On view at Tate Britain is a mammoth selection of bodies by Sarah Lucas. There are bodies in bronze, in concrete and in stuffed nylon tights. Ripping up any trope of the classical form, Lucas presents bodies that are fleshy but statuesque, disturbing yet funny. Headless and sometimes bodiless, with gold stilettos or stumpy square feet, they sink, flop and twist on to chairs in various positions, full of expression and personality. These embodiments of freedom playfully present themselves as whatever they want to be.
Lucas’s major exhibition, Happy Gas, is exactly what it says it is. You get infected by it. Walking around I was struck by how far we’ve come in the artistic presentation of the body – a far cry from the sexualised females in old master paintings, which often imprisoned the woman in her silent image. I thought about how challenging Lucas’s figures can be; how they are able to viscerally represent our different emotional, psychological and physical states, showcasing the multifaceted nature of our society. It felt liberating – joyful.
But my high came crashing down after watching Rishi Sunak speaking with vengeance at the Conservative party conference last week, when, after damning the UK school system, he said: “We shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t. A man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense.” It was excruciating to watch as he degraded anyone who doesn’t identify as cis. Making a mockery of them, it was as though he was implying they do not deserve a place in society.
Transgender people make up less than 0.5% of this nation’s population. To target a minority like this was, as the Tories well knew, something that would be picked up by the media to distract from their incompetence.
Framing trans people in such a way has dangerous consequences. During the same conference, health secretary Steve Barclay, backed by Suella Braverman, threatened to keep trans women off women-only wards within the NHS, despite a study last year indicating no complaints had been recorded. As political leaders, I don’t think it is their job to polarise the nation on their approaches towards gender, but rather to work to unite us to create a safer, better place. The same could be applied to their views on migrants arriving here in small boats. By framing certain groups, who have no doubt endured traumatic experiences, as the enemies of the “good guys”, British citizens, leaves no room for humanitarian thought.
We can’t think in binary terms when it comes to human existence. It prevents the complexity of our multitudinous selves: the hopes and dreams that we all have, no matter what gender we are or where we were born. This is why the need for the arts and humanities is greater than ever. They teach us to question what we are looking at. If we believed everything the government or media told us at face value, not only would we live in a world deprived of imagination, but we would live an existence that doesn’t embrace human thought. We must see beyond what is put in front of us.
The power of art shows those in-between spaces – allowing us to see a range of perspectives from the varying people who lived and shaped this world, and fueling us to embrace different cultures as well as learn from our past.
Right at the beginning of Happy Gas, you are confronted with spreads from a tabloid newspaper from the 1990s that Lucas has blown up into a size on a par with those old masters. Featuring scathing headlines, such as “Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous”, Lucas directly engages with the misogyny of the day, exposing the media’s cruelty towards women.
Despite the abominable, yet unsurprising, cuts in the arts subjects over the past decade by the Conservative government, artists must continue to hold up a mirror to the nature of what is happening – and ensure that it doesn’t take decades to realise how vicious these remarks are. Let’s also hope that artists continue to proudly present bodies of all sorts in our best museums, so that we can embrace the multiplicity of our ever-curious society.
