Sarah Lucas Read Through Andrea Dworkin
Sarah Lucas (born in 1962) is a British artist whose work initially developed within the context of Young British Art. In 1988 Lucas participated in Freeze, the exhibition which first bound the group together, organized by Damien Hirst. In 1993 she opened The Shop with Tracey Emin, there she first explored soft sculptures made with stuffed tights. Within that space in East London she created Octopus, (1993), made with tights stuffed with newspaper. Through the years she kept exploring soft sculptures, which are now her main form of expression. With her work Lucas explores the body, the abject and gender and feminist issues. She has declared in a few instances that she has been influenced by the writing of the feminist essayist Andrea Dworkin, yet she has never unpacked this influence.
Sarah Lucas, Self Portrait with a Skull, 1997, digital print on paper, 737 × 760 mm
One of the books by Dworkin whose impact can clearly be seen in Lucas’ sculptures is Intercourse. In each chapter the author focuses on a male writer’s narration of the sexual act and unpacks the range of emotions and meanings in it. Chapter five, “Possession”, contains the strongest references and points of contact between Dworkin and Lucas. Some of the relations between the writing and the art are so direct that the artworks could be illustrations for the book.
In this chapter Dworkin highlights male dominance, which is asserted through the possession of women. She cares to stress that the possession is always of a woman by a man even though his penis is vulnerable inside the woman’s vagina during intercourse. She points out the element of fear of castration felt by men and exemplified by the individual or cultural imaginary of a vagina with teeth.
Sarah Lucas, The Odd Couple, 1992
Dworkin then examines Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The novel is a story of sexual possession. A woman, Rachele, is married off to an impotent man. As a woman’s identity depends on being sexually possessed by a man, she stops existing for the community. She is then married again to a religious minister who gives her a social identity, but at the cost of her human existence. He repeatedly rapes her in the name of God. Finally she is possessed by a demon.
Dworkin explains that through these repeated forms of possession and violence Rachele has become social pornography. Each possession has sent Rachele into a deeper level of coma, until when she enters this new dimension of possession in which “she is a living corpse, existing for sexual use”, “an impersonally possessed female used as female with no remnant of human life animating or informing the use of her in sex”, “used by men impersonally”.
Sarah Lucas, Pauline Bunny, 1997, wooden chair, vinyl seat, tights, kapok, metal wire, stockings and metal clamp, 950 × 640 × 900 mm
Women as social pornography are all that Lucas represents in her art. Pauline Bunny (1997) is the most blatant example of this. She is a corpse, totally impersonal with no face nor features, she is abandoned on a chair, waiting to be used, the point of entry into her, which is all she is, all she has been reduced to, highlighted by the seams of the nude tights that make up her body. Pauline Bunny is the illustration of social pornography.
The Shop, interior, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas's gallery and studio space in 1993. Photograph: Carl Freedman
Tate Britain has recently announced a retrospective dedicated to Sarah Lucas which will open on 26th September 2023 and will run until 14th January 2024.