one for homosexuals, one for wanking and one for excrement – these seemed to be the main categories that swearing could be divided by in English. I saw the overlap. And the hatred. I was already aware, instinctively, since childhood, of a distinction between people swearing humorously or with venom and bile, I suppose we all are – but I hadn’t thought clearly until then about how whole classes of people had language stacked against them, including sexism and racism. I retaliated with Five Lists.’
The curators lament that ‘Casual or everyday language is still not often part of the description of contemporary art’, well, hmm, whose fault is that? Who curates art exhibitions? Could it be art exhibition curators? If you want to see the extreme opposite of Lucas’s plain speaking, visit the Barbican’s RE/SISTERS exhibition, where every caption is a festival of impenetrable critical theory.
Room 2
Walking through into room 2 is a stunning experience. The room is long and vividly and dramatically lined with enormous blown-up images of the (fairly famous) image of Lucas eating a banana. She looks stunning. The photos were taken in 1990 by fellow artist Gary Hume and bring out her cocky, confident street style, her androgynous haircut and well-defined features, her great sense of humour. Bananas.
Installation view of room 2 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain
But what are all these things on plinths along the middle of the room? These are what Lucas has come to call ‘bunnies’. They are tights stuffed with fabric, most often cotton wool, and then loaded with piles of comical boobs with bright pink or brown nipples.
‘I’ve been making Bunnies for a long while. The first one from the mid 1990s is in this show. I’m not constantly making them but it’s something I’ve returned to from time to time and they’ve evolved over the years. It struck me, quite recently, that they’re mostly very thin. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I had a sudden urge to make some fleshy ones. It must be a combination of the fleshiness and the saggy tits that make them appear old to you. The latter probably. It turns out, surprisingly you may think, that a saggy tit is very expressive.’
Point one, it’s surprising how many shapes you can arrange these stuffed tights and boob explosions into, and how expressive they can be. Most are funny, some are sad, I found one or two of the artfully staged ones deliberately erotic.
Point two, the bunnies are headless. Now this arises from a simple fact which is that they’re stuffed tights and tights aren’t intended to come up to the head. It may have a secondary spin-off, a feminist interpretation satirising the way men (allegedly) regard women as sex objects. But there’s another point which only dawned on me half way round, which is that the bunnies in the middle of the room are headless but the wall is lined with heads, versions of Lucas’s head. In some voodoo way the headless stuffed tights are completed by the banana-eating artist (maybe; from certain angles…)
Third point is that, like any artist, having stumbled across a form or genre, Lucas experimented with it. Thus the early bunnies are made from nylon stuffed with newspaper or cotton wool, but about half way down she begins to branch out into other material. Some are made of plastic but the most impactful ones are the ones which were, presumably made from tights and wool, but then cast in bronze. These have a completely different vibe from the fabric bunnies. Those are funny; these, by virtue of the material, are more statuesque, enduring, strange and challenging.
Bronze bunnies from ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain
Fourth point, chairs. Let’s talk about chairs.
Chairs
Chairs are everywhere. The first object in room 1 is an old chair, ‘Wanker’, the final object as you exit the exhibition is a swish modern armchair penetrated by fluorescent tubes. There are quite a few chairs in all four rooms and Lucas is aware of their importance to her work.
The purpose of chairs (in the world) is to accommodate the human body sitting. They can be turned to other purposes. Generally as a support for an action or object. Changing light bulbs. Propping open a door. Posing. Sex…The character of the chair lends mood and meaning to the sculpture. The progression of chair sculptures through the years adds up to a world populated by these characters.’
If you ignore the booby figures sprawling all over them, the chairs themselves amount to a kind of history of office chairs, or a Sargasso Sea of Lost Chairs. Millions of hours of office tedium redeemed by having ludicrous cartoon bodies in platform shoes exploding all over them.
‘I like the idea of using a particularly naff piece of furniture and exploring its inherent character or hidden elegance by working on it.’
Surprisingly, running deeper than all the overt feminist subject matter, one of the themes of the exhibition is the pathos of chairs.
Room 3
In contrast to the long grey concrete wall of room 2, the walls of room 3 are painted peach. This gives it a strong visual unity which compensates for the more scattered, varied nature of the exhibits.
Installation view of room 3 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain
In this installation view of room 3 you can see, from left to right:
1. The concrete cast of a TV with ‘THE LAW’ inscribed on it.
2. From this a spread of pink plastic like some spilled liquid extends as far as the concrete cast of a woman’s lower body sitting astride a section of concrete pipe. You can’t see it in this photo but wedged into her buttocks is a cigarette, sticking out at a jaunty angle.
3. Hanging over the pink plastic slick is a fashionable dangling chair covered entirely in the kind of stuffed-tights boobs she perfected for the bunnies. A boob chair (in fact titled ‘Mumum’, 2012).
