Sarah Lucas at Barbara Gladstone - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

As individual would expect from a "Britpacker" (that clump of young British artists whose work is characterized by dint of raunchy sexual and/or scatological content) Sarah Lucas's fresh work is unruly, rambunctious and cocky Despite being titled "The advanced in years In Out," her recent display had less to do with sex than with other cherished themes, among them drinking, shitting and smoking.

Cigarettes were prevalent, serving as a cliched penis surrogate in You Know What (1998) and functioning more directly as a sculptural material in the installation Life's a Drag Organs (1998) The latter comprises sum of two units wrecked and burned-out cars whose seats and other parts have been meticulously, almost anally, overspreaded with thousands of Marlboros. In previous installations by means of Lucas, vandalized vehicles referred to the violent, working-class neighborhood of Islington where the artist grew up Here the cars also were tokens for her lungs, or "organs," burned-out from years of smoking.

While Lucas's use of everyday materials (beer cans, aged mattresses, hotdogs, eggs)is firmly established in contemporary practice, the abundance of bathroom imagery inevitably evok the specific antecedent of Duchamp's Fountain, the 1917 urinal-as-readymade. Is Suicide Genetic? (1996) incorporates a soiled ceramic toilet in which the artist has painted the work's querying title; Nature Abhors a Vacuum (1998) is a toilet painstakingly overlayed with cigarettes. In the show's title piece, The aged In Out (1998), nine variously colored polyurethane casts of toilets look to pay (mocking?) homage to the bathtubs and other domestic particulars cast by the artist's compatriot Rachel Whiteread.

Elsewhere in the display Lucas launched an assault upon gender stereotypes. In one photographic self-portrait, Human Toilet Revisited (1998) she sits atop a toilet seat, naked from the waist down, feet up smoking a cigarette. In another, entitled Laugh? (1998) the artist make opens a beer can, which sprays up and without toward the viewer. Lucas targets action s and actions associated with a true specific "brand" of masculinity: the beer-swilling, leg-splaying, assscratching bloke by dint of usurping this socially abject male stereotype she search fors to undermine the conjugate myth of the weak and vulnerable woman. Her grungy gender-ambiguous work is intended as an affront to the decorum of the gallery connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts in particular and the mores of patriarchal society in general.

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