Sarah

Sarah Lucas. Historic. Couldn’t be happier about this. See Sarah’s show at Gladstone. As always whenever Sarah puts something on, I burst out laughing because why not, our bodies, not to say minds, are very funny, particularly if you don’t have the thing you’re looking at but you think about it more than your own junk, thank you for that, Sarah, and the egg breasts and your spread legs, the chicken pussy and the oversized cocks, a kind of Roald Dahl “Chocolate Factory,” world filled with real things; thank you, Sarah; we met in London many years ago when she used to work with Tracey Emin, and I loved Sarah from the time I saw her round, open face and her tendency to laugh at what was laughable, and also her exquisite manners, the cigarettes and her inability not to laugh, and then she and Tracey made a piece called “Gone to Morocco with Hilton,” in homage to our lovely meeting, I can’t remember how old we were then, we just ran around London like mad things, no one was out of breath because we had lungs to spare despite the cigarettes, and what I remember if I close my eyes is Sarahs’ brown hair short and lank in the English air, she really does love England, and I don’t think America could have produced her because her humor is very English, Americans think irony is cruel, particularly if it’s verbal, and while Sarah is, of course, a superb visual artist, her work rests, profoundly, at the intersection of the visual and the verbal–a world of associations, jokes and puns and the like and then breasts and cocks and space as a kind of joke that we want to fill or dominate with the oddness of our very weird same and individual selves.