Sarah Lucas has long experimented with her androgynous look with food. They range from her first photographic self portrait, Eating a Banana, 1990 to the more recent Human Toilet Revisited, 1998. Photographic self portraits have been an important element of Lucas’s work since the early 1990s. The seminal Eating a Banana changed Lucas’s perception of her ‘masculine’ appearance from being a disadvantage to being something she could use in her art. ‘I suddenly could see the strength of the masculinity about it – the usefulness of it to the subject struck me at that point, and since then I’ve used that’ (Lucas quoted in Barber, p.16). The resulting confrontational self portrait photographs, made throughout the 1990s, complement her sculptural and installation work. Through them she presents an identity which challenges stereotypical representations of gender and sexuality. Posing simultaneously as tough and abject, macho but female, she creates an image of defiant femininity.
Lucas appears in the macho pose she has claimed as her own. Clad in old jeans and heavy footwear, she sits with her legs wide apart and her feet planted firmly on the ground. Androgynous t-shirts and leather jackets feature in many of the images. In all these images her gaze back at the viewer is direct and uncompromising. Food representing or standing in for sexual body parts is a common theme in Lucas’s work, mainly employed to reveal and subvert degrading objectification of the body in vernacular language. Fried eggs feature as breasts in sculptural installations and cover Lucas’s own breasts in her Self Portrait with Fried Eggs. In Got a Salmon On #3 1997, Lucas stands outside a public toilet, a huge salmon resting from her shoulder to below her waist, a pun on the idea of a female erection. Summer 1998 portrays Lucas grimacing as she is sprayed with frothing beer. Like Eating a Banana and Lucas’s film, Sausage Film 1990, it satirises traditional female roles in pornography. These images present a female artist of masculine appearance as an object for male desire.
Self Portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996
Au Naturel 1994 Mattress, water bucket, melons, oranges and cucumber 84 x 168 x 145 cm
Chicken Knickers 2000 C-print 273.2 x 196.3 cm
Eating a Banana, 1990
I really enjoy how Lucas has used the foods specifically to display sexual, and mostly feminine, body parts – I only wished I had seen these months ago. They capture what makes her feminine in the photographs, proving the foods sexual themes, as her appearance and manner capture the masculine aspect of the photograph. It begs the question of, why does masculinity get the mannerisms and aesthetic to represent it, while the femininity gets the objects to be consumed?
saratrouble 