Sarah Lucas

Interview by Jean Wainwright, recorded July 1997

In conversation at Sadie Coles HQ, London, Sarah Lucas discusses her latest work, Bunny Gets Snookered.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 16 Numbers 3 & 4, 1997

Transcript

Sarah Lucas, in conversation at Sadie Coles HQ, London, discusses her latest work, ‘Bunny Gets Snookered’. Working with ordinary objects, her conceptual sculptures stimulate the imagination. Satirising the sexist world of laddishness, her installations and photographs court the strange and ephemeral. Although claiming anti-establishment affinities, Lucas is one of the key figures in the recent group of British artists enjoying international acclaim.

Jean Wainwright: I’m here at Sadie Coles HQ with Sarah Lucas at her new show ‘Bunny gets Snookered’. Let’s start with the title of this show, ‘Bunny Gets Snookered’.

Sarah Lucas: Well I made an edition of arm sculptures with my arms interlocking in snooker ball colours, because I needed to bring a bit of colour into my work, and I thought it would be good to have a limit on the number I did. There are eight snooker ball colours so I thought ‘well that will be quite nice’. Since then I’ve been on the lookout for things that could be made into editions in that way; most things aren’t really suitable. When I made the first one of these I thought, ‘well, yeah I could do something with one of these’ because of the possibilities with the colours for the stockings and that kind of thing. I thought it would be a really funny thing to make in snooker ball colours, especially if they are all hand made; it’s not an edition. That’s really where it came from and then I thought it’s actually really funny, the whole idea of the snooker thing with these bunnies, because it does have that sexual connotation, so I thought I’d call it ‘Bunny gets Snookered’.

JW: Looking first of all at the triptych you’ve done; the black and white bunnies and photographic works, is this an influence on your work, surrealism?

SL: Yes, I it is. I’ve always had a sort of interest in it, something I was very impressed by when I was a teenager. I liked that kind of ‘odd’ quality because I think it makes you think a bit. There’s also something accidental in my work. I actually took these pictures to use up a bit of film and they just worked out a lot better than I expected. That’s why there’s so much incidental stuff in the background and a lot of Angus’s work.

JW: If we move to the largest piece here which is this glorious snooker table with the two chairs on it. Can you describe this work and also say how it relates to the main body of your work?

SL: The snooker table isn’t part of the work, we just hired it; we thought it would help with the installation. It goes back to the previous show where I was thinking that there were certain things that you could introduce, just to be themselves, like the car, which wasn’t working. In a way it was sort of irrelevant whether it worked or not. I suppose it’s more of an artwork if it works, but it adds quite a flavour to the whole thing. Because these bunnies are all about the same height I thought that to have eight of them in here, all at the same height, would maybe not be as dramatic as it could be and since I already had the idea of the snooker ball colours I thought that would be the ideal thing to introduce, for a bit of variation.

JW: They do look marvellous. Again is it an incidental thing, with these chairs that you’ve just found?

SL: No, I could have gone and tried to find an appropriate chair and just striated them. I don’t like that sort of standardisation. I actually think I tend to use odd bod stuff that doesn’t particularly have a value. I think the fact that they’re all different doesn’t matter. Again, that introduces another thing about the colour and the texture, and because none of the chairs are particularly new, that helps the sleazy aspect.

JW: It definitely does and also I think people start to make associations because you’ve got office chairs and bar chairs and working man’s café chairs, all the different situations that you’ve dealt with in your work.

SL: Exactly, yes.

JW: If we just look at the actual bunnies themselves, the way you’ve constructed them; what stimulated you to do that?

SL: It goes back a long time actually. In 1993 when Tracey and I had the shop I made an octopus out of tights stuffed with newspaper and I liked it, so I thought ‘well what else could I make with tights’ and three months after that I was thinking about making a tortoise but the whole thing never quite worked, so I just dropped it. When I came to be thinking about the show in St. John’s lofts the idea occurred to me again of making a hare but making it much more feminine and having stockings and things. Putting it on the chair was actually a complete accident. I just put it on a chair I had handy, to see how the legs were working and suddenly the whole thing was just going on so I took it from there, and attached the ears to the chair and it then just happened.

JW: So they’re actually attached to the chair, is that something that’s just happened incidentally?

SL: It did happen by accident, but on the other hand I’ve often used the furniture as a stand in for the model, so in this case it doesn’t quite stand in for the body, but it does in the chest area, and it’s helping to support the bunny. It also brings the chair to life in a certain way and they become indispensable to each other but generally speaking it’s been the tables.

