Vile Bodies and Happy Gas:Sarah Lucas @ Tate Britain.

"Why can't I walk down a street free of suggestion? Is my body the only trait in the eye's of men?" - Suggestion, Fugazi

Tits, fannies, willies, and bums. It wouldn't be a huge surprise if your initial reaction to the work of Sarah Lucas (whose Happy Gas career retrospective is currently on at Tate Britain) is to imagine it had been made by a sniggering teenager who just discovered sex and enjoys shocking their parents.

FAT DORIS (2023)

But Sarah Lucas is sixty-one years old and has been doing this stuff for quite some time now - over thirty years. It's possible she could have moved on, that would be a fair criticism, but it's equally fair to see she found her theme, her motivation, early and has pretty much stuck to it. Lucas isn't sniggering, much, about human bodies. She's critiquing the way we look at human bodies and the way we talk about human bodies.

Particularly the way men look at, and talk about, female bodies. As well as human body parts there are other repeated motifs in Lucas's work and you'll work out what they are very quicky. Chairs, strip lighting, shoes, cigarettes, and concrete. In fact the Happy Gas exhibition is divided up into four rooms and in each of them all four rooms are made of concrete. Many of the pieces are perched on piles of breezeblocks.

The exhibition begins in the foyer, you can see that bit without paying, and the themes are immediately obvious. Here's Donkey Kong Diddle-Eye:- chair, strip lighting, lights arranged to look like a pair of boobs. Here's Tits in Space (Pink), a fairly self-explanatory title except the tits in question are made up, not for the last time in Happy Gas, of cigarettes, and here's Fuck Destiny which is, essentially, more of the same. Twenty years separate these works but there seems to be little, or no, development whatsoever. Doesn't it get boring spending two/three decades making breasts out of cigarettes and sourcing old sofas and armchairs?

Donkey Kong Diddle-Eye (2000)

Tits in Space (Pink) (2020)

Fuck Destiny (2000)

Wanker (1999)

Seemingly not. Once you step inside things get ruder and more puerile. A mechanical arm curled into the traditional masturbating position metronomically rocks up and down over a bucket in 1999's Wanker. The title presumably given for the 0.1% of the population who have yet to familiarise themselves with the universal symbol of wanking.

1992's The Old Couple consists of a pair of wooden chairs. One's got some kind of dildo sticking out of it and another a pair of false teeth representing female genitals. Anyone for vagina dentata? Thought not.

Then there's the first of many, ever such a lot actually, of Lucas's Bunny series. A crude mannequin in tights with emphasis given over to the genitals and/or breasts and often with no head because .... well, I'm not sure why exactly. It seems that Lucas is trying to subvert the male gaze and to a degree she does but most men I know definitely prefer it when a woman has a head. Perhaps that's the point. If we talk about tits and fannies all the time, Lucas is saying, how do you like it when it's just tits and fannies? And stockings in this case. Though sometimes shoes.

The Old Couple (1992)

Bunny (1997)

Max's Wanking Armchair (2000)

Is Suicide Genetic? (1996)

Every now and then, Lucas's muse will turn away from the sex and the male tendency to objectify female bodies. She's look at suicide (Is Suicide Genetic?), happiness, health, and food and all the other things we tend to think about and worry about. But it's never long before she returns to her key themes of sex, sexual organs, the way we talk about them, and, of course, chairs, Chairs - and sandwiches but they'll come later.

1997's Chicken Knickers is, I assume, intentionally (slightly) disturbing as if to say how would you like it if my 'parts' really looked like how you described them, there's a series of self-portraits scattered around Happy Gas and in most of them Lucas is making no effort to pose whatsoever. Take me as I am. 

There are works like 28 Percent Bent for which there are no explanation whatsoever and there are A4 lists of slightly, and very, rude words attached to the wall from a time when Lucas was seemingly analysing British people's approach to swearing. She concluded that there were five main themes and that they were women, men, homosexuals, masturbation, and excrement and wrote down as many as she could think of.

