The Incidental Orifice In Sarah Lucas’s Au Naturel

At UCLA’s Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (through September 1)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

It’s been said that all great artists have only a few “real” subjects and those subjects nearly always reference love, sex or death. In fact, these pivotal subjects could arguably be the holy trinity when it comes to the imagination and the deeper impulses that drive the creative process. So, Picasso had his underage lovers, his bull testicles and his minotaur. Magritte his pipe, umbrellas and top hats and Cezanne his monumental, sacred mountain. Similarly, and in the tradition of such obsessive preoccupations, Sarah Lucas, in her most recent retrospective, organized by The New Museum now newly restaged at the Hammer Museum, reveals yet again her fascination with cigarettes, surrealism, panty hose, the ever-enduring phallus and chicken carcasses, not necessarily in that order. These might seem like obvious choices in terms of subject matter for a woman whose work takes on epic themes like male dominance, female identity and subjectivity especially as it relates to women’s bodies being used and exploited by the media, the beauty and pure energy of common everyday materials and finally the desire to speak out on behalf of women using humor and simplicity as a vehicle for change, but if you think that — you’re wrong. The obviousness inherent in her choices simply re-contextualizes these themes, allowing that the viewer enter them through a keen and unwavering sardonic wit, sometimes ribald — at other times, deliberately sad…