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Art with a capital F
J aspistos IN COMPETITION NO. 1997 you were shown a reproduction of a 'work of art' exhibited at the ICA and invited to provide an enthusiastic appreciation/explanation of it in the style of a very modern art critic.
Betting on a sticky wicket for the ICA, co-curator Gregor Muir prodded forward with: 'In some ways it is strikingly poetic . . . a bold twist on words.' Does Lucas have the courage and artistic stamina to confront a bidet with the same subtlety?' wondered Nick Syrett. Annelise McArdle was struck by 'the absurdist darkness of her wit', Mike Morrison by 'the work's quint- essential bathroomlessness', whereas Paul Hatton considered that it is quite clear, even to the most blinkered bourgeois eye, that "The Great Flood" is nothing less than an indictment of the Thatcher years'. Meanwhile the Royal Academy has felt obliged to display health warnings for any- one entering its latest show. Will viewers be offered free protective masks? Com- mendations to Bill Greenwell and Alanna Blake, who only just missed the cut. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus bottle of Isle of Jura Single Malt Scotch whisky goes to Joe Hyam.
With 'The Great Flood' Sarah Lucas has made more than just a fundamental statement about the human condition. She has evoked a sense of promised movement within an actual stasis, and made a construction vibrant with absences. Under her spell, impelled by a fierce logic, the practical translates instantly to the metaphysical: Where the toilet paper? Where the lavatory brush? Where the door? Where the wall behind the cistern? She may at a stroke have stripped the cloak from the cloaca, but we know that we will never know the answers. These arrange- ments of exits and entrances have become an archetypal riddle pulsating with the ambiguous. Note how they manage both to imitate the func- tions of evacuation and replenishment and simultaneously to service them. How deft! When
in 1917 Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal in New York he only flirted with the truth. Ms Lucas gives us the works. (Joe Hyam) Lucas's latest work is the fruit of her meditations on the absent as 'present', through which we can participate in the hypnotic realism — conveying a contemporary sense of unease — which per- meates her installations. In 'Flood' we face a perceptual whole where roundness contrasts with upright and horizontal orientations, testing the limits of three dimensions, yet with a touch- ing concern for the integrity of the materials. Lucas scorns, on our behalf, the turgid. She com- mands us: 'only connect'. 'Flood' is statement: a direct equivalent or model for objects or their processes. Here the transitory nature of life is suggested, flushed with preoccupation for humano-political issues, expressed through an unstrained spatial relation- ship of controlled extravagance. More than a new 'stage' in Lucas's work, this is a new 'reach'. Yet, knowing Lucas, one feels here, too, a very private sub-subject matter, a moment of person- al effluxion by the artist. Not representation but encapsulation. (Valerie D. Choppen) What a vibrant symbol would the German Romantics have found in the flush toilet, had the prudishness of the age not prevented them! One had thought that there was little more to be wrung out of the theme of spiritual loneliness,
but here is Sarah Lucas to give it a marvellous new twist. Who among us has not spent his loneliest hours installed on such an installation? It is all here: the sense of Sehnsucht, of Einsam- keit, of Weltschmerz. The feeling of despair, of sheer Verzwetflung, is compounded by making the installation a blatantly botched DIY job, which resonates even more powerfully as a sym- bol of the loneliness of the individual in the modern world. One final resonance: as I left, with a regretful Rack!,lick at the piece, isolated in its gaunt surrounding space, I felt like Shel- ley's traveller gazing at the relics of Ozymandias:
and I despaired. Magnificent! (Noel Petty) Art is nothing if it is not an endoscope thrust into the bowels of society. Through it the con- cealed is revealed and the revelation is set before us with transfiguring clarity. It is this sense of discovery through uncovering that gives such primal power to Lucas's 'The Great Flood'. Its visceral starkness wrenches us into acknowl- edging the light-dark duality of consumption and evacuation — the one proclamatively conspicu- ous, the other skulking and secretive. The simple reic solidity of her work exposes and explodes our unthinking pretension that the human body is any more than a succession of tubes linking the bowl we eat from with the bowl we defecate into. More, by also physically laying bare the crude connective pipework that feeds and is fed by cistern and pan she puts us in our place in the endless circulating chain that draws from the rains and empties into the sea. (W.J. Webster)
Here is a work of art that says almost more than there is to say about the modern world, a work that enters what is disparaging referred to as the smallest room in the house and expands that room's pivotal artefact, rendering it conceptually larger than the house that contains the room that contains it. For the artist, with brutalist hon- esty and honest brutality, has elected to strip away the pretensions of those who believe they are anything more (or indeed other ) than toilet- goers, while simultaneously rescuing the lyricism of the lavatory by compelling us to look at and respect the intrinsic textural poetry of an object practicality demands we desecrate daily with effluent. As it stands, proudly proclaiming its existence outside the demeaning context of func- tionality, the liberated lavatory chillingly con- jures back shades of this century's oppressions. 'I have been shat on,' it says, 'and yet I am
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