Bunny Gets Snookered #3
Sarah Lucas
Sarah Lucas
Bunny Gets Snookered #3, 1997
Tan tights, green stockings, red office chair, clamp, kapok, wire
120 x 58 x 61 cm
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
Photo: Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London
- Date
- 2002
- Medium
- Tan tights, green stockings, red office chair, clamp, kapok, wire
- Dimension
- 120 x 58 x 60 cm
- Credit
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
- This artwork is part of the donation and long-term loan from TBA21 to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Details
Artist Sarah Lucas specializes in challenging gender stereotypes through a play on conventions of representation, specifically through the language of popular culture.
Originally part of an installation, Bunny Gets Snookered #3 is one of eight similar mannequins which were arranged on and around a snooker table in 1997. Lucas stuffed variously colored pairs of tights with cotton wadding to make "bunny girl" forms, whose limply dangling arms and passively lolling legs provide a representation of abject femininity, in thrall to the arena of male virtuosity as suggested by the snooker table. The passivity of the floppy, unheaded stuffed body, which is clipped to an office chair, provides an emblem of secretarial submissiveness. The title of the work reinforces the reading of disempowerment: to be snookered, in the language of the game, means to be prevented from scoring. However, the sagging form of the figure provides a comic antithesis to her traditional namesake and turns the desiring stereotype of masculinity back on itself.
(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Encounters", MNTB, Madrid, 2023)