Sarah Lucas: Au Natural Exhibition Review

When I walked through the elevator and onto the second floor of the New Museum, I glanced at two chairs that were positioned near the entrance and immediately did a double take. I initially thought that I saw genitalia on the chair and upon inspection I realized it was a waxed penis and a pair of teeth; my suspicions about what the sculpture was suggesting were confirmed. I looked to my left and saw a photograph of a naked woman next to the text “Fat, Fabulous, and Forty”. Then I looked to my right and saw another pair of inanimate objects positioned in suggestive forms. From my first encounter with the exhibit Au Natural, to my last, I was often presented with artwork that left me feeling shocked, amused, disturbed, and curious all at the same time.

Some artists prefer not to confirm to the traditional. Instead they target the dissentious, often testing the limits of accepted ideas and tastes. Sarah Lucas is one of these artists. A leading figure in the young British artists generation during the 90’s, Lucas is widely known for her provocative and satirical artwork that comments on our views of gender and sexuality and their influences in contemporary life.

To new viewers, like myself, Lucas’s work can first strike one as shocking and confusing, to the point where we begin to question what art is. It tasks the viewer to reconsider the way we think about sex and gender. What makes an object sexual? What makes it feminine or masculine? How are we defined, or sometimes even trapped, by these labels?

Lucas’s art challenges traditions about sexuality, masculinity, and femininity. In parts of the exhibit, Lucas imbues everyday items such as furniture, stockings, lights, or food with sexual meaning by substituting body parts with these objects. Although the items she uses are simple, they carry profound meanings. For example, with objects such as cucumbers and two fried eggs, Lucas brings out our instinctive associations of the object with specific genders and with sexuality.  By showing how we resort to defining each other by simple things, Lucas picks apart how gender plays out in our world. The exhibit also includes enlarged images of pages from British tabloid newspapers. These images show misogyny and sexism as women’s bodies are objectified and sexualized openly and repeatedly. These images bring to mind the pattern of abuse and inequality in the way we view the bodies of women. In this exhibit you will also find, among other things, photography of Lucas herself, often emphasizing an androgynous aesthetic through props and poses, in ways that one again challenge and poke fun at gender expectations and roles.

Lucas’s process of forming the artworks and sculptures is very creative. As previously mentioned, Lucas uses everyday household objects to create most of her art, but uniquely transforms these mundane objects – rearranging and reconfiguring them until they deliberately touch a nerve and evoke strong feelings. When discussing how she made Bunny, she states “I had no clear idea of where I was heading … I hung them on the back of a chair to see how they were shaping up and Bunny stared back at me.” Her explanation shows that her creative process is not one where she deliberately thinking and planning her work to evoke themes of sex and gender in our culture, but one where the deeper meaning slips in as she is creating – a meaning that never fails to bring out powerful reactions from viewers.

Much of Lucas’s work is relevant to the #Metoo movement as it digs into the core of how gender dynamics operate in our society. This new movement, aimed at cultivating conversation and exposing sexual abuse against women, sheds light on years of inequality and disenfranchisement that often gets disguised or hushed away. Through almost all her pieces, Lucas brings the question back to how we look at men and women and even how violence and objectification can often covertly, yet pervasively, run in our culture. For example, in Lucas’s piece called “Bunnies get snookered”, Lucas creates headless humanlike figures with stuffed tights. The figures wear stockings that match the color of the snooker balls on the billiard table. The tights serve to instantly connect the figures to both femininity and the objects of the game. The association of the tights with females match Lucas’s pattern of testing the way we define masculinity and femininity. What is interesting about the way the figures are attached to the chairs is that their limbs and bodies our slumped down–as if they are worn out or even deteriorating. Since the figures are completely naked, except for their tights, it sends the message that the expectations of femininity have sent them down into a lifeless state. The title Bunnies Get Snookered denotes sexual intercourse and suggest that the “bunnies” are ensnared in a game associated with masculinity. You can also see these figures as protesting the ideas of femininity by the way they sit on the chair. Usually women are expected to sit up with their legs closed, but each of these figures sit back, slouch, and spread their legs across the chair. The sculpture overall, like in the #Metoo movement, deals strongly with ideas of power and our definitions and associations with gender.

The exhibition in the New Museum is spread across three floors and is designed in a clever manner to allow viewers to better appreciate Lucas’s work. Viewers are introduced to significant messages and ideas in one section that always tie in and facilitate understanding in the next section. For example, as you immediately walk into the museum you are first presented with tabloids that objectify female bodies. These images introduce the idea of sexism and the definition of femininity and sexuality, which is further examined by many other artworks in this floor this idea, as many of them bluntly replace human bodies with objects that match our associations with gender. Most of the artworks in this floor question how we look at male and female genders. The next floor expands in this idea, but now going into how we associate and place genders. In this floor, you will find plaster models of female legs sprawled across domestic objects such as tables, washing machines, and freezers. In contrast you will find representations of male figures that are made out of outdoor materials such as twigs, branches, and gardening tools at the opposite end of the room. In the middle of the sections you will find several entangled objects named NUDS. If you view these objects by itself, without looking at the previous artwork in the exhibit, it can easily be confusing as they may resemble nothing but strange, lumpy, shapes.  But when you look at them to the view of the previous artworks you can start to see entangled bodies. The last floor ties the exhibit together with the idea of death. This theme has been slightly hinted at before in the first two floors through coffins and skulls, but now it is magnified through a car crash and cigarettes. You will also find that this for further delves into the idea of where we place and how we associate gender, through a giant penis that placed on the car and a chicken that represents a vagina.  The ideas in the exhibit intermix to lead us a long continues journey as a building on top of each other digging deeper two themes of sex, gender, and death.