Sarah Lucas: in Conversation with Dr Laini Burton
VAULT speaks to Sarah Lucas about sex, toilets and sculpture.
Image credit: Sarah Lucas, Alice Cooper, 2020, tights, wire, wool, spring clamp, shoes, acrylic paint, metal chair, sculpture; 99 x 50 x 90 cm; plinth: 20.3 x 121.9 x 121.9 cm. Copyright: Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London
Thank you for your time, Sarah. I imagine you are a busy woman, so I’m going to dive right in. Your use of humour has always been an effective way of circumventing or disarming bodily taboos. After so long exploring these moral and psychological dilemmas, what do you think is at the core of our discomfort with sex, genitalia, desire and bodies?
It’s a lot of things. Many of them very subtle, unspeakable and even unthinkable. Societies need taboos and conventions of behaviour. We’re born into a world that is not a blank page, and we have to learn the rules and get on with it as it is. Which we do, like learning to talk, unquestioningly, during our formative years. It’s a process of indoctrination from the outset.
Questions do occur to us along the way. We develop a sense, or learn through experience, which questions can be asked and which ones are better kept to ourselves. Swearing is a good example of this. We know what the bad words are before we know what they mean. And often, what they actually mean doesn’t seem as bad as we thought – unless they’re coming at you with aggression and venom behind them. Basically, we find ourselves in a situation of being judged all the time. It becomes an inner voice.
Think of the taboo around going to the toilet. Quite a perversion really. Building these little private rooms where we can be invisible, receptacles that carry our excreta far away from us and out of sight. Segregation in public places of men and women ...Subscribe to read this article in full
