A wax-cast erect penis is planted on a chair, and a pair of pink dentures sit upright on the other. The chairs are corralled behind a low barrier, to deter the adventurous from taking a seat and doing themselves a mischief. Those pesky Tate barriers also prevent you from sitting on another chair, beneath a plain wooden box cantilevered above it, which is meant to function as a portable smoking area. What spoilsports these museums are. No smoking, no touching, and definitely no wanking, though a couple of sculptured mechanical arms with clenched fists are going through the motions.
Sarah Lucas’s Happy Gas at Tate Britain is more than an opportunity to leer and laugh or indulge our prurient and perverse fantasies, though it is an exhibition devoted to sex, smoking, death, the nudge-nudge, lists of swear words and sexist and homophobic insults, to toilets and excreta and cigarettes poking from between the arse cheeks and the labia.
Happy Gas is a wonderfully theatrical and surprising installation of older and newer works, taking us from 1991 to the present. Selected and configured by the artist, the exhibition is in no way a conventional retrospective, which usually tracks an artist’s development from tyro beginnings to greatest hits in dutiful stages. With her juxtapositions of the old with the new, and choreographing individual sculptures in such a way as to help us see them afresh, Lucas is having none of that. For an artist who was characterised as a “slacker” since first emerging at the end of the 1980s, she has been enormously prolific, and has designed the show, from the seating to the plinths some of the works occupy.
There are gigantic resin sandwiches, big as king-sized beds and with dubious spam-like fillings, intimations of a smoker’s death (a burned-out car, covered in unlit cigarettes), naked body-casts of friends in various abject poses, raw chicken underwear and photos of the artist on the lavvy. Amid all this, it is the everyday that looks perverse. And what could be more everyday than the toilet, even if a cigar, balanced between two walnuts, rests on the cracked and grubby seat?
As soon as Lucas slides into horror, she is back again. Fellating a banana may be a tired old routine, but Lucas has reinvigorated the joke by blowing up the photographs her then boyfriend took of her in 1990 and turned them into wallpaper. As the young Lucas nonchalantly devours a banana, a succession of female figures rise from their chairs, writhing and flopping beneath her image. Offering themselves for sex, or a porno tease photoshoot, they adopt impossible positions on rows of chairs that run the length of the gallery.
Sprouting multiple breasts but no heads, and often stilled in the transition between sitting and standing, they turn and they convulse. It is like a Pina Bausch dance, folding and unfolding through the gallery. A polished bronze body balances precariously on a chair back, arms outstretched. Fat Doris slumps exhausted in a wing-backed armchair and Honey Pie shows off her patent-leather pink platform shoes. There are a lot of kinky boots and dominatrix heels, but however impractical and improbable they are, they keep the figures tethered in the real. The chairs they squirm on go from mid-century modern to office generic, from bent plywood to chrome and steel.
Lucas’s headless figures tie themselves in knots and slither about like figures in a Francis Bacon interior. If these were made by men they’d be cancelled. Lucas’s figures are made from stuffed tights and wire and bronze and raw concrete and painted resin, cohabiting the space seamlessly. One androgynous figure leans back on a clunky chair (maybe requisitioned from a steampunk dentist), manspreads and proffers a silvery-bronze erection to the ceiling, while another is mangled in a folding chair and slathered in paint. These figures are full of variety, wit and life, however much they tie themselves in knots or extrude their rubbery limbs. And like Manet’s Olympia, one of Lucas’s figures is accompanied by a black cat, one of several that stalk the galleries. However bleak things get, you can’t forget Lucas’s humour.
Towards the end, we come across a photo of the artist sitting on a chair among the stooks of corn in a Suffolk field on a summer’s day. A bucolic image, among all the filth and the impossible footwear.
• Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas is at Tate Britain, London, from 28 September to 14 January.
