Human Toilet II 1996

Cigarettes have featured regularly in Lucas’s work, as a rebel accessory, a phallic stand-in and a means for independence, for ‘possessing time in a palpable way, stopping to pause and contemplate … It’s really important to have areas of your life - whether it’s walking into a pub or smoking - where you suddenly feel you’ve found your own time zone.’ (Lucas quoted in Sarah Kent, ‘Young at Art’, Time Out, October 7-14 1998, pp.38-42, p.42.) Fighting Fire with Fire 1996 (P78449) is a moody close-up depicting Lucas frowning with a fag between her lips. Smoking 1998 (P78453) is a more meditative image of the artist exhaling smoke as she lies, looking into the distance. The mood of Smoking is similar to that of the earlier image Human Toilet II 1996 (P78448) in which Lucas sits naked on the toilet bowl holding its cistern on her lap. As in Human Toilet Revisited 1996 (P78454) she has been photographed looking away from the camera and presents a more vulnerable aspect than in the confrontational poses of the earlier images. She appears caught unguarded in moments of quiet contemplation, perhaps closer to a meditation on the death drive which prevents people from giving up smoking despite its destructive effects on the body. Lucas is fascinated by the paradoxically co-existing drives towards both sex and death described by Sigmund Freud in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). She refers to this in Self Portrait with Skull 1997 (P78450), a photograph in which she sits on the floor with her legs apart and a skull positioned between her feet. Equating her sex with death, this image encapsulates the fear of obliteration, through a projected fantasy of engulfing and swallowing, evoked traditionally by the female body. For Lucas, as the female subject, this threat is posed by her own urges towards pleasure and self-destruction.

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