JW: I love the way, as you said at the beginning, that you use the types related to the snooker balls, so you’ve got this lovely contrast of red stockings, blue stockings and black stockings. Were you pleased with the way that worked?

SL: Actually there was quite a lot of scope because I could have looked for certain kind of chairs or painted the chairs, in the end I thought I should just stick with the stockings, the blue one is holy blue, for instance and the pink one ...

JW: Why is that one holy blue, was there any reason for that?

SL: I just fancied it, I thought I suppose there’s that whole thing of blue movies for a start and there’s the melancholy feeling that blue has an association with, and I didn’t really want them to all kind of samey.

JW: You often play with these kinds of stereotypes in your work, the male domain etc. Are you considering this in this piece?

SL: Well really I just stick to those simple things. People say it’s to do with the maleness; all those things play a part but mostly I just try and choose simple things to work with that everybody knows about, that are fairly common, so that I know where I am. It’s surprising how many meanings tend to converge on that.

JW: Do you find that exciting when people put all these meanings, because they really do?

SL: Oh yes, I find it exciting in my own head when that starts to happen, because you choose something, like the snooker table, for quite practical reasons and the associations seem to grow.

JW: I just started thinking about smoking when I saw the snooker table.

SL: It gives you a feeling; I mean by having the snooker table here puts you in a mind of more an evening time situation, a smoking and a sleazy environment.

JW: Drinking.

SL: Illicit. I always think that in the sexier work, these bunnies, or the ‘Bitch’ piece or the ‘Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab’, people feel my presence much more strongly in those pieces than in perhaps things with less of a sexual element. I think I’m still very heavily associated with things to do with sexuality. But from my point of view, with all my work, I’m operating from inside it somehow, not really making things that are separate from me, they’re all about things that I do or that I’m involved in; it’s very much from the inside.

JW: I don’t think we can talk about your work without talking about smoking.

SL: Well it’s been a recent theme definitely during the last couple of years.

JW: Is there any reason why that’s become more dominant?

SL: I think since I turned thirty I started to think more about decaying and eventually dying, and to feel more the affects in my body of the kind of lifestyle I live. I do smoke a lot and I do drink a lot and I started to think about the self-destructiveness of that, how bizarre it is to be doing something so self-destructive and enjoying it. I’m intrigued by the contradiction of those things on the one hand the decay and on the other hand the pleasure you take in doing it. You smoke for the distraction from what you’re doing; I might be making something and I want to take a break so I’ll take a cigarette. On the one hand you do it for relief and on the other hand it’s destroying you so it’s going to cost you sooner or later, all that relief.

JW: People read political statements into it as well, about smoking and anti-smoking campaigns.

SL: I mean all that is less important in a way, but it’s funny because it is relevant at the moment, the whole idea of realising that you’ve got the freedom to smoke and other people have got the freedom to be free of your smoke. I agree with both sides on that really. You shouldn’t have to be choking on other people’s fags but on the other hand I’m not really pro any kind of censorship. Another thing I sometimes think about smoking is that I do it to actually dampen down my passion in that same way that you smoke when you’re nervous, which always strikes me as a funny thing to do as well.

JW: Can we talk a little bit about why you have always had this great interest in this kind of laddish culture? Is that for any particular reason?

SL: I suppose I was quite a tomboy when I was a teenager, although I went to an all girls’ school. In the daytime I was surrounded by women and in the evening I tended to hang around with this crowd of blokes. I’m sure it’s like this for most people you don’t have to be tomboy to understand what goes on in the mind of the opposite sex. It took me in a very strange way, I’d always think that what they thought was funny, but at the same time it would make me more self-conscious, because I would know that I could easily be the butt of that particular joke. I found myself in that self-conscious position and that’s very much the position that I make things from, and when I talk about being ‘inside the work’, that’s really what I mean. I’m as self conscious about it as the next person; I’m not sort of sitting on high making these things or lecturing anybody on how they should be. I’m thinking that this is the kind of push and pull that I’m in. I always enjoyed that kind of humour and I still like the way people use language, especially people with quite a limited vocabulary, but who manage to say a great deal. It’s almost like poetry or singing, in the way that if you’ve got a song, the tune adds a great deal of meaning to what’s being said. If you just read the lyrics they sound quite stupid, but with the music they sound fantastic. There’s something about that with language, about different accents that have a kind of singing quality that you can identify very strongly with your own. I’ve always enjoyed that.

