'Happy Gas' at Tate Britain: Understanding Sarah Lucas' brand of good clean fun

With these puerile depictions of women, Lucas was preparing the ground for her own vision of the female. She rarely bothers representing men, and these headlines and the accompanying pulchritude from a lost black-and-white era are perhaps the final emanations of the male gaze in the entire exhibition.

They have a gratifyingly archaeological quality, like the faint tracks of unreconstructed knuckles once dragged across a prehistoric landscape.

From this point on, Lucas sets out her own store of weird female forms.

As her own curator, she officiates over a cult of Artemis, the many-breasted goddess. In choosing this motif, Sarah Lucas is challenging a long tradition in European art. Fresh from visiting an exhibition of Peter Paul Rubens in Dulwich, Jonathan Jones wrote recently:  

'Women's breasts don't just attract Rubens. They move him religiously. The goddess Venus squeezes her own breast to send white milk spurting into her baby son Cupid's mouth in a painting of the gods at home.

Juno does the same for the infant Hercules: the milk she spills becomes a white river in the night sky, the Milky Way. The word "exuberant" literally means this – coming out of a breast. Rubens is nothing if not exuberant.

Actually, 'udder' would be a closer approximation to the word's Latin origins. It would be hard to find a better word for the art of Sarah Lucas than 'exuberant,' but her headless mannequins have nothing bovine about them. To begin with, they are slim, as were the earlier 'bunnies' she created – limp effigies of Playboy centrefolds.

Filthy modern metropolis

Unlike the bunnies, each of these pneumatic creatures is also many-breasted. Collectively, they are the chain-smoking Artemis of London, the filthy modern metropolis formerly known as The Smoke, where the air is so polluted it leaves black grime in your nostrils after just a few hours, and every intake of breath is laced with seventy carcinogenic substances. It says so on the packet.

As Sarah's gallery party wears on, the exotic canapés can no longer sustain you. The cigarettes begin to leave a metallic aftertaste. You feel like death.

Surveying the madly proportioned avatars of her goddess through the haze of their smoke, the effect of the nicotine begins to wear off; it can no longer dull your appetite for proper food.

Then, at the last possible moment, the goddess takes pity and lays on an oversized sandwich.

That's not all, of course. It's amazing the things she can do with two fried eggs and a kebab. What's not to like?

Yet Lucas has had no shortage of detractors over the years. Me included. She has been dismissed as the baddest bad girl of the Young British Artists (otherwise known as the YBAs).

At over sixty, she would probably not claim that description for herself now, but in fact it's decades since she was closely affiliated with the YBAs. She doesn't reside in London either, but a remote house in Suffolk, just round the corner from Maggi Hambling, another fanatical smoker and artist.

Nor is Lucas half as bad an artist as, say, Tracey Emin, with whom she once ran a shop selling rude T-shirts. Her work shares none of Emin's crude technique, cheap provocative stunts (I think here, chiefly, of the notorious unmade bed) or neon lighting.

Furniture fixation

Well actually, there is a bit of the neon lighting, but how much more sophisticated is Lucas's taste in furniture? Apparently, it began in her childhood when the family visited other people's houses, 'ogling at the furniture'.

Did the whole family ogle at it, or just little Sarah? The article doesn't explain. There are no beds, made or unmade, in her oeuvre. The furniture ranges from sprawling sofas all the way through to plush armchairs and pert little seats.

Like this one, dedicated to smoking, they are often spartan in design:

Even toilet seats form part of her repertoire. She accords the people who sit on them all the solemnity of Rodin's thinker, thus robbing Rodin's thinker of any solemnity he still had.

I suspect Lucas is a great fan of sitting down, partly because it's so much less a) feminine (especially in the 'nuddy' (the jocular way her mother – and mine, incidentally – liked to pronounce 'in the nude'), art historically speaking) than lying down, and b) so much less domineering than standing up. I could be wrong.

Maybe she just prefers seats to settees.

One fact is beyond doubt: anyone who has a yen for decent furniture should make haste to see this exhibition, which includes a long central installation of seats and chairs and a photograph entitled Supersensible, which shows Lucas slumped in an armchair outside a second-hand store. 

Could this be the Blackstock Road? I don't know, it's too long since I strayed from the swanky confines of London's West End.

Juxtapositions

You often get this sensation of incongruity, though: an armchair outdoors, cluttering the pavement. Amid the commotion of passersby, including two bobbies on the beat, where you can almost feel the particulate matter lodged in your eye, borne on a plume of carbon monoxide, Sarah sits at her ease, taking the weight off her feet.

Her creations are usually seated too. One kissing couple is composed of intermingled, merging chairs. The piece is called The Kiss, as if she's having another go at Rodin.

Best of all for me, though, is one called Cross Doris. I challenge anyone not to recognise instantly that Doris is cross, even without a head and face to express her crossness. Doris is the funniest, most convincing image of a huff, or being miffed, you're ever likely to see. It's a comic masterpiece.

If it wasn't guilt by association with the YBAs, why has the label 'bad girl' stuck to this artist so persistently over the years?

Because right from her earliest works, she has been subjected to an obscene misreading. The earliest images here are a case in point.

They are blown up to cover the entire wall and show Sarah eating a banana. The repetition of this image faithfully replicates a certain New York pop artist. Her banana might be some kind of forbidden fruit, like the one churned out by Andy Warhol.

On the other hand, it is also a banana.

The British habit of spotting the double entendre everywhere is fine, but it is not definitive. When the joke wears thin, in the words of the old music hall song, we can still go down the Strand and have a banana, straight-forwardly a type of fruit, liberated from innuendo.

The jokes are rude, inevitably. Like dirty postcards, they thrive on bad puns. But, in the same way as a dirty postcard, they can also be viewed as works of art. It only requires us to get beyond the surface lewdness.

Like with the peach-coloured wallpaper, prettier than anything those prudish Victorians ever came up with. Or the swirls of compacted cigarettes forming Cupids. Or evoking cloud formations.

Obsession with cigarettes

This level of aesthetic appeal lies immediately beneath the bawdiness. Her puppet-like figures, with their ballooning curves, either soft or as hard as bronze, are lovingly crafted. And once you get past the smutty surface, they're as innocent as Jeff Koons's Rabbit.

I'm not being deliberately paradoxical here, but the real revelation of the objects assembled in Tate Britain is their innocence. Look past the chicken, the lists of slang words, the chain-smoking and the obsessive preoccupation with mammary glands, and the overwhelming sensation is of fun.

Her effigies evade the clichés of feminine beauty as patented by old masters like Rubens. Without making women ugly, Lucas makes them no longer beautiful in any traditional sense. It's as if they are viewed from the other side of a defunct fantasy.

She lets us in on the in-joke that feminine reality is a lot more difficult, contradictory and even at times ridiculous than we might think.

Just not as ridiculous as Rubens.

Happy Gas is currently running at Tate Britain, London, until 14 January 2024.