Titular puns and Freudian slips: Sarah Lucas at the NGA
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The National Gallery of Australia’s ‘Project 1: Sarah Lucas’ is billed as the first major solo exhibition of Lucas’s work in this country. Featuring new sculptures from both her ongoing ‘Bunny’ series and a more recent series cast in bronze (from which the gallery last year purchased TITTIPUSSIDAD, 2018), the installation sits prominently alongside and concurrent with the ‘Know My Name’ exhibition of Australian women artists.
Although she rose to notoriety as part of the Young British Artists (YBAs) movement of the late 1980s, Lucas’s name has arguably not retained the celebrity status that other YBAs such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst still enjoy. Her work, however, continues to draw on the practices that the YBAs group used to shock the art establishment at its inception in its use of everyday objects and crude representations of sexual and other bodily processes. Her photographic self-portrait from 1990, which depicts Lucas eating a banana, is emblematic of her confrontational style. Reproduced in giant black-and-white prints on the walls of the exhibition space, it also presents Lucas in an androgynous light, a theme that recurs in her sculptures.
The first time you are in a room with Lucas’s work, it is hard to know what to make of it, and ‘Project 1’ is no exception. Surrounded by pendulous breasts and huge penises, at first glance the installation seems to be an uncanny manifestation of a stereotypical patriarchal fantasy in which women are impossibly proportioned and the phallus rules. At the same time, a disarming playful quality is also evident in Lucas’s use of visual puns and titular jokes. The figure PEEPING THOMASINA (2020) is a key example: while her name references the stereotypical male voyeur, the figure is looking at the viewer while revealing her own genitalia.
The ‘Bunny’ series originated in 1997 and references the Playboy magazine logo. Principally constructed from nylon stockings, their pliable forms echo the soft sculptures of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse. Their most striking features are their lanky contorted limbs and prominent breasts. As the figures are headless, the breasts meet the viewer’s eye, a tactic that draws attention to the male gaze by explicitly tracking it. Each figure is lit from above, as though they are performing on stage, an association that is enhanced by the stripper heels adorning some of the figures’ feet. While this arrangement echoes the patriarchal construction of the female body as public property, Lucas subverts this association through her figures’ implied agency. OOPS! (2019) features a figure straddling a chair in a manner reminiscent of the iconic photograph of Christine Keeler taken by Lewis Morley in 1963. In her later years, Keeler revealed that she was reluctant to appear nude, and that the pose had been selected to hide her nakedness. In Lucas’s rendition, it seems that the figure is choosing to reveal her nudity, and that this is the transgression.
DORA LALALA (2020) strikes an almost-childlike pose, as though the figure is awkwardly revealing her sexual self while in a kind of dream state. This is possibly an homage to Freud, whom Lucas admires (one of his case studies was about a woman he named Dora). Her sculptures parallel Freud’s psychoanalytic work; the unremitting focus on crude sexuality could be interpreted as reductive, but, on another level, it brings to the fore archetypes that are deeply embedded within our culture.
Since 2007, Lucas has lived in a farmhouse in rural Suffolk, where, surrounded by ancient churches and the relics of agrarian life, her access to a deeper time structure has become possible. This, in turn, has led to a revitalisation of the mythic in her work, an idea encapsulated in her bronze sculpture ELF WARRIOR (2018). Her use of bronze connotes glory and domination, especially when contrasted with the pliability of the ‘Bunny’ stockings, but the show of strength collectively implied by these figures is undercut by both the absurd size of their phallic elements and their latent androgyny – a final reminder that nothing with Lucas is ever settled.
Amy Walters, Canberra
Curated by Peter Johnson, ‘Project 1: Sarah Lucas’ is at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until 18 April 2022, and can also be viewed online. Amy Walters was a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.
