Situation part 5: Sarah Lucas - encouraging ‘Classic Pervery’ since 1987.
Classic Pervery was the penultimate incarnation in the series of perennially provocative exhibitions at Sadie Coles, which singularly and collectively formally document Sarah Lucas’s experimentation. A cock-tail of elements by the pun-prone artist, are assembled, comprising an array of sculptures, various forms cast from concrete, nylon stockings, porcelain toilet bowls, breeze blocks, cigarettes and random metal objects.
Sarah Lucas Classic Pervery 2012 installation view from Sadie Coles Situation.
As always these typically abject art pieces, continue to fit into the body of work Lucas has built since the early 1990s. Relentlessly appropriating banal, everyday materials to formulate a grungy assemblage aesthetic where appearance belies any serious and complex subjectivity, promoting humour, bawdy visual slang and puns verging on the slapstick.
Sarah Lucas Hysterical Attack (mouths) 1999
All of Lucas’s Classic Pervery bears out with a lewd wink, the artist is shooting her mouth off again (See Hysterical Attack (Mouths) 1999). Her sculptures remain anthropomorphic in character, questioning gender definitions and challenging male cultural domination. We see the repeated use of metal bed frames, exhausted and leant against the wall, joined by loungers, dangling from the ceiling, it can always be said that Ms Lucas promotes horizontality! And its nice to imagine the artist working ‘flat out’ in the studio before taking a nap on one of the pieces of furniture just ‘lying around’.
Sarah Lucas Loungers #4, 2012
The queen of subversion employs visual wit and a defiant, indecorousness to challenge sexual stereotypes from a so called tabloid vernacular. By making surreal and unexpected juxtapositions of objects we all too easily forget the sun loungers don’t usually hang, because all the surrealism somehow seems normal, we just presume that the tights stand in for a pair of swinging breasts and the bucket is a vagina, and now, after 6 Situations, her visual language is familiar, though none the less punchy.
Sarah Lucas, Untitled (titchair) 2012 / Skull 2000 as installed in Classic Pervery at Sadie Cole’s Situation.
Sarah Lucas is perverse. As an artist she demonstrates a deliberate and obstinate desire to behave in a way that is considered contrary to the accepted or expected standard, often in spite of the consequences. She is not a typical female artist. No doubt she identifies as ‘one of the lads’, but Lucas still manages to formulate what I might identify as a women’s language. In this sense I can immediately recognise the similarities between her and one time collaborator Tracey Emin, that make work about issues which affect women, female viewers can identify with the prospect of droopy tits (Lucas) or the fact that women are allowed to enjoy sex (Emin).
Despite the variety of perversion in the work, primarily in the way that Lucas alters something’s materiality, from its original course, meaning, or state, distorting or corrupting that which was first intended, with tights for example, stuffed or stretched, Lucas produces versatile artworks. Playfully comprehending their potential as if she were a sexually perverted teenage boy experimenting with a condom, blowing it up, popping it, stretching it over his head.
Sarah Lucas Classic Pervery 2012 installation view from Sadie Coles Situation.
A pervert might lead someone away from what is considered right, natural, or acceptable, and there is little au natural in Classic Pervery, or in fact any work by Lucas. The subject seems completely natural, she deals most directly with humanity, physicality, bantality, but her chosen materials are concrete, nylon, porcelain, man made and hard.
Lucas is all about making that which comfortable, uncomfortable and visa versa. Toilets for example, Lucas’s trademark, her go to object/material/subject, the centre of her world, are in this exhibition topped by cushions. A tribute to Duchamp maybe, they are made unserviceable thrones which in a gallery context cannot be sat on, they become surreal chairs, perhaps useful at parties when furniture is at a premium.
Sarah Lucas Soup, 2012.
‘Classic’ can describe something judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind. As a noun is refers to a work of art of recognized and established value. Sarah Lucas herself is a classic pervert, having build up a repertoire of continuously punchy, witty and titillating (!) artworks which I thoroughly enjoy perving on!
By Alison Humphrey
More information about Sarah Lucas: Situation can be found here:
