Teilen
130114: Secession: Sarah Lucas – NOB + Gelatin
Secession
Sarah Lucas – NOB + Gelatin
23.11.2013 – 19.01.2014
The invention of the “ladies joke”
By Nina Schedlmayer
Meat grinder, throbbing cartilage or brown milliner: in her book “nob”, Sarah Lucas collects synonyms for the term “phallus”, and next to each she positioned a black-and-white photo of her work using a live model. She used the cast of her boyfriend’s erected penis and presented it here in great detail (and this has less to do with eroticism than with handicraft).
The book was published on the occasion of Lucas’ exhibition in the Secession, which predominantly focuses on a male’s “best part”. Two gigantic bronze pumpkins, showing a distorted mirror image of the main room of Olbrich’s construction, refer to vegetable cultivation competitions in Great Britain – and, similar to everywhere on the globe, the winner is also the one, haha, “with the largest one”. On a monumental T-shirt, nipples peep out of holes cut into the shirt for exactly this purpose, and two huge concrete dildos are on the sides (one pointing to the floor and one to the sky) placed on bases made of compressed car wrecks à la Arman. In the back area, four chickens are getting comfortable in the coop – they were contributed by Gelatine (in other words one chicken for every Gelatin boy). Yes, it’s all quite amusing, the chicks and the members, the nipples and the vegetables, the up and down of the dildos; and the staging of the room was also quite well done, something that doesn't apply for every exhibition here. And of course this is Lucas’ response to the century-long underrepresentation of male sexuality in art, what many have done before her, but why not.
Now the artist is trying to developing something like a counterpart to male jokes, and maybe that’s the summit of emancipation – but it remains unclear how ironically she deals with the, lets temporarily call it “ladies joke”. After all: pumpkins and penises, nobody can really take this type of snide humour seriously.
Secession
1010 Vienna, Friedrichstrasse 12
Tel: +43 1 587 53 08
Fax: +43 1 587 53 07 – 34
http://www.secession.at
Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00 – 18.00 hours, Sun 10.00 – 16.00 hours
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
 |
|
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
130114
Secession
1010 Wien, Friedrichstrasse 12
Tel: +43 1 587 53 07, Fax: +43 1 587 53 07-34
Email: office@secession.at
http://www.secession.at
Öffnungszeiten: Di-So 14-18 h
Secession
1010 Wien, Friedrichstrasse 12
Tel: +43 1 587 53 07, Fax: +43 1 587 53 07-34
Email: office@secession.at
http://www.secession.at
Öffnungszeiten: Di-So 14-18 h
