Sarah Lucas
Au Naturel
Published on 9. October 2009
Book
Paperback/Softback
112 pages
978-1-84638-054-9 (ISBN)
Description
Does art have a sex? A study of Sarah Lucas's famous assemblage of objects that suggest male and female body parts.Amna Malik opens her study of Sarah Lucas's Au Naturel (1994) by asking "Does art have a sex? And if so, what does it look like?" Au Naturel is an assemblage of objects-a mattress, a bucket, a pair of melons, oranges and a cucumber-that suggest male and female body parts. Through much of Lucas's work, and particularly through Au Naturel, Malik argues, we are placed in a position of spectatorship that makes us see "sex" as so many dismembered parts, with no apparent morality attached-no implication of guilt, shame, or embarrassment. The sardonic and irreverent nature of Lucas's observations, moreover, violates certain assumptions about what kind of art women artists make. This, Malik proposes, is the significance of Lucas's work for a later generation of artists who are unburdened by the need to insist on questions of gender and sexual politics as a necessary subject for the woman artist. Lucas's shift between high and low art and culture operates as a shift between "high" aesthetic ideas about the art object as a metaphoric play of meaning and its "low" associations with the materiality of the literal object and its allusions to the genitals and sex. Au Naturel creates a series of associations that bring the ideal into collision with a base materialism emphasizing desire as a condition of the meaning of the object.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Interest Age: From 18 years
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
32 farbige Abbildungen
32 color illus.
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
295 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84638-054-9 (9781846380549)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Amna Malik is a Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Sarah Lucas's work has been included in the major surveys of new British art in the 1990s, including Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. Au Naturel, made for and exhibited for the first time in "Football Karaoke," organized by Georg Herold for Portikus, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, 1994, is in Damien Hirst's "murderme" collection.
Amna Malik is a Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
David S. Landes is Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 1967, he has been bridging disciplines throughout his career as an economist and a specialist in the modern history of Western Europe and the Middle East. His books include "The Unbound Prometheus" (1969), "Revolution in Time" (1983), and, most recently, "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" (1998).
Amna Malik is a Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
David S. Landes is Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 1967, he has been bridging disciplines throughout his career as an economist and a specialist in the modern history of Western Europe and the Middle East. His books include "The Unbound Prometheus" (1969), "Revolution in Time" (1983), and, most recently, "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" (1998).