position paper and case study of sarah lucas

| Youdale, Position Paper and Case Study

Position Paper

Scott Youdale

Positive space, Negative space and Virtual space Below is an artist statement from a previous work

The Wall was initially influenced by the work Black Sun, 2009, by Alexandre Arrechea of La Ha-bana, Cuba, displayed during the 2014 Nui Blanche in Toronto, Canada. The interaction between a projection and what it is projected on was not something I had contemplated as, until now, I was more intrigued by filtering the projection through materials. I looked to the piece One and Three Chairs by Joseph Kosuth from1965. The film was like a definition of the object. It lacked funda-mental information yet provided a simulacrum, “an image without the substance or qualities of the original”, an exploration of the objects fundamental parts as seen in the breadth of colour found


on a white wall after resolution reduction. All of those colours where present in the film and thus in some sense on the wall itself and by reducing the resolution original information is lost yet new information can be found through the simplification of the object. A film of a wall is an inaccurate reproduction. It lacks fundamental information such as physicality and is restrained to a frame and so lacks depth and breadth. That being said the wall itself is a simulacrum of the platonic notion of a wall. The perfect ideal of a wall is a conceptual barrier which divides space. As technology ad-vances so does our ability to approach the platonic ideal of a wall and so, like a film of a wall, this wall also lacks information. The video of the wall is inaccurate and distorted, lacking information possessed by the original. Yet in its inaccuracies and pixilation’s new information can be found. Colours that before would not have been noticed are now clearly apparent. //: END OF STATE-MENT

Wall, Scott Youdale, 2014.


Simulacrum A simulacrum can fulfill the value of the original. Video games and virtual reality are exam-ples of simulacrum; artificial representations of an original.

“Beyond that (and this is the germ of the concept of kitsch), a less-precious thing could be substituted for a more valuable one. The image was a tool, useful but dispensable...”(Kelly 88)

My exploration of simulacrum are due to a suspicion of the notion of the real. Reality is so often debated and, since Einsteins, it is actually a scientific fact that the reality “I” see is not the reality other people see. Quantum mechanics have brought into question the notion of not only solidity but of existence as well. If a particle can vanish when it is not being identified then what of larger forms? Plato would agree that reality is no more than a simulacrum of the perfect reality in our minds.

What happens when the simulacrum defies the original as in surrealism? What happens when a simulacrum is created without an original? Does that make it an original object? Take some of the more abstract fantasies of the video game industry (McKee 544). If there is no orig-inal object to act as the “real” to the virtual objects simulacrum it either calls into question the nature of original versus replica or implies that the replica is indeed the original. What then comes of creating a reproduction of a digital object?

My piece Game Space began with the analogue photography of digitally rendered environ-ments from a video game. The film was then intentionally incorrectly handled and over exposed so as to enhance the loss of information. The result of this is the lines of the images became smooth and anti-aliased in an almost organic fashion resulting in images that can be easily mistaken for real places. This piece is then exhibited in a digital, interactive environment. The purpose of this piece is to call into question the relationship between reality and virtual reality as perceived through the viewer. As the population explores the virtual world through the Internet and video games it begins to merge with reality.When I was a child one of my favorite activities was photocopying myself and objects. The sexual and erotic nature of reproduction was enticing.

Photocopying, black and white, is also a reference to the timelessness of the monochromat-ic while representing the nature of kitsch in its rampant disregard for tradition and self-importance. The act of photocopying is at its heart a menial form of reproduction. The result is a pale shadow

Wall, Scott Youdale, 2014.


Game Space (Above: Six, Below: Five), Scott Youdale, 2012.


of what came before and this disregard for nuance makes the result plebeian or pedestrian in na-ture; suitable only for the barest of understanding and of essentially no value. By photocopying the body these notions are reflected onto the human form; rampant limbs flailing and blurring as the photocopier spits out distorted blobs that at first glance seem not even alive. “Cindy Sherman’s photographs are a case in point. They are not photographic odes to pop cul-ture; they are self-portraits of a psychology that cannot disentangle itself from the kaleidoscope of clichés of identity that surrounds it.” (Kelly, 24)

Quest for Fire, Scott Youdale, 2012.

Loss of Information Quest for fire began by filming chem-ically modified candles which emitted vari-ously coloured flames in a dark room using a cellphone camera. This footage was then played back on the same camera which did not have sufficient memory for playback. The result was distorted images taken from frozen frames as the video struggled to play. This process creates a series of images that combine accurate and inaccu-rate data into a new structure that is both representative of the original candle flames yet lacks sufficient information to be recog-nizable. The subject matter of the image is linked with the process of its distortion.


Portraits of Stuffed Animals by Mike Kelly

The stuffed animals are a representation of life yet are presented as life through their re-representation. By taking portraits of stuffed animals their existence and essential life that makes an object no longer a simulacrum but an original is made concrete.

What happens when a human body dies? It is exhibited; sometimes thousands of years after the death of the “person”. The body has now become an object to be viewed and possibly even used as in the corpses of other living things. In a sense the body is now a simulacrum of its former self. The body is now only an incomplete representation.

Ahh…Youth!, Mike Kelley, 1991.


Unfamiliar Familiar Piss Christ by Andres Serrano is an object of reverence and castigation placed in a position of absurdity. Though critics, even the artist himself, defended its ambiguity the piece, neverthe-less, is named so that the truth is unavoidable. If taboo is darkness then art is light. This work rep-resents the denial of which society is so rich; kitsch or the absence of refinement. The question of garishness, kitsch and colour: My work began with the recognition of the distinction between garish works and those that are considered refined. I took images considered garish and obtuse, images of socially taboo or morally ambiguous events and forms, and altered them digitally to remove any presence of value, black or white. What is left is an image bereft of detail and nuance. Instead it is a blur of colour and a recontextualised significance.