4. On the wall you can see two photos of our heroine as poor student, one wearing just a t-shirt sitting on a toilet (‘Human toilet’ 1998), the other sitting (wearing jeans) with her legs apart and a skull placed at her crotch (‘Self Portrait with Skull’, 1996). Strong atmospheric images but not a patch on the banana ones.
5. Lastly, you can see an enormous concrete cast of a sandwich.
Concrete
I said we’d come back to concrete. The idea is that it is one of the most common materials of our age. Traditional art galleries are finished with luxury stone like the walls of the Duveen galleries that run through the centre of Tate Britain. It was not until the breakthroughs of modern architecture in the 1920s, particularly with the Bauhaus School of Art and design, that architects began to leave the raw material of construction revealed and unfinished, as an artistic (and political) statement (against bourgeois lies).
By the 1970s entire new towns were being built of concrete which was left unadorned as a statement of fashionable modernity. An entire architectural movement, brutalist architecture, was based on it, with a classic example being the concrete-lined Barbican centre in London.
Walls Anyway, in line with her interest in street detritus, fags and old chairs and yesterday’s newspapers, Lucas likes concrete. It appears in at least three forms in the exhibition. One, it absolutely dominates room 2, where the wall opposite the big blow-ups of her eating a banana are covered, floor to ceiling, with concrete grey panels. Part of the odd intensity of the room is it feels like you’re in an underground car park or a nuclear bunker.
Plinths Second appearance is in the plinths to most of the works. Traditionally, a plinth that a work of art sits on is as luxurious as the work, radiating bourgeois value. Well, as you might expect, Lucas confounds this tradition. Instead of smooth and pristine plinths, Lucas uses concrete breeze blocks to support many of her works. The breeze blocks are not precious or finished: they are basic, practical, uncovered building blocks.
Casts For decades Lucas has created sculptures in concrete, starting with a cast of a pair of her own boots in 1999. Thus it is that these last two rooms contain a number of incongruously enormous casts of pretty common or garden objects, namely a ham sandwich and, bizarrely, a gigantic concrete marrow.
These are striking and humorous but not as funny as some of the earlier gags. There’s an absolutely huge blow-up of a photo of her torso wearing a t-shirt with two frayed holes where the nipples go. Massive but, again, not as funny as many of her classic sex gags.
Au naturel by Sarah Lucas (1994) and NOT included in ‘Happy Gas’ @ Tate Britain (© Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London)
Room 4
After the ambient peach of room 3, room 4 is red. This is because it is entirely lined with 20 massive colour photos of Lucas smoking a fag in a red room or a room lit by red lights (‘Red Sky’, 2018).
Installation view of room 4 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain
The obvious thing about these photos is how much she’s aged. She is no longer the enormously winning gamin from the black-and-white banana days. She looks raddled and old. Smoking will do that for you. And time.
Centrepiece of the room is a burned-out car which has been sawn in two. Inside it’s all blackened carbon and ashes. Burnt-out luxury products are so ugly, so completely devastated.
Still, I wasn’t that impressed. A few days ago I was at the Imperial War Museum which, in its central atrium, has the wreckage of a car bomb from Beirut, much more impressive. Back in 1970 J.G. Ballard displayed a handful of cars smashed up in crashes at the ICA, sparking a mini riot. Fifty-three years later it feels like nothing new to see here. Except Lucas gives an old theme a wrinkle, which is to cover the entire front half of the car, and a chair which has been thrown clear, in carefully arranged cigarettes, thus turning them into a decorative objects.
Installation view of room 4 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain, showing , showing ‘This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven’ (2018)
I like ruined industrial objects but this didn’t do it for me, somehow.
Cigarettes
Talking of cigarettes, the curators have organised the show around themes (bunnies, plinths, language, concrete) and cigarettes is another recurring theme of Lucas’s work. I’ll quote the curators:
Cigarettes have featured in Lucas’s work since her 1997 exhibition ‘The Law’, and she has gone on to create several series of cigarette-coated objects. In the final room of the exhibition, we see the climax of this theme in ‘This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven’ 2018. A Jaguar car, covered in cigarettes, is split in two. The action of cutting the car in half is a destructive act. Lucas said, “When I first started using cigarettes in art it was because I was wondering why people are self-destructive. But it’s often destructive things that makes us feel most alive”. Self-portraits of the artist such as ‘Red Sky’ 2018, displayed as wallpaper here, show her surrounded in an almost ethereal or ghostly cloud of smoke. In her ‘Muses’ series, she places phallic cigarettes in the orifices of body casts of her friends.
What I liked more than the chopped up car was more of the concrete casts. As you can see in the general view photo, there’s another giant, blown-up cast of a sandwich, this time with a shiny new metal toilet placed on it and a cast of someone sitting on that.
