I had heard mixed reviews about the Sarah Lucas exhibition currently showing at Tate Britain. I can see why.
First there’s the title of the show, “Happy Gas”. Is she referring to nitrous oxide, the empty canisters of which we find scattered on our streets after Friday and Saturday nights? Or is she referring to the pain relief you can take when giving birth which left me feeling nauseous when I had too much of it? Certainly some of Lucas’ artworks left me feeling more than a bit queasy.
The first room has some huge blow ups of articles from tabloid newspapers in the 1990s. The one that made me stop was an article in the Sunday Sport dated 25 November 1990. It reports on an advertisement in which a man attempts to sell his wife and throws in his “two bedroom terrace for free”.
Is Lucas commenting on the fact that women were still being treated as the property of men?
Or is she drawing attention to what female forms are deemed attractive?
Or is she drawing attention to the way the wife fights back…
“Bet who says there’s nothing wrong with being 25 stone and 41 years old” delights the reporters by getting undressed upon their arrival. The article quotes her as saying “I might as well go the WHOLE HOG… he’s not stepping in MY bedroom after this. So let these pictures be a lasting reminder to him of what he’ll be missing… I may be FAT and FORTY but I reckon I’m just as FLAB-U-LOUS to some people as those SKINNY LITTLE RAKES you see on the telly… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a healthy sexual appetite – and now I’m looking for a REAL MAN”.
Or did Lucas just find the article amusing and had the platform to be able to put it in a gallery space and is having a laugh at those of us trying to make sense of it? Who knows.
Next, we enter a 36 metre long room showcasing her “bunnies”. We are told “associated with sex and femininity, tights have an enduring appeal to her… they form a body with a pair of lightbulb breasts, the stuffing evoking marbled fat and blood vessels. Hems and seams make nipples and labia… Her structures might be limbs or breasts, always relating to a body; sometimes exhausted, sometimes excited or performing. Often sitting in a chair, they seems vulnerable and human.”
I really liked the ones cast on bronze, but then I do like shiny things. The ones still in the rawness of the stuffed tights Lucas uses to make them I found slightly disturbing.
There are all sorts of sculptures in the rooms that follow… a nest hammock swing chair created from breasts made from tights… a jaguar car covered in cigarettes split in two… a mythical creature half covered in cigarettes holding a woman entitled “Dreams go up in smoke”.
It’s certainly different but give me the works of Chris Ofili over Lucas any day.
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