Review: Sarah Lucas Is One Great Badass

“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel,” which is currently on view at the New Museum, could not have arrived at a better time. Lucas, a British artist of 55, has been fixated on the issues of #MeToo – namely, male entitlement – long before the phrase was coined. She earned her first fame in London in the ‘90s, as a member of the YBA’s, or Young British Artists. The movement specialized in art that pursued the over-the-top outrageous gesture, and was epitomized by Damien Hirst and his giant shark-submerged-in formaldehyde.

The virtue of the current show is that it isolates Lucas from the collective hijinks of the YBA’s and allows us to focus on her as a one-of-a-kind sculptor whose work deserves comparison with predecessors as different as Henry Moore or Louise Bourgeois. To be sure, Lucas takes pleasure in being a brazen badass.

The current exhibition takes its title from her best-known work, “Au Naturel” which consists of a queen-sized mattress lying clunkily on the floor, with an assortment of strategically placed fruits and vegetables (two melons, a cucumber) embedded in its surface to evoke male and female sex organs. The piece dates back to 1994, and what once seemed like so much raw burlesque now appears as a polished extension of the tradition of assemblage and the found object. Many of her pieces – note the set of penis-sculptures fabricated from crushed beer cans – hark back to the bizarre objets of Surrealism. But Lucas puts a feminist spin on art history, exposing the degree to which art that claims to loftiness and refinement is often a function of male desire and entitlement.

In the age of # MeToo, Lucas offers a model of art that seems at once politically enlightened and free of didacticism. She goes for laughter rather than lectures. Sometimes, her work does feel overly literal, and I could have done without the cigarettes stuck in the orifices of a series of female figures. But on the whole, Lucas brilliantly exploits the history of sculpture to satirize the ways men have co-opted its forms for their own pleasure and satisfaction. And she makes the argument in terms that are impressively accessible and direct.