Scattered around this final room are four or five other casts of women’s groins and legs, presumably items from the ‘Muse’ series, all of them featuring an (unsmoked) cigarette wedged into their bum cracks.
Regarding these casts of naked women, Lucas is quoted as saying gallery goers don’t on the whole like casts or images of vulvas.
‘Funnily enough vaginas seem to shock people more than a penis. Especially the plaster casts of real ones. I’ve seen people approach some of the Muses and, when they’re close enough to get the vagina into focus, about turn and walk away. Which is an experience on a par with or maybe opposite to, finding out the meaning of the word ‘c**t’. I remember, as a child, being quite baffled by this word which I’d heard bandied about a lot and definitely understood enough to know it was out of the question to ever use it in front of adults and was, seemingly, the harshest and worst term of abuse available in four letters. And I had one myself. Shocking.’
This is agreeably fighting talk but nothing on display matches it in confrontation. Instead there’s just half a dozen concrete casts of herself or women friends, taken from the waist down, and neither foregrounding nor hiding their front bottoms which are just there as part of the rest of their bodies.
I didn’t feel these had any ‘edge’ or subversive value whatsoever. On the contrary, I found them sweet and lovely. They looked like the kind of casts kept at art school for young artists to assiduously sketch and draw.
The only novelty was the chairs, the way these casts are arranged on common or garden office-type chairs, as in the arcade of bunnies.
This one (pictured below) gave me a powerful burst of nostalgia: I’m sure that at my school or at one of my early office jobs, the place was full of these dull, institutional, grey-metal-piping chairs with the cheap moulded wooden bottom and back. Far more than any ‘shock outrage’ at barely visible moulds of vulvas, I was moved by these further instances of ‘the pathos of chairs’.
Installation view of ‘Pauline’ (2015) in room 4 of ‘Happy Gas’ by Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain
Tits in space
As I keep emphasising, Lucas’s thing is straight-ahead, unambiguous street vulgarity. The first exhibit is titled ‘Wanker’ and, when you’ve finally had enough of the red room, its broken car and fanny casts, you emerge back into the corridor containing the ticket checker and the shop, to find it completely covered in patterned peach wallpaper.
What is the pattern? It’s two of her cigarette boob sculptures, cut out and arranged as repeating pairs across this very striking, dominating peach wallpaper. And Lucas’s name for it? Something subtle? Something intellectual, maybe using a foreign language to evoke multiple layers of meaning and resonance? If you think so even for a minute, you don’t know our girl and you haven’t been paying attention. She calls it ‘Tits in space’.
The lobby to Lucas’s ‘Happy Gas’ exhibition, entirely covered with the ‘Tits in space’ wallpaper
This title made me laugh but I laughed even more when I discovered that this wallpaper is on sale to members of the public, to you and me. A roll of ‘Tits in space’ 10 meters long by 52 cm wide will set you back a princely £480. I think it would look perfect in the downstairs loo, don’t you?
Summary
Obviously the curators, most of the reviewers and Lucas herself go along with the feminist view that her art ‘subverts’ this or that gender stereotype or sexist convention. Here are the curators’ own words:
- Her everyday language (which forms the narrative of this exhibition) is humorous and accessible, but inflected with a feminist edge as it subverts patriarchal traditions of writing about art.
- For many feminist artists, textiles have been a shorthand for ideas and experiences imposed on women, as well as an opportunity to subvert them.
- Using ordinary objects in unexpected ways, she has consistently challenged our understanding of sex, class and gender over the last four decades.
- Lucas creates a unique visual language which she uses to challenge stereotypical notions of identity and gender.
- Breaking boundaries with humour and daring, Lucas shows us the whole spectrum of what it means to be human.
If you think a chair with a dildo on it or sculptures made out of stuffed tights or blown-up tabloid newspapers from 30 years ago are really ‘subverting’ patriarchal power systems, then you’re welcome to your optimistic beliefs.
I take a different view. As with all the YBAs, I’m still as thrilled and excited as I was by their exuberance and energy and irreverence as when I first saw them 25 years ago. They seemed then, and still seem to me today, to be saying ‘fuck off’ to all kinds of polite conventions about what art is, how it should be displayed, and how you can talk about it. It was a punk rebellion against stifling conformity.
What this retrospective tends to show is that, although some of her approaches have hardened into mannerism (I wasn’t that impressed by the car, the concrete sandwich or marrow), there’s still plenty which is irreverent, in-your-face and funny. Her best works consist of jokes which are still very amusing, gags which still make you laugh (well, make me laugh, anyway).
In the world as it is today, I personally think this is more of an enduring achievement, more something to be celebrated, than all the curatorial clichés about ‘subverting the patriarchy’. Laughter is good for everybody’s mental and physical health. This exhibition is a tonic.
Related links
- Happy Gas by Sarah Lucas continues @ Tate Britain until 14 January 2024
- Exhibition guide
- Guardian review
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