The retrospective of Lucas’s work was a pretty full on assault of the visual senses. It comprised the Lucas greatest hits and then a few more recent artworks. I hadn’t seen much of her work in the flesh, so to speak, before, just in reproductions in art books and online so I was maybe expecting too much from the show. I was struck by how dated much of the work appeared now as artistic sensibilities have moved on and the shock of phalluses, tits and vaginas has paled in the 20 or so years since she first presented them. Many of the works look like jokes or one-liners and you got them in one and deeper levels of meaning seem largely absent.
from The Sara Lucas show at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
The new work, mostly seemed to evidence a different artistic language and I didn’t find it terribly convincing. I was reminded of something a poet friend and publisher Chris Hamilton-Emery said to me recently, “that maybe some poets only have 5 or 6 good poems in them during their whole career, and you don’t always know if the best is already behind them”.
I wondered whether artists similarly only had a handful of great or good art works in them and everything else was pointless repetition of what they considered a winning formula, or attempts to innovate which just didn’t come off. I wonder what this says about my own practice and whether I’ve produced the best work I’m ever going to make, or whether the best is yet to come. And the point now is to promote and show what already has been produced. Of course I don’t believe that, and no artist would, otherwise they would quit producing. Most believe, and I’m assured that’s true of writers and poets also, that they will produce better and continually strive to do so.
Nonetheless, I found Lucas’ latest work worrying given she’s about to up scale for Venice.
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