Context is often key to the reception of an artist’s work. Which is why I’m supremely confident that during this #MeToo era—the very week, in fact, that the battle has been joined over elevating an alleged sexual predator to the Supreme Court—the opening of Sarah Lucas’s New Museum retrospective will find her hailed as a sort of Saint George(tte) running her lance through the scaly hide of the patriarchy.
Though Lucas isn’t well known on this side of the pond (this long-overdue career survey is her first in the U.S.), the British artist has established a considerable reputation for pugnacious work that seizes prerogatives usually reserved for men, flipping the script on gender norms and what constitutes socially acceptable behavior for women. Her sculptures, photographs and videos take deep dives into sordidness (dismembered phalluses, filthy toilets and U.K. tabloids are among the notable motifs) with a badass swagger that finds expression in works about cigarettes, alcohol and car wrecks. If you believe the hype, Lucas subverts abusive male behavior by channeling it—which, I suppose, is true enough, though I’d submit that she’s still something of an unreliable standard-bearer for feminism.
Much of what she does seems to provoke for the sake of provocation, but, in that respect, she’s hardly alone among the Young British Artists (YBAs) with whom she emerged in late-’80s, early-’90s London. Making in-your-face art was part of the brand, and indubitably, Lucas delivers there, weaponizing abjection and crude humor. For example, Au Naturel (1994), which furnishes the show’s title, features a mattress soiled by God-knows-what, folded between the floor and a wall, with a cucumber standing erect over a pair of oranges; next to it, a rusted bucket is set beneath two melons shoved side by side though slits in the ticking. The equally cheeky Chicken Knickers (2014), a billboard-size photomural, depicts, yes, a raw, supermarket-fresh chicken placed spread-eagle over the artist’s panties-clad crotch. Similalry, Edith (2015) casts the lower half of its subject’s nude body in plaster, then bends it over a loo with a cigarette in its ass.
Subtle it ain’t, though Lucas’s outlandishness is consistent with the sod-off, working-class belligerence that informs her work. It’s also of a piece with the YBAs’ resurrection of an épater la bourgeoisie attitude—a revival that, however contrived, has proven to be a fantastic selling point.
Depending on how you look at it, Lucas’s posturing is either manufactured or authentic. Or maybe it’s both, though she doesn’t always successfully maintain the right balance. Nevertheless, her ambition of scale can’t be dismissed: One installation comprises a Jaguar sedan cut in half, its front end covered in cigarettes, its back end burnt to a crisp.
Ultimately, Lucas’s work may leave you feeling smacked around; if so, that’s only because countless women have suffered the same fate through the ages. Whether that makes her show moving or not is contingent on individual taste, but it certainly makes it hard to ignore.