Sarah Lucas - 709

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Time and again, the body plays a central role in the work of Sarah Lucas. It can be found in the strange objects, surreal and psychologically charged, in post-Freudian humour, in a suggestive handling of sexual attributes. Overall, Sarah Lucas’s works reflect on the question of what it means to occupy a body: A body that is socially constructed through context, through attribution, through experience, and which is both a site of refusal and of the production of difference.

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In 1994 Sarah Lucas produced a wax cast of her own body, which you can see in front of you: Where Does It All End? is a cast of the artist’s lower face which captures a grinning mouth with opened lips and closed teeth. Apart from the white teeth, the entire cast is rendered in fleshy, dark red. A half-smoked Marlboro cigarette is stuck in the corner of her mouth.

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The cigarette, with its manifold associations and layers of meaning, appears repeatedly in her work: here she speaks of the smoking woman as a symbol of female emancipation, which Marlene Dietrich once cultivated, of masculine cowboy poses, which for decades were shaped by the Western genre and the position of the cigarette in the far corner of the mouth. She speaks of the proximity of physical lust and deathly consequence, of Freudian Eros and Thanatos. And of anger, at being forced to the margins as a woman artist, while her male colleagues were fawned over: 

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“One of the reasons I was interested in the feminine was that I wasn’t successful. I lived with Gary Hume. I was reading a lot of feminist writings and that led to arguments, because I was angry with him for being so successful. And not just him, but lots of other people, most of my good friends – but him, being my nearest and dearest, he really got the worst of it. I don’t get so aggressive when I’m drunk now – but I used to come home furious from openings and fancy dinners, and he’d get the brunt of all that anger.”