Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, through Sept. 1
By rights, Sarah Lucas “should be the Art World’s ideal emissary to the #MeToo movement,” said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. For 30 years, the celebrated provocateur from working-class London has been raging against male hegemony and its abuses by obsessively mocking the anatomical sources of gender differentiation. Her first museum retrospective is thus “strewn with penises”—sometimes cast in bronze or gold, sometimes represented by such mundane stand-ins as sausages, cucumbers, and bananas. Lucas also toys occasionally with representations of female anatomy, but never for long. Her most recent series again centers on phalluses, only “now she makes them bigger”—literally big enough to crush a car or two. She scored her points years ago. Today, instead of deepening and broadening her critique of gender norms, she’s diluting her brand through “tedious single-mindedness.”
So many people just don’t get Lucas, said Natasha Boyd in LAReviewOfBooks.org. Even this show’s curators present her as a gender warrior determined to steal men’s power, but really, her work “has less to do with empowerment than with eros,” and all the talk of cultural combat “woefully ignores” how funny and generous she is. Her true subject is sexual desire— “exaggerated, abstracted, and generally made the butt of the joke.” The exhibition’s title piece, 1994’s Au Naturel, is a stained mattress on which she arranged a bucket, two breast-like melons, and a cucumber in such a way that they suggest both a naked woman and man and also how lust renders us absurd. She’s not exposing men’s pretensions; she’s reminding us all how thin the line is that separates cultured, rational, proud humans from animals—and from fruits and vegetables, for that matter. She’s angry? Please. The chief marketing image for this show is a 1996 photo self-portrait in which Lucas, in T-shirt and jeans, slouches in a chair and stares sullenly at the camera while two fried eggs rest atop her breasts. “She’s practically daring you not to laugh.”
And she can do so much more, said Linda Yablonsky in The Art Newspaper. “Her ‘bunnies’—headless female forms made of stuffed pantyhose and slouching on brightly painted secretaries’ chairs—are practically a signature by now.” Her “NUDS”—a series of “impossibly and provocatively coiled” abstract sculptures also made from stuffed nylons, are “captivating and gorgeous enough to make Rodin sit up in his grave.” Lucas has been brilliant since she burst onto the scene alongside the other bomb throwers then known as the YBAs, or Young British Artists. This show only elevates her. “It’s tough. It’s hilarious. It’s beautifully done.” And, despite the plethora of found-in-the-street materials, it “conveys an unmistakable sense of majesty that I found almost breathtaking.”