Art - Charles Darwent on what one artist does with her cigarettes
Artists have taken their inspiration from all kinds of things in the past - war, worship, political intrigue - but never, so far as I can recall, from the aesthetic properties of low-tar cigarettes. This fact alone makes the exhibition of Sarah Lucas's new work, "The Fag Show", something of a novelty. Lucas gave up smoking her favourite Marlboro Lights last summer and, artistically speaking, has never looked back.
Lucas may have given up smoking cigarettes, but this does not mean she has given up buying them. "The Fag Show" contains a dozen or so works in which low-tar Marlboros play a starring role: a vacuum cleaner, Hoover Junior, which the artist has covered, nozzle to plug, in a carapace of fags; a pair of garden gnomes, ditto; a yachtsman's inflatable life vest, embroidered all over with cigarettes; and a self-portrait of Lucas on brown paper, its outline formed by the familiar dot-dash-dot sequence of cork-brown filters and white cigarette papers. In one corner of the exhibition, a cheap wooden chair sports a pair of Marlboro-Light-covered breasts shaped like rugby balls. In another corner, its male alter ego boasts a penile fibreglass marrow, complete with low-tar foreskin.
What is this all about? The image that springs most instantly to mind is that of Andy Capp's long-suffering wife, Flo. Flo, you will remember, went through life with a mop in one hand and a cigarette (of indeterminate brand, but probably not low-tar) in the other. Between these two things, mop and fag, emerged some kind of portrait of gender, a dual metaphor for woman's lot. Lucas's linking of domestic drudgery and chain-smoking merely takes things a step further, eliding these two metaphorical objects into a series of composite ones: a cigarette-vacuum-cleaner, a Marlboro-Light-garden-gnome, a fag-breast-chair and so on.
The message of these works is clearly autobiographical. Lucas's breast-chair has predictable things to say about the role of domestic woman as a piece of furniture, a thing to be sat on; by covering the chair in a layer of cigarettes, the artist presumably means to explain the link between the eternal drudgery of women and their desire to kill themselves slowly with fags. Her life vest, which doubles as a pair of breasts, says much the same kind of thing about the effect on women as sexualised objects. The fact that the vest needs to be inflated reminds you of smokerly things such as dodgy lungs and shortness of breath: Lucas's inflatable cuirass is not so much a life vest as a death vest. Hoover Junior, too, is to do with respiration; both the vacuum cleaner and the cigarettes that cover it depend on inhalation to work. Given the artist's pungent frame of reference, it is probably not going too far to suggest that the covert message of the last piece is: life sucks.
Muse over all this and you may come to the conclusion that "The Fag Show" is not so much a series of works as a single work, a user's manual for the 21st-century woman. Like her fellow, and more notorious, BritPacker Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas has a well-developed taste for self-advertisement. She appears in this exhibition as a poster-sized image of herself, wearing a T-shirt whose printed legend notes that its wearer is sexually aggressive in bed. This is, if you like, a portrait of the new, post-smoking, post-feminist Lucas. Her fag-covered objects, by contrast, are the drudgy, wheezing, womanly her: the Hoover, and the cigarettes that cover it, have been sloughed off by the artist in a single shrug in an attempt to gain control over her own life. The message of "The Fag Show" seems to be that women like Mrs Capp have only themselves to blame if they do housework or smoke.
Or something like that. The trouble with the works in the show, as with conceptual art in general, is that it is difficult to know just how to respond to them. Pieces such as Hoover Junior are not intended as objects with an immediate aesthetic appeal so much as acrostics, little puzzles that need to be worked out and frowned over intellectually. For all the demotic nature of their message (and of the materials in which that message is spelt out), these are elitist things: you need to be fluent in a certain language to be able to read them, and you are unlikely to have that language unless you read Fine Art at Goldsmiths. For the rest of us, the only satisfaction you are likely to derive from "The Fag Show" is the kind you feel when you finish the Guardian's cryptic crossword: clever, but hardly sublime.
"The Fag Show" runs until 18 March at Sadie Coles, 35 Heddon Street, London W1 (020-7434 2227). Sarah Lucas is also showing until the end of April at the Freud Museum ("Beyond the Pleasure Principle"), 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 (020-7435 2002)
Charles Darwent is art critic of the "Independent on Sunday"
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