Chicken Knickers (1997)

Untitled (1993)

28 Percent Bent (1991)

Five Lists (1999)

Five Lists (1999)

Five Lists (1999)

Five Lists (1999)

Five Lists (1999)

Or would fit on the A4 sheet. I reckon I could add a few but it's a reasonably impressive list. My favourites being arse eater, shit stabber, shit cunt, drill bit, and ball bag. Of course, they're not my favourites and if you look at the list you can see there is a lot of bile and venom, and a lot of misogyny and homophobia, in the way we swear. I've used the term 'vile bodies' in the title of this blog but I don't think bodies are vile and I don't believe Sarah Lucas does either.

I think she thinks the way we, men especially, talk about bodies is vile and that's a pretty big difference. Though the art she makes about the subject would have been reasonably groundbreaking at the time it has dated a bit over the last three decades and it doesn't feel like she's really moved on. It's a very blunt, very crude, art with virtually no subtlety whatsoever.

That doesn't mean it's bad but it does mean you don't really need to spend that long looking at it to get the point. There's not a lot of hidden depth to be discovered which is strange for somebody who has mocked up so many 'front bottoms'. Lucas says she hadn't really given feminism much serious thought until her late twenties when she picked up a couple of Andrea Dworkin books, Intercourse and Pornography, and started to see "pornography and other atrocities committed against women". It changed how she felt about men. She started to see, through male eyes, the extent of their misogyny.

One way she turned this into art was to take pages from the Sunday Sport (a supposed newspaper that, alongside stories about aliens and Hitler driving double decker buses to the moon, had almost as much female nudity as a copy of Razzle or Fiesta) and blow them up to huge sizes. Once these were put in a gallery they became a lot more uncomfortable to look at than they would have been on the train or, indeed, in a dimly lit bedroom with one hand.

Fat, Forty, and Flab-Ulous (1990)

Sod You Gits (1990)

Pairfect Match (1992)

Ha ha! Look, it's a fat woman with her top off and, oh my, she's so old, she's forty. Repulsive. And what's this in Pairfect Match? It's a game where you have to match the boobs to the face. A 'breast quest' no less. Possibly even the most dedicated of Sunday Sport masturbators wouldn't be able to succeed in this quiz so they've put really easy clues beneath each picture. I'm pleased to report I scored six out of six.

None of which, of course, is the point. It's the fact that this kind of stuff went on in a newspaper. In some respects the Sunday Sport was less offensive than The Sun as it never seriously pretended to be a newspaper. There was no serious news or comment in it. It was a cross between Viz and a porno mag whereas The Sun had Page 3 in something that did claim to be a newspaper. Billy Bragg wrote, in It Says Here, about a place "where politics mix with bingo and tits" and "where they offer you a feature on stockings and suspenders next to a call for stiffer penalties for sex offenders".

I believe it was also The Sun that had a countdown to both Charlotte Church's and Emma Watson's sixteenth birthdays. Presumably their readers were hoping that Church and Watson were going to 'bare their breasts' for the paper. Good luck with that, you filthy, borderline paedophile, wankers.

The next room is full of Lucas's Bunnies. They're bent over chairs, contorted into unfeasible positions, displaying multiple breasts and impossibly stick thin legs - and sometimes layers of fat, many of them - of course - don't have heads, and most of them are either displayed in a wooden chair or an armchair. The point is hammered home again and again until you can have no doubt of Lucas's intentions.

PEEPING THOMASINA (2002)

Gary Hume - (Sarah Lucas) Eating a Banana (1990)

CROSS DORIS (2004)

SUGAR (2020)

ZEN LOVESONG (2022)

ANGEL (2022)

SLAG (2022)

ZEN LOVE SONG (2023)

SEX BOMB (2022)

HONEY PIE (2022)

At this point, Lucas starts to consider her reasons for making a penis and considers them to be:- appropriation, because she doesn't have one, voodoo, economics, totemism, they're a convenient size for the lap, compact power, gents, gnomes, because you don't see them on display much, and for religious reasons having to do with the spark.

