THE OUT OF SCALE SANDWICH

 I like Sarah Lucas’s art, and I like the idea of Sarah Lucas.  

I was once eating lunch in St Johns restaurant and I noticed this incredibly charismatic woman sitting a few tables away.  There seemed to be nothing very remarkable about her and yet she was incredibly compelling. I suppose that’s how it is with charisma.  It was, of course Sarah Lucas.  This was long before she was nearly as famous as she is now.

 

So last weekend off we went to see her piece Sandwich, one of 20 works around the City of London, part of the annual ‘Sculpture in the City’ programme.

 

On the train to London I read Private Eye and Sarah Lucas had made into Pseud’s Corner (tis a consummation devotedly to be wished) with this description of the work in question:

“Sarah Lucas’s recent large-scale sculpture, Sandwich, 2011-2020, stands in opposition to traditional public sculpture. Its horizontal configuration opposes veneration and pomposity through its prosaic absurdity and functional accessibility. Mining at themes of British culture, Lucas ambiguously transposes the humble sandwich on a monumental scale with a metaphoric and literal sense of hyperbole; simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the commonplace foodstuff as a proletariat symbol. The material austerity of the work in concrete, elevates and inverts the object’s ordinariness with irreverent humour.”

 

The Sculpture in the City website says “© Sarah Lucas, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London” but I don’t know if Sarah Lucas actually wrote that. I hope not unless the pretentious art-speak nonsense is also part of the joke.

 

Anyway, Sandwich is indeed austere – which I liked – just a plain concrete thing and you couldn’t guess what was the filling was.  And of course I thought about the recently late Claes Oldenburg’s Giant BLT, 1963, which which looks like this: 

 

It’s colourful and overstuffed, with the filling spilling out.  And maybe that’s Sarah Lucas’s point.  The American sandwich is an exuberant and extravert thing, while the English sandwich is plain and muted. 

 

And the great thing about Oldenburg’s Giant BLT is that it’s made up of various components (just like a BLT in the real world) and these components have to be put together again whenever the sculpture’s moved and reinstalled.  Isn’t that kind of wonderful?

 

And it so happened that later in the weekend I was passing an Aldi supermarket, and I went in and they were selling pre-packed BLTs, so in honour of dear departed Claes, and partly in honour of Sarah Lucas, I bought one.  It looked like this (not a work of art):

But it really didn’t taste bad at all.