The Erotic Work of Young British Artist, Sarah Lucas

History

Feb 8

When thinking about art and culture from the 90s, as an American we typically think of grunge, orange VHS tapes, and Gina Ekiss’ Jazz cup design. Odds are that the Young British Artists (YBA) movement won’t come to mind or cause a wave of nostalgia to crash over you, but their art played an important role in defining postmodern art in the 90s.

Young British Artists

*Damien Hirst: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, Tiger shark, glass and steel case, 5% formaldehyde*

Many YBA artists met and studied at Goldsmiths, where they learned to abandon traditional fine art practices and mediums and instead focused on creating art that caused viewers to think about the message of the piece.

Their work was shocking for the time. Using imagery of excessive violence and pornography were common motifs of the movement. They also shocked the fine art community because of their use of unconventional mediums like fresh food, cigarettes, or women’s tights.

The Sensation Exhibition

One of the more important YBA exhibits to tour the world was in 1997. The Sensation Art Exhibition, curated by Charles Saatchi, opened at the Royal Academy of Arts and drew an audience of over 300,000 people.

The exhibition drew controversy from tabloids, the public, and politicians. The BBC called the collection “gory images of dismembered limbs and explicit pornography". In 1999 when the exhibition made its way to New York City, then-mayor Rudy Guiliani threatened to cut the Brooklyn Museum’s funding saying, “the city shouldn’t have to pay for sick stuff.”

Federal Judge, Nina Gershon, ultimately ruled in favor of the museum requiring the city to reinstate the funding it had withheld.

Watch an AP News Archive clip of shots of the exhibition:

Sarah Lucas

One artist who embodied the principles of the YBA movement is Sarah Lucas. Lucas’ work reduces sexuality and erotic imagery into caricatures that some would think could only come from the mind of a young, sexually inexperienced male talking with his friends about his embellished sexual conquests.
A.C. Grayling, of the Tate Museum, on Lucas:

“She does not represent breasts and vaginas, but tits and cunts; not penises and male masturbation, but cocks and wanking. Her subject is an uncooked perspective on the nature of sex, and particularly the place of women as orifices, receptacles, as meat or fowl prepared not for the table but the bed, as something for consumption or deposit – exclusively, the deposit of male excretions.”

Lucas mocks sexists, reductionist language, and ideas of sexuality through her work by using simple imagery and creating a joke of her own.

Take a look at Lucas’ erotic and thought-provoking work below.