Art Club: Gallery Visit to Sarah Lucas’ Happy Gas at Tate Britain

By Joshua Y'Barbo

Florian and Kevin (2015) by Sarah Lucas is displayed at the Tate Britain (2023). Photo by Joshua Y'Barbo

As an artist-in-residence for the TEAM LEWIS Foundation and a lecturer at the University of the Arts London, I write Art Clubs for cross-sector audiences and teach various theoretical, practical, and research-based skills transferable across art and design.  This month, I led a group of women from TEAM LEWIS through Sara Lucas’ Happy Gas at the Tate Britain. Doing so allowed me to learn more about and reform my opinion about Lucas’ work and talk about and share these ideas with the group. 

Photo by Joshua Y'Barbo

The group of young women, who predominately never studied art but are very aware of gender inequality across many aspects of life, initially wanted to see the exhibition because of the giant phallic marrow sculptures Florian and Kevin (2015) installed in the front lawn of the Tate Britain. When asked what the sculptures mean, the obvious answer was that they’re giant willies made of concrete. According to the press release for Lucas’ retrospective at the Tate Britain (nd), ‘Lucas is internationally celebrated for her bold and irreverent work, often exploring the human body, mortality, and very British experiences of sex, class and gender.’ Lucas’ giant marrows named after men highlight an exciting contradiction in audiences' responses to artworks of realistic penises in art, such as Jeff Koons’ tasteless billboards of him having sex with a porn star, compared to the literal cast of vaginas, which Lucas’ refers to as her ‘muses’ (Higgins, 2015). In the Tate exhibition guide, Lucas’ stated, ‘Funnily enough vaginas seem to shock people more than a penis. Especially the plaster casts of real ones. I’ve seen people approach some of the Muses and, when they’re close enough to get the vagina into focus, about turn and walk away’ (tate.org, nd). An example of these works is Like walking into custard … Kris (2015), which Lucas included in her installation for the Venice Biennale at the British Pavilion. However, the work suggests a more profound feminist critique of the exclusion of women in art history. For example, in talking about one of her projects that critiqued ‘institutionalised art history’ and the meaning of feminine artmaking, Griselda Pollock (p.26, 2010) stated, ‘Old Mistresses […] referenced the sexual dissymmetry of language that revealed the political and phallic unconscious of Art History.’ Although Old Mistresses finally entered the public realm in 1981, Pollock’s ideas began forming through participating in the Women’s Art History Collective, founded in 1973. 

Experimenting with presenting our materials collaboratively to counter typical forms of academic individualism, we identified three topics: images of women, the language and discourse of art history and criticism with their stereotypes and omissions, and a recovered, reconceived history of women as artists. 

Griselda Pollock (2010, p.22)

An apparent critique of the representation of women and audiences' responses points towards the feminist art movement and its fight against exclusion and objectification in art history and artmaking based on Lucas’ material use of textiles, reclaiming concrete from masculine modernity, and critiquing institutions through unconventional plinths.

Photo by Joshua Y'Barbo

Feminist artists’ use of sewing and textiles starkly contrasts with the conventional mediums of contemporary art. For example, ‘Embroidery and textiles are associated with women's art practice; women artists used embroidery, needlework, and textiles as a powerful symbolic medium of expression and resistance against the male-dominated art society’ (Rani et al. 2021). Compared to more masculine acts of painting or sculpturing, needlework and textiles suggest more domestic materials associated with work within the home. Therefore, using such materials represents a continued struggle for women artists to address social issues that directly affect them and understand their own sense of self-representation. Lucas' exhibition features several examples of her signature use of textiles to represent female bodies, highlighting the sexualised objectiveness of art over the representation of women. Interestingly, Lucas ‘[…] uses the roughness of concrete to contrast with the delicacy of other materials such as tights and paper’ (tate.org, nd). The giant marrows in the front garden of the Tate show this use of concrete, distinct from her use of concrete as plinths, suggesting the phallic shapes as the embodiment of the masculine nature of the material through one of her signature willy-jokes. 

Photo by Joshua Y'Barbo

Artists like Henry Moore and Anish Kapoor are examples of famous, high-value male artists who use concrete to make sculptures, linking this urban construction material used to make art to a predominantly male art market that establishes the value of such artworks. However, truly little connects this material with male-dominated art history. So, understanding the representation of patriarchy in concrete requires turning to its use in the architecture of modern cities. For example, Leslie Kern (2020), author of Feminist City, writing for the Guardian, stated, ‘As the feminist geographer Jane Darke has said: “Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.” In other words, cities reflect the norms of the societies that build them. And sexism is a deep-rooted norm.’ If the use of concrete to build cities represents the sexist society that made them, then the same material used to create works of art, also representations of society and culture, perpetuates the gender inequality within the art world that this material represents. Therefore, Lucas’ use of concrete suggests reclaiming the material, generally used as plinths, either as slabs of concrete or breeze blocks, for her subtle feminist critique of class and gender inequality in the art world and across modern society.

