Sarah Lucas - 705

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It is a sensitivity for fields of meaning that lies at the root of Sarah Lucas’s continual play with words and images, which she also carries out on her own body, sometimes employing grotesque attributes. Two of these photographed constellations are shown on opposite walls as oversized wall pictures: Got a Salmon On #1 and Chicken Knickers, both from 1997. 

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Both works show the artist herself, sometimes in excerpts, in interaction with food meant for consumption. In Chicken Knickers we see the artist’s abdomen, from her upper thighs to shortly above the navel, clothed in a pair of white, emphatically unerotic, solid-functional knickers whose edges are fitted with a very Spartan lace trimming. A plucked, oven-ready chicken is placed in front of the knickers. At the level of the vulva a vertical slit in the animal’s body gapes open, behind which is located the hollow abdominal cavity of the dead, gutted chicken. The pictorial composition references visual word games—for example in English “broad faced chicken” is a vulgar colloquial expression for vulva.

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In Got a Salmon On #1, the large-format picture to the left, Lucas is holding a whole salmon over her arm: the head and body in her hands, the tail fin extending over her shoulder. She is wearing a pin-striped jacket with broad shoulder pads, faded jeans with holes at the knees, a roll neck pullover, and clumpy black shoes with heels. She is standing outside in front of a dirty brown brick wall, covered in graffiti tags, behind her a barred door with the inscription “MEN” above it in large letters. Posing in front of what is clearly a men’s toilet, she also engages in various wordplays with the salmon, above all those relating to male genitals—and translates them into pictorial arrangements, into poses. Here too she displays a defiant femininity, or rather a defiant feminine masculinity, which underlines the absurdity of social norms with biting humour. 
It is this mixture of art and life in the person of Sarah Lucas, who lives out the undermining of normative constructions in her own everyday life, which she has made the theme of her art: 

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“Well, I like to play around with gender stereotypes. And I like androgyny. All these meanings are constructs, and they’re quite fragile really. They could be otherwise. (…) Women could be aggressors. Or, sit with their legs astride taking up two seats on the bus. Men could wear the skirts. Bisexuality could be the normal way for both sexes…”