Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel (1994)

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel (1994) and the artifice of sexuality

Sarah Lucas is often identified with the 1990s movement of Young British Artists because of her cheeky, playful, and postmodern style that uses collages, pastiche, and 'found' objects to address serious social issues. Lucas has been particularly commended for her works questioning masculine and feminine social norms. To parody traditional British working-class attitudes towards women she created a sculpture entitled Two Fried Eggs and Kebab (1992) "in which a reclining naked female body is constructed from a table with two eggs and a kebab" showing the merger of a male desire for cheap and easy food and the female body.

Lucas has also used the common association between women, food, and sexuality to create self-portraits such as Eating a Banana (1990) which shows the artist boldly gazing at the camera in a display of sexual self-confidence.

Lucas' foray into installation art for the exhibition "Sensations" entitled Au Naturel continues to explore themes of women, food, sexuality, and popular culture. However, this piece of art to a casual observer may not look like 'art' at all. Au Naturel is the depiction of an old, stained mattress. Lying within the walls of a museum, it seems to question the very nature of art itself -- no one would think that this piece of decrepit furniture had any claims to being 'art' had they found it on the street. It looks like something that belongs in a seedy motel, or a college student's unfurnished rat-infested apartment. And this, perhaps, is Lucas' point. This is human existence 'all natural' -- what could be more natural than sex? Yet because of our attitudes about where sex should take place, we judge the display of sexuality embodied in the form of the mattress in a harsh and negative way.

This work depicts sexuality stripped of all of its aesthetic adornments, even sheets. There is nothing beautiful about this sex-stained mattress, nothing gentle or playful. There is only a sense of cheapness, impermanence, and decay. The work would shock even if it were depicted as a painting: as a three-dimensional work it is even more unsettling. The mattress is so old its springs hardly seem to have any resistance, and it is half-held up by the museum wall, as if it was shoved against the wall as a result of a violent sexual act. To some observers, calling such a work 'natural' might seem offensive. Surely what is natural would be the naked human body, not something that looks like it was used for a degrading form of sexual activity? But because the mattress provokes such violent emotions, Lucas reveals the degree to which the accoutrements of sexuality, like where it takes place, cause us to judge the participants.

The surprise of the work derives not simply from the fact that a mattress from a motel or apartment is displayed in a museum: there is also evidence of Lucas' artistic hand at work. The mattress is covered with ordinary objects that depict a series of sexual jokes, including a pair of melons evidently designed to represent breasts, a bucket that is supposed to represent a vagina, and a cucumber and a pair of oranges intended to represent a penis. These ordinary objects are unlikely to be found on a 'real' mattress. Because they are evidently placed upon the mattress, they hint at what may be the larger purpose of Lucas' work, namely to suggest that there is no 'natural' sexuality at all. Humans impose sexual ideas upon objects, whether it is the idea of cheap sex on a dirty mattress, or upon physical objects such as fruit.