I understand some of those reasons - if not all of them - but Lucas goes on to say how she's noticed, through her three generations of an artist, that depictions of female genitals tend to shock more than depictions of male ones. Perhaps that's because if you're a man and you've ever used public toilets you will more than likely have seen an enormous amount of graffitied cocks in your time. Often with three pubic hairs protruding from the testicles and three droplets of spunk flying through the air. That's the classic design though there are variations. I don't go in a lot of ladies loos but, somehow, I don't think the equivalent happens there.

Smoking (1998)

Sandwich (2004-2020)

One of the outliers in the show is a huge Jesmonite sandwich which simply sits on the floor next to a large photo of Lucas smoking a fag. I'm not sure why it's there and I'm not sure what the filling is supposed to be but it made a welcome relief to all the body parts. A brief relief though as next to it stands a work called Mumum. A swing chair made of tights bundled up to look like ladies boobs or, possibly - though unlikely, some exotic gourds. Which, as soon as I typed that, sounds like a euphemism for the same thing anyway.

The bronze work that sits near it is called TITTIPUSSIDAD so that kind of confirms we're back on the boobs though, in this room at least, it is balanced out by a concrete television and a couple of remarkably ordinary photos including one of Lucas sat in a field surrounded by hay bales, looking very at peace with everything. I liked that. It made a good contrast with almost everything else on show.

Mumum (2012)

TITTIPUSSIDAD (2018)

The Law (1997)

Angus Fairhurst - (Sarah Lucas in) Supersensible (1995)

Julian Simmons - (Sarah Lucas in) STOOKS (by Dom Meek) (2023)

There's one last room though and normal service is very much resumed before you leave the show. Lucas talks about her mum's allotment and growing marrows and making jam. She talks about the allotment and the harvest festivals in which the produce would be shown in some form of competition would be a strangely male, macho even, environment. There's a quote given "go away, get a nob, come back, we'll talk about it" and though it's not attributed to anyone it seems to sum up how Lucas, and her mother, felt about that environment.

Lucas may have made it up entirely, she's entitled to - she's an artist not an investigative journalist - but the feeling, no doubt, is real. In this room, alongside a concrete gourd (gourds again) and a concrete Eames chair, there are lots of dirty toilets and plaster cast models of women with cigarettes shoved into various orifices. Oh, and there's another massive sandwich too.

William Hambling (2022)

Eames chair (2015)

RED SKY (2018)

Cnut (2004)

Sandiwch (2012-2020)

This one, apparently, only took eight years to make which is half the time the other took. Lucas never explains the sandwiches but she does offer her thoughts on why smoking and cigarettes turn up in her work so often (and why there's a dissected car covered in fags on show):-

"I'd always had it in mind to do something about the fact of smoking. I wanted to make something about the heart and lungs in real size. Then, I needed something with scale for an exhibition, I thought of using cars. I liked the idea of cars being burnt out because of the parallel with lungs. And because of people's idea of lungs as something insulated from the outside. Cars insulate you from the outside - like a home does. It's a shock to see it violated".

Michele (2015)

Inferno (2000)

Me (Bar Stool) (2015)

Dreams Go Up In Smoke (2000)

Exacto (2018)

This Jaguar's Going To Heaven (2018)

It's one of my favourite pieces of the show, maybe my favourite, because it mixes several themes together and shows Lucas developing as an artist both visually and conceptually. As for the rest of it, some of it was great - some not so good. I agree almost entirely with the points Lucas makes about objectivity, the male gaze, and how society judges women by their bodies (or their 'attributes') but I think she had made that point fairly effectively by the turn of millennium and since then it's been diminishing returns.

But then I would say that because I'm a man and I though I'm ageing and deteriorating I don't have to put up with anything like the same level of judgement or scrutiny as my female peers do. Lucas may be crude and sensational in her art work (she was a YBA after all) but she's still fighting the good fight and, for that, I salute her.

The Kiss (2003)