Gender and art

"Sarah Lucas's sculptures are irritating, baffling, and brilliant. That's why she's a great choice to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, says Alastair Sook.

Sarah Lucas, who will represent Britain at next summer’s Venice Biennale, is the sort of artist whose work leaves many people scratching their heads in bewilderment. Since she emerged alongside her YBA contemporaries Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in the early Nineties, she has been making sculptures so seemingly slapdash and shambolic that they often feel aggressive.

Her materials are not what we would normally associate with art: stained toilet bowls, cigarette butts, dilapidated pieces of furniture, fried eggs.

Often she jumbles these together to create disturbing figures and tableaux."

Two startlingly different retrospectives show Sarah Lucas and Ana Mendieta socking it to the male-dominated art world.

Officially, there is no such thing as Women’s Art Month. Officially, the fact  that so many powerful women artists are concurrently on show in our  galleries is merely a coincidence. But even if WAM does not officially  exist, the fact that Louise Bourgeois is opening in Edinburgh, Mira Schendel  is at Tate Modern, Kara Walker is at the Camden Arts Centre, Ayse Erkmen is  at the Barbican and even dear old Judy Chicago is popping up at the Frieze  Art Fair suggests that someone up there is cluster-bombing us with distaff  aesthetics. WAM is happening.

The main thing that makes contemporary women’s art different from contemporary  men’s art is its obsession with identity. Having been marginalised for so  many millennia, women artists today are conspicuously determined to put  themselves at the forefront of their own expression. Going round two of the  most compelling events in the WAM schedule — the Ana Mendieta show at the  Hayward Gallery and the Sarah Lucas show at the Whitechapel — is like  trekking across a pair of Mount Rushmore-sized selfies.

"Sarah Lucas may have mellowed since her hard-partying days as a leading Young British Artist, but her work still combines a feminist agenda with a bawdy physicality and a joyous wit – as her new retrospective proves.

Sarah Lucas arrives at a restaurant near Spitalfields Market in east London looking like, well, Sarah Lucas – or, more precisely, the Sarah Lucas I recognise from her grungy photographic self-portraits of the 1990s, in which the young British artist adopts various enigmatic poses: eating a banana while wearing a leather jacket, having a fag squatting semi-naked on a loo, standing before a public toilet holding an enormous salmon.

In these pictures, some of which will be shown in a new retrospective of more than two decades of her work opening down the road at the Whitechapel Gallery on October 2, Lucas dresses down in heavy, workaday clobber: ripped jeans, crumpled T-shirts, stout leather boots. Often she is smoking, or seen with a packet of Marlboro Lights by her side."

Sarah Lucas: Situation is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, from October 2 to December 15, 2013.

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/