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Lot Essay
"Borin' hubby bleats about my weight...now I want someone who loves feelin' folds of flesh in the sack" invites Ms. Flabulous. 'Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous', a blown-up page from the dubious London newspaper 'Sunday Sport', features an advert for a voluptuous prostitute, an article on lifting the lid on Madonna's hanky panky success, sex lines and wives for sale. Sarah Lucas began her career using the 'Sunday Sport' as source material, taking an interest in its splashes on outrageous sex scandals and sensationalist photographs of naked women. The assemblage of collages consisting of photocopies and cuttings from tabloid newspaper articles indicates something of the artist's class conciousness and her limited resources. This impersonal discipline in fashioning her work from existing, utilitarian objects accentuates the concrete quality of the media and serves in finding a common language of things that are familiar and understood.
The interrelation of text, title and image serve together to point to a social/sexual content that at its best, suggest a terrible pathos, cloaked in a crass knockabout, very English humour. "It's a game for a laugh, not simply 'feminist' or 'political', it's about degradation, hilarity and deprivation, what Lucas depicts is lived by everyone. Her laughter embraces the macabre, the grotesque, the scatalogical and the reproductive." (Jerry Saltz: 'She Gives as Good as she Gets', in Parkett, No. 45, 1995).
For Lucas, the body is not politically closed. In 'Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous', she conveys the exaggerated, the crude, the excessive, the material life of the body. A close-to-the-bone statement of "this is what it's really like" is portrayed in the obese Ms. Flabulous featured. The work is layered and intersected with obsession, desire, society and an insolent urban Britishness. The artist believes everything is connected to everything else, and in trying to cope with the vast amount of information and things already existing. Lucas has created new things and her work takes on a documentary function. However, what makes Lucas on e of the most sought after artists on the British art scene is her ability to combine everyday innocence with in your face gross-out metaphors for sex.
The interrelation of text, title and image serve together to point to a social/sexual content that at its best, suggest a terrible pathos, cloaked in a crass knockabout, very English humour. "It's a game for a laugh, not simply 'feminist' or 'political', it's about degradation, hilarity and deprivation, what Lucas depicts is lived by everyone. Her laughter embraces the macabre, the grotesque, the scatalogical and the reproductive." (Jerry Saltz: 'She Gives as Good as she Gets', in Parkett, No. 45, 1995).
For Lucas, the body is not politically closed. In 'Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous', she conveys the exaggerated, the crude, the excessive, the material life of the body. A close-to-the-bone statement of "this is what it's really like" is portrayed in the obese Ms. Flabulous featured. The work is layered and intersected with obsession, desire, society and an insolent urban Britishness. The artist believes everything is connected to everything else, and in trying to cope with the vast amount of information and things already existing. Lucas has created new things and her work takes on a documentary function. However, what makes Lucas on e of the most sought after artists on the British art scene is her ability to combine everyday innocence with in your face gross-out metaphors for sex.