Photo by Joshua Y'Barbo

On the contrary, Racheal Whiteread and Barbara Hepworth have used concrete to make their drastically different work, reclaiming the material for female artists, which doesn’t make Lucas’ use of concrete particularly original. For example, Hepworth, known mainly for her carved stone forms, created Turning Forms out of concrete for the 1951 Festival of Britain and the Southbank Centre (Croft 2021). Whiteread, too, used concrete for her work, House (1993-1994), which led to her being the first female artist to be awarded the Turner Prize in 1993 (Tate.org, nd). Both artists have substantial places within contemporary art history and the art world, making their use of concrete clear examples of the reclamation of the material by female artists, earning prestige against their male counterparts. However true, neither Hepworth nor Whiteread could be seen as critiquing the institutions of art by using their reclamation of concrete to create unconventional plinths, traditionally an apparatus of display artwork that represents the unseen oppressive mechanism of the museum that hides gender and racial inequality. For example, ‘Instead of smooth and pristine plinths, Lucas uses concrete breeze blocks to support many of her works’ (tate.org), which suggests an institutional critique.  

Photo by Joshua Y'Barbo

Institutional critique is multiple waves of art history, where contemporary artists criticise museums and other institutions for their practices, holding them accountable for their public function to society. This includes the mechanisms for displaying art, such as plinths and vitrines, and the unseen labour of cleaning and maintaining these institutional structures. For example, 

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!” […] focuses on the hidden orders of the museum, but more specifically from the perspective of labor. Ukeles emphasizes the indispensable labor of installing and maintaining the site of an art exhibition, such as painting and washing walls, sweeping and polishing floors, cleaning windows and vitrines—labor that is often gendered and/or raced, and always carefully kept out of sight. 

Alberro, 2009, p.9

Ukeles’s early institutional critique shows us that something as mundane as a plinth or vitrine symbolises far greater inequalities within the museum, suggesting the structures used to display art oppress race and gender without the public fully realising it. Whether using chairs, desks, packing pallets, breeze blocks, or concrete slabs, Lucas replaces the conventional plinth throughout her exhibition with materials that suggest a critique of the museum’s exhibition practices. 

In conclusion, Hepworth and Whiteread may have reclaimed concrete as a material for female artists in contrast to the textiles and needlework often ascribed to feminist art in a similar way as Lucas. However, neither have imbued their work with a subtle feminist and institutional critique of the artwork.  At first glance, Sarah Lucas’ works seem derivative in their repetition of willy, vagina, and boobs jokes, which initially come across as more crude than insightful. However, this opinion overlooks the nuanced elements of feminist and class struggle that Lucas’ work is actually about. As a result, I had the opportunity to talk with the group about these neglected aspects of Lucas’s work, forming a new opinion about Lucas’s work from a feminist perspective. From my experience, I see opportunities to take similar groups around exhibitions, like Women in Revolt, as ways to make the sometimes vague or inaccessible feminist critique of art overlooked by those without advanced art degrees and have eye-opening conversations that reflect the non-initiated public personal experience of gender inequality. I also see the opportunity to further connect concrete as a patriarchal material and instances where female artists have reclaimed this material as a feminist critique. 

Bibliography

Alberro, A. (2009). Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique. In: A. Alberro and B.

Stimson, eds., 2009. Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists' Writings. London: MIT

Press, pp.2-19.

Croft, C. (2021). Unusual Barbara Hepworth concrete sculpture restored and to be on view in Wakefield. c20society.org. Available [online] at: https://c20society.org.uk/2021/05/13/unusual-barbara-hepworth-concrete-sculpture-restored-and-to-be-on-view-in-wakefield [accessed 14 November 2023]. 

Higgins, C. (2015). ‘No one’s told me off about the fannies yet’: Sarah Lucas at the Venice Biennale. www.theguardian.com. Available [online] at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/05/venice-biennale-2015-sarah-lucas-exhibition [accessed 25 Oct 2023]. 

Pollock, G. (2010). Opened, Closed and Opening: Reflections on Feminist Pedagogy in a UK

University. n.paradoxa international feminist art journal, vol 26 (July), pp. 20-28.

Rani, S. Jining, D., and Shah, D. (2021). Embroidery and Textiles: A Novel Perspective on Women Artists' Art Practice. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Vol. 13, No. 4, 2021, Pp. 1-11.

Tate.org. (nd). RACHEL WHITEREAD. Tate Britain Exhibition. 12 SEPTEMBER 2017 – 24 JANUARY 2018. Available [online] at: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/rachel-whiteread [accessed 14 November 2023]. 

Tate.org. (nd). Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas. Exhibition Guide. Available [online] at: https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/sarah-lucas-happy-gas [accessed 14 November 2023].