Sarah Lucas: about as rebellious as paper doilies
In spite of a giant spam sandwich, burned-out Jag, and several plaster casts of the artist’s close friends in which cigarettes have been jammed up their orifices, Sarah Lucas’s Happy Gas is as funny as lead. In a corner of Tate Britain’s upper galleries, an animatronic hand jerks up and down, titled Wanker (1999). Across from it, The Old Couple (1991) – false dentures and a wax dildo – perch on a pair of rickety chairs.
I turn to face the wall, on which Lucas has reproduced a spread from the now-dead tabloid (and, even when it was alive, pretty low-hanging fruit) the Sunday Sport, whose headline screams: “SOD YOU GITS… MEN GO WILD FOR MY BODY”, accompanied by the grinning profile of a pint-sized kissogram.
Lucas, now 60, first emerged as a leading light of the Young British Artists, the swaggering art-school grads who, during the 1990s – through sheer shock factor and masterly management of the hype cycle – produced an endless commentary on sex, death, and money that caught the spirit of the times.