A Vacuous Signifier for an Emergent Biennial City
Ralph Darbyshire
Liverpool lies on the northwest coast of England. It is renowned for its sporting prowess, its mongrel wit, and for being the home of the Beatles. The city is important both historically and culturally. Whimsically recognized as Ireland’s "third city," its natives, known as "Scousers," are a unique blend of renegade and suffragist, thief and quartermaster. The craic in its pubs is always at the expense of authority and formality and yet it is home to a burgeoning and increasingly successful Biennial of Contemporary Art that is becoming ever more confident and precocious. September 2006 will see the 4th Liverpool Biennial, with the city bristling with exhibitions, events, installations and all manner of pontification and pomposity.
The 5th Biennial will coincide with Liverpool’s accession to "European City of Culture" for 2008, an honour bestowed in recognition of its fine Victorian architecture, for its World Heritage status waterfront and for its contribution towards the cultural health and well-being of the continent. The city’s permanent visual arts collections and related activities are the largest and most significant outside of London.
Tate Liverpool, in collaboration with the Kunsthalle, Zurich, and the Kunstverein in Hamburg, is presently showing a retrospective of the work of the 41 year-old Sarah Lucas. Lucas is considered by many to be a leading light amongst the group of U.K. based artists known collectively as the YBAs–young British artists. The show is on the 4th floor of the spectacularly renovated 17th century Tate and Lyle sugar warehouse. One half of her show faces down the River Mersey where ships would arrive from West Africa, bursting with slaves. The other half faces across the city. But directly below is Albert Dock, into which the dead, dying, useless and fiscally worthless human cargo would be weighed down and dispatched. This is an important history, of a continuously important city, which is the unfortunate host of an unimportant retrospective. Tate Liverpool can ill afford such blunders. It was at the spearhead of Liverpool’s latest creative cycle and remains a banner in the fight against introspection and parochial malaise.
Lucas’ apotheosis began in 1988 when she participated in the "Freeze" exhibition, a provocative, artist-curated show that was in many ways the genesis for Mayor Giuliani’s cultural nemesis, the "Sensation" exhibition of 1997. Lucas’ art historical genealogy follows a well-trodden path of fiddlers and manipulators. She sees what she can do with "stuff." She pulls it apart, imbues it with biography and titillates, tantalizes, and scratches at us with sexual and social whispers. Her objects are crude, perhaps self-deprecating, and follow the convention that disposes with the fluidity and comfort of polite assemblages. Through sculptures, collages, photographs, installations and drawings, she stretches and distorts gender clichés with a roguish deference to historical precedents. The problem for Lucas is that these precedents have been done so well, so thoroughly, and with such substance, that even the humour in her work seems frivolous. She relies almost exclusively on linguistic puns and slang, using a vernacular language that is both unattributable and paradoxically compliant. There are at least 90,000 slang words and phrases in common use in the UK alone, 10% of which can be traced to what we eat and drink. A significant percentage cover sex and gender. No surprise, then, that Lucas’ bread and butter is fish and eggs, or meat and two veg!
In Au Naturel (1994) she gives us a double mattress with two melons and a bucket that lies next to a cucumber with two oranges for testicles. Six years later came Spinster (2000), again with the mattress lexicon but with two fried eggs for breasts and an old fish for a vagina. There is no question that Lucas knows how to place an object. Spinster is mawkish and melancholic, whilst Au Naturel is emblematic, not only of the traditional physical union, but of the 1990s and of Lucas’ place in it. But how can it take six years just to change food? And if slang is about subverting the meaning of innocent words, the subversion of objects to merely enhance the original subversion is simply an indulgence. Perhaps even just lazy.
There is nothing intrinsically subversive about Lucas’ practice. Its essence is its humour. Other than a rather didactic use of materials, there is not even anything clever to recommend it, although given the amount of "smart-assed" art about, this is somewhat refreshing. But simple becomes banal and banality begets trivia. Soldiers’ helmets plated with Coke cans, sloganed televisions cast in concrete and polyurethane toilets are all the stuff of high school art departments. That’s not to dampen the implication that "stuff" can have more than a passing resemblance to our familiar, sentient world. Paul Nash wrote in his essay The Life of the Inanimate Object: "The idea of giving life to inanimate objects is as old as almost any record of fable…the sudden assumption of life and speech, in the human sense, by inanimate things is a commonplace." But Lucas manages to pulverize the last vestiges of "life and speech" out of her objects and, by so doing, empathy, connection and meaning are lost.
In two works from 2004, Fuck and the Notorious Dream, Lucas uses ordinary wooden chairs. Fuck is comprised of a chicken, bully beef and a vest with the word "Fuck" written on it in tomato paste. Notorious Dream is built of tan tights, stockings, bully beef tins and another tin helmet. Now I don’t want to fall foul of fashionable orthodoxies, but in using so directly the vocabulary of Edward Kienholz, and particularly the derivation of his masterpiece The Illegal Operation (1962), Lucas exposes the fundamental weakness of her practice: its shallowness.
Sarah Lucas’ retrospective is a show of one-liners. Snort, guffaw, get the joke and move on. It’s easy to gasp at the linguistic gymnastics, inane social observations and smart, sardonic ribbing. But I get that from Lenny Bruce, and he leaves me with a residual battering. But I’m unlikely to go back into the office on a Monday morning and say, "Did you see what Lucas did with that mattress?"
Archie and Edith Bunker know about gender stereotyping. The residue of their gender war leaves a more permanent testimony to an historical lineage from Duchamp, through Dali’s Taxi Pluvieux (1938) to Kienholz and his Tableaux.
Two core reasons why I dislike this show so much are because I enjoyed it like I enjoy an episode of The Office–uncomfortably and entertained. And, second, because of what it could have been. There’s no doubt that Lucas is good at her theatre. But it’s the uncertainty of the bouquet, the unexpected after-taste that I missed. I missed ambiguity.
In explaining their object montages, the Surrealists cited "beautiful as the meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table." Since MOMA’s 1961 survey entitled "The Art of Assemblage," the bringing together of bits and bobs and stuff and things has been the fast track to the iconolatry of the new modern. Some have even given us furlongs of it. Nevertheless, when it is done well, by its very nature we become accomplices, accessories to the fact. Lucas keeps us at arm’s length, as audience, as canned laughter.
I am forty in a few months. Although I’m hopefully not quite ready to shuffle off, I am, however, of an age where the big questions start to settle more determinedly. Although I would never enter an art gallery in order to find the answers to them, I would at least expect to find similar ones being asked. Lucas makes me feel no better about my forthcoming and irrevocable lack of breath, nor shed light on my journey to date. I’m irritated with myself for enjoying my moment with this naked emperor. But don’t write off the YBAs.
Damien Hirst put metaphysics back on the map and Richard Billingham, as the brilliant bastard son of Bela Lugosi and May Angelou, lives his poetic, Gothic life through a 35mm lens.
In the "Codex Atlanticos," Leonardo da Vinci quotes the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras: "Every thing comes from everything. No thing is ever created, no thing is ever lost, but is always assembled from existing things." I wonder whether Leonardo’s profundity would have stretched sufficiently to accommodate Lucas’ 1996 piece Is Suicide Genetic?–a ceramic toilet with the title painted within? I suspect he would have settled for a more welcome prognosis that "pretentious certainty" almost certainly is.