JW: A lot of critics have talked about your ‘pose’, this particular pose you have with your jacket, and the boots. Could you talk a little bit about how this developed?

SL: I’ve always dressed in a fairly androgynous way. I wouldn’t say I’d in any way try and look masculine, but I don’t wear anything particularly feminine, I don’t feel comfortable in floral prints. The funny thing is, it’s sort of an accident, I actually do photograph much more masculine looking than I think I look in real life.

JW: You do.

SL: And that just happens. Obviously I’ve begun to exploit that, but initially I’d hate all photographs of me. As a teenager I would never have a photograph taken of me, for that reason I thought ‘God, I look so butch, I look like my little brother’. So I steered clear of it but the first self-portrait was the picture of me eating a banana, and I took those pictures for a laugh and I wasn’t expecting it to be as potent as it was. It was completely different from a pornographic picture, because I did look so androgynous and unconfrontational. I gradually realised that the scope, well just the potency of that also had the useful purpose of making me less self-conscious of pictures. As long as it’s a good picture it doesn’t matter if I think I look masculine. I don’t feel particularly that the toughness or the laddishness is the point, but I think there is something very potent about doing things that could be provocative, in the way that women are often exploited in a sexy way. Because I look masculine it doesn’t come across like that, I think that’s interesting and it’s not particularly clichéd; I don’t wear workman’s boots or adopt ridiculously male poses, it’s slightly more incidental than that, it’s just a flavour.

J.W: It’s people taking a very stereotypical view of that because you’re dressing in that way.

SL: Exactly, and this is another thing that goes on in my work that people actually take a much more stereotypical view of it than I do. That’s up to them but in another way I feel that the work is working but not necessarily in the way I would have it work. Those people are not assessing their reactions and disentangling how much of that is them and how much of it is me. I think that that is when something is working, when it becomes problematic to disentangle what’s what. It’s that kind of complexity and ambiguity that I think is interesting. The work isn’t really didactic; it isn’t trying to tell anybody what to think, so I think it’s successful in that way.

JW: The works do become actually very complex, don’t they?

SL: They’re all very simple and quite economic really in terms of their construction but there are a lot of ideas that converge on them; whether it’s power relationships or gender relations, or whatever else.

JW: So, the joke?

SL: Well, to come back to the surrealism thing, I think surrealism is like a joke, but it’s not the punch line. What I always think is really funny about jokes, is the scenario in the first place. If you say ‘two horses walk into a bar and ask for a pint of beer’ well that to me is hilarious, but there’s got to be a punch line to this, and everyone’s just standing there listening, incredulous, It’s the same with making an object, you make something like ‘The Bitch’ and you can’t help thinking, ‘how hilarious it is to have made this object’ and sometimes people don’t think that, they take it so seriously. When people get annoyed you think, ‘well Christ doesn’t it ever occur to you that it’s hilarious, to make an object like that’, it’s as simple as that, it’s as ludicrous as that. It’s ludicrous to call tits ‘melons’.

JW: That’s a very surreal thing isn’t it? I really want to conclude by talking about the power in your work; about your use of words and language and that interactive power that you create as a woman, as an artist.

SL: A lot of woman I talked to, especially older women, have pointed out that things are very different for this generation of women artists, as we’ve got a lot more freedom. There was a lot more theory involved before, people having to carve out a space and perhaps not being taken so seriously, so they resorted to being very serious. There’s a lot more humour perhaps in what women are doing now because they’re not breaking down those particular barriers.

JW: So where do you place yourself then in women’s histories?

S.L: One of the things that struck me as a much younger artist, looking around at people like Warhol and Gilbert & George, even Francis Bacon and Picasso, whoever you like to think of, it struck me that personality played a huge part. The bigger the artists the more their personality played a part. It hadn’t really happened so much with women’s art but perhaps one of the reasons was that women hadn’t been as big as men; it must have been a social thing as well as an art thing, because their personality didn’t seem to enter into it so much. That was something I was ambitious about, but I’ve just hit into the right moment when enough groundwork had been done already, and now I suppose it’s characteristic of my generation of women artists, that their personality plays a huge part. If you look at someone like Tracey, her personality is totally integral to what she does.

JW: You think yours is as well?

SL: Yes totally.