Piss Christ, Andres Serrano, 1987.


Case Study: Sarah Lucas

Scott Youdale

Au Naturel, Sarah Lucas, 1994.


Sarah Lucas is a sculptor born and educated in England. Her work ventures into photogra-phy, installation art and traditional sculpture. Her work is provocative and often involves the use of furniture, food and found objects. Furniture in he work tends to act as a substitute for the human body. The furniture is dressed and derogated by being dressed in human clothing as some sort of parody or satire of the human body. Further more the furniture is more often augmented and anthropomorphism with the addition of satirical, human like, genitals. She takes the ready-made culture of Marcel Duchamp and the assemblage culture of Meret

Chicken Knickers, Sarah Lucas, 2000.


Cnut, Sarah Lucas, 2000.


Oppenheim and spins it with “misogynistic tabloid culture”(Stonard). She attacks popular culture for its singular ideologies and xenophobic, homophobic, brutish and cognitively dissonant ways. Her art is base and low brow, tending toward sledgehammer like implementations of “surrealist and sensationalist movements”(Stonard). Much of her work involves representations of breasts attached to furniture or other found objects. Her work tends to be exclusively bent on insulting sexual stereotyping.

The attraction to this artist is clear for me. I have a deep fascination with sexuality and the body. Nudity and genitalia and notions of beauty are areas of Taboo that my art explores. The work of Lucas inspires me with its ability to make child like interpretations on very “adult” topics. Cigarettes, cock and vagina. Yet somehow her art surpasses those simple concepts and delves into obsession and the roots of misogyny. Her work is metonymic in its application of materials like food and furniture as satirical replacements for the human body. Her use of cigarettes, like in Cnut (2004), in which a concrete figure sits atop a stainless steel toilet holding only a cigarette, to illus-trate feelings of malaise as the concrete figure seems trapped in an endless state of deification. In the case of Christ You Know It Ain’t Easy: reverent horror.

Christ You Know It Ain’t Easy, Sarah Lucas, 2000.


“Lucas is fascinated by the paradoxically co-existing drives towards both sex and death described by Sigmund Freud in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Is Suicide Genetic? Is one of several works with the same title. Part of Lucas’s impetus in making these works is a realization of the mixture of self-destructiveness and pleasure that habits such as smoking involve. (Freud himself died of a smoking-related disease in 1939.)”(Manchester)

Is Suicide Genetic?, Sarah Lucas, 1996.


Bibliography“Sarah Lucas’s Bed at the St. John Hotel.” YouTube. YouTube, 17 Oct. 2011. Web. 10 Jan. 2015. <https://www.you-tube.com/watch?v=jlhej87xcWY>.

An interview with Sarah Lucas as she works in a hotel room. She accepts audience from both fans and jour-nalists during this time which is when this piece was filmed. It assisted in further understanding of not only Lucas’ work but also her personality and her opinion of her work.

Stonard, John-Paul. “Sarah Lucas, ‘Chicken Knickers’ 1997.” Tate. 10 Dec. 2010. Web. 10 Jan. 2015. <http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sarah-lucas-2643>.

This short work described the piece Chicken nickers in detail and explored its socio-political ramifications as a serializing and objectifying statement.

Kelley, Mike, and John C. Welchman. “Playing with Dead Things.” Foul Perfection Essays and Criticism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2003. Print.

This piece assists in my exploration of the Abject in art.

Elizabeth Manchester, Chicken Knickers Summary (London: Tate,2000), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lu-cas-chicken-knickers-p78210/text-summary.

This piece gives an in depth analysis of Chicken Nickers as well as the process of artist Sarah Lucas.

Thomas Kellein, Donald Judd: Early Work, 1955-1968, New York: D.A.P., 2002. Originally published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965.

This piece explores the work of Donald Judd who, while being quite different from my own work, illustrates the ideals of minimalism that I adhere to regardless of my post modern style.

Mileaf, Janine A. “Tactile Objects.” Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College :, 2010. Print.

This was an important work in my research as it explored to a very great depth the nuance of contemporary found object art as well as notions of tactility and its relationship to complete experience.

Bourriaud, Nicolas, and Caroline Schneider. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay : How Art Reprograms the World. 2nd ed. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005. Print.

This text assisted in the exploration of appropriation, the product and found object art from Duchamp to Koons. Focus was placed on the chapter THE USE OF OBJECTS which discussed readymade as a matter of artistic gaze.

Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” in Minimal Art_ A Critical Anthology, eds. Gregory Battcock (Berkley_ Universi-ty of California Press, 1995) p 222-235 originally published in Artforum 1966. Print.

This text discussed the literal and physical nature of sculpture and primarily, in the chapters in which I took greatest interest, its distinction from two dimensional art forms. The notions of colour as unrelated to sculp-ture as a medium due to detraction from space and form.

McKee, Alan, “Pornography as entertainment”. Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies. 26:4, 541-552. This text explores pornography in entertainment culture and assisted in explaining my exploration of Taboo and the Abject.

“Sarah Lucas, ‘Is Suicide Genetic?’ 1996.” Tate. Web. 24 Feb. 2015. <http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lu-cas-is-suicide-genetic-p78209/text-summary>.

position paper and case study of sarah lucas

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