Bitch: Language and Embodiment
Sarah Lucas Bitch, 1995
What do we make of this sculpture, Bitch? It is a base, if rather humorous, representation of a female body on castors – mobile, accessible – a vacuum packed kipper nailed to its tail end – two melons for breasts, suspended from a T-shirt.
People often do have a giggle once all the constituting parts and attendant meanings become clear – despite its degradation, despite the makeshift aspect of it, or the disgust elicited either by the pool of brine that collects underneath the fish’s head, or the violence of the sculpture itself.
What is the joke? Are we having a laugh at the expense of womankind and setting back feminism a few generations? Well humour is an odd state from which to view the world: like pushing a reset button. Humour suspends us in a state of momentary disbelief – of excitement even. We get the joke.
But humour also has a dark underbelly. Jokes, puns and witticisms are true manifestations of social and intellectual processes/signification because they illustrate collective cultural phenomena, and how infrequently we consider our habituated behaviour as shaping and reinforcing our attitudes towards certain things.
Reflect upon how we experience things. To look upon the object is already to inhabit it through our senses. One can perceive objects in the world relative to their purpose and significance to the lived body’s needs and capacities
The condition of seeing the object as a rigid Other, humorously identifiable through a grotesque sexuality renders it devoid of self. Through it we become disconnected from our common humanity.
By deconstructing the ‘natural’ sexed body through the familiar – food and a table and otherwise objectifying the objectified in the absurd – we are caught up in momentary state of suspension granted to us by humour. We take up the object through the lived experience of our bodies, the phenomenology of the self.
Lucas’ Bitch sculpture is a concrete expression of immutable sexual differences, that are reified by symbols, corrupted words and social practices that perpetuate the myth of the feminine, the truth therein. A word for a female dog, has become, over time, an unforgiving, fixed representation of woman, is firmly entrenched in language, culture and thought. Even representations that try to claw back some power from this derogation cannot redeem the word bitch. Meaning is no longer derived solely from reference to external reality, but is constructed from the relation of the signifier bitch to other signs in the universe of meaning-constitution, including objects that represent the female body, the socio-cultural signification of the female, and the indignities of the body to which the female self is bound: from menstruation as taboo[i] to rape as war crime.[ii]
References and Additional Reading
[i] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).
[ii] Catharine MacKinnon , Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)
Sarah Lucas
Bitch, 1995
Table, t-shirt, melons, kipper
80.5 x 101.5 x 64 cm
© Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London
