Feminism And The Female Body: Social Justice Towards Gender Conflict
Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel. 1994. Mattress, melons, oranges, cucumber, and water bucket, 33 1/8 x 66 1/8 x 57 in.
Feminist art of the 21st Century examines various ideals behind justice. Women in the arts producing such Feminist art have brought to discussion various topics behind women’s social justice throughout the course of history. The women behind these contemporary feminist art practices have continued to connect their artistic agendas to the thematic topic of social justice by redefining pretenses of history that are riddled with false accounts of male-dominated social practice. The role of the female artist in regards to justices behind the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society has expanded with great social significance. From women’s history, experiences, and visualizations of gender; Feminist art expresses the social justices and injustices behind the personal, sexual, or private areas of women’s lives. Feminist artworks such as English artist Sarah Lucas’s 1997 sculptural installation piece Au Naturel is symbolic of Feminist Art’s direct correlation to Social Justice by giving a voice to underexamined elements of women’s lives. Therefore, Lucas’s Au Naturel serves as a satirical response to the social injustices of degradation women experience in social and private aspects of sexuality and gender.
The stature of women throughout the duration of history is a casting congruent with complexly nuanced experiences of social injustice. The current contemporary feminist art movement directs its agenda toward social justice by redefining history’s gratuity to male-dominated social practices of toxicity. Hence, as a result of both Antiquity’s and 21st Century’s unjust favoritism for male-dominant heterosexist gendered societal restrictions, women were faced with socio-political prejudice of uneven development between the sexes. Moreover, society’s gendered bigotry, pension for belittlement, and gendered sexual discrimination are evident in the social injustices experienced behind women’s lives.
The role of the female artist in regards to justices behind the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society has expanded with great social significance. Practitioners of the feminist movement utilize these liberations of social and societal comeuppance to deliver topics such as positive social change into the public domain’s eye. Feminist art expresses the social justices and injustices behind the personal, sexual, or private areas of women’s lives. Works of social controversy such as Lucas’s 1994 sculptural installation piece Au Naturel is symbolic of Feminist Art’s direct correlation to Social Justice.
Upon contextualization, Au Naturel is symbolic of Lucas’s highly satirical and rhetorical responses to personal areas of injustice women experience in sexuality and private areas of women’s lives. Au Naturel is iconic of the artistic agendas of social justice behind Lucas’s work. In which Lucas employs vast amounts of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. Lucas avails her areas of expertise with iconoclast irony to challenge areas of social injustice such as gender stereotypes. Lucas holds these symposiums up to ridicule by playing with culture’s stereotypical conventions of both representation and framing. Lucas’s frame of reference in her work through language, media, and elements of popular culture is driving force which makes works such as Au Naturel particularly impactful with her targeted audience.
Similar to the fundamental principles behind the third-wave of feminism in the 1990s, Lucas examines gendered identity constructs behind that of sexuality. Lucas examines gendered identity constructs behind that of sexuality by manipulating found objects and everyday materials. Lucas secures the services of mundane everyday materials such as furniture, cigarettes, and vegetables as weapons of confrontational tableaux. These combative tableaux vivants demur against forms of social injustice and social norms. The particular tableaux vivants of in Au Naturel serve the work as silent and motionless objects of the mundane arranged to represent a scene or incident of gendered identity constructs behind sexuality.
Named after the brand name of mattress printed on the mattress’s label, Au Naturel consists of a yellow-stained soiled discolored mattress which Lucas positions as a sculptural installation by arranging Au Naturel in a particular manner subsiding to sit heavy leaning against the wall of a gallery space. Au Naturel is characteristic of Lucas’s puts pension for manipulating found objects and everyday materials. In which cuts in and on the mattresses upper leftmost exterior hold two melons of anthropomorphic intent. These curvaceously full-figured supple melons that relate to having human characteristics are situated above an outwards exposed water bucket which Lucas positions directly confronting the viewer. In contrast to these found objects and everyday materials that are presented as having female characteristics, these anthropomorphic gendered forms are met with two shapely opulent oranges and courgette (zucchini) which erectly protrude from the rightmost side of the sculptural mattress.
In contingency with the feminine and masculine forms suggested in Au Naturel; elements of the human body and anthropomorphic forms mundane furniture and objects having human characteristics are an ever-present part of Lucas’s work. These connections between furniture and the human figure often appear to be erotic and often comedic fantastical anatomies of desire. Moreover, Au Naturel addresses feminist topics of social injustice via Lucas's fascination with crude and vulgar sexual innuendos and metaphors. These works address the crude sexual metaphors women experience in social and private aspects of sexuality and gender through a flagrant play on base connotative associations to a global audience. Lucas therefore successfully gives a voice to the sexual bigotry experienced behind women’s lives.
In Au Naturel Lucas creates anthropomorphic bodily human forms that criticize crude metaphors of sexuality and gender. Au Naturel presents these humanly objects as a portrait of a nude couple showing erotic feelings and relations of sexual desire. Lucas objectifies these sexual feelings through the openly exposed water bucked which represents a vagina drenched in arousal and through the perpendicular bolt upright courgette and two oranges which represent a phallus erect with anticipation. The two humanly anthropomorphic bodies lay separated by a faint distance, therefore the composition of material Lucas creates results in a vulgar vernacular language that communicates the couple in an intimate moment of either pre-coitus or post-coitus resolutions to the viewer. Au Naturel’s blunt candid plain-spoken objectivity encourages the social justice of diminishing the inclinations of guilt, shame, and embarrassment of repose forced upon the private and personal aspects of women’s sexuality by gendered societal injustices. Lucas’s flux between consciousness about women and women’s social justice experiences results in a satirical feminist response to both positive and negative visualizations of gender in previously unexamined or underexamined experiences. Therefore resulting in a metaphoric play on representation and meaning behind the materiality that social justice poses on conceptions of sex.
When using the metaphoric play on representation and meaning behind feminist art, Lucas effectively manipulates elements every day to promote positive social change in social justice. Lucas’s anthropomorphic representations of the human form create a strong connection between the furniture exhibited in Au Naturel and the human figure. There is a fleshiness and plushness of the couch or the chair or even the mattress that connects to the female form. This connection can be made due to Eastern and Western culture’s favoritism of a male-dominated social practice. These male-dominated social practices throughout history laboriously placed women in a social position where their sole domicile permanent residence was in a particular jurisdiction of the house; similar to pieces of furniture. Therefore, Au Naturel serves as a satirical response to the social injustices of degradation women experienced in social and private aspects of sexuality and gender while also promoting Feminist Art’s connection to social justice.
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