Sarah Lucas is highly addictive

After some time spent browsing the current, magnificent Sarah Lucas survey at Tate Britain, with its crashed cars and hard cocks, its tits and asses and its seaside postcard puns, I found myself developing an intrusive thought. God, it whispered—chugged, even, circling my brain the way a toy train circles on a track—I need a cigarette. Lucas uses sex the way that certain historic painters used chiaroscuro shading; she might be said to put the “vag” in “Caravaggio.” That said, she is also an unparalleled master at the use of cigarettes as a medium, whether she is clamping one defiantly between her teeth in a photograph, or using hundreds of them to mosaic a toilet bowl. There are so many cigarettes in the show, in fact, that even some of its vagina sculptures smoke, fags dangling from them with such casual élan that James Dean would be envious of their style. What are they rebelling against? The tyranny of knickers, mostly—still, it’s undeniable that there is something rather thrilling about seeing a cigarette used in an artwork or a publicity image now, like glimpsing a rare animal on a safari. What used to be a universal signifier of adult elegance and naughtiness, or a sign of laddish, Lucasian toughness, has become taboo, so out-of-date that it’s nostalgic.

The most unfortunate thing about smoking is that although it is extremely risky and enormously addictive, it is also terribly good fun (unless of course, my mother is reading this, in which case it’s an awful habit that I personally do not indulge in, even if I am three to four drinks deep, and especially if I am three to four drinks deep and standing in the street outside a party next to someone who has Marlboros and a generous soul). Ask Gwyneth Paltrow, who describes her weekly American Spirit Light, smoked with perverse strictness “once a week, on Saturday night,” as her “guilty pleasure,” or Mary-Kate Olsen, who famously put out bowls of cigarettes for the guests at her wedding in 2015 and, in doing so, gave black-clad millennial women everywhere a new gold standard for event décor. The “guilty” part of “guilty pleasure,” though, is paramount, and images of stars smoking are now vanishingly rare, the heavy knowledge of the habit’s dangerousness finally having outweighed its sensual, visual allure. “You’ll never see party girls—celebrities like Mary-Kate Olsen—with a beauty contract. They party and we all know it. It’s why no celebrity female, even a Paris Hilton-type, who everyone knows lives hard, wants you to know she smokes like a chimney—which she does, by the way,” the beauty writer and memoirist Cat Marnell told an interviewer in 2012, adding that the industry prefers “squeaky clean girls [with] peachy skin.”

Nobody would ever accuse Sarah Lucas of being squeaky clean, and her youthful refusal to prioritise her health or project a peachy, feminine appearance was always part of her charm. Looking at her work, and her photographs especially, makes me think about the gulf between the classic rock star, and the modern celebrity archetype, who is more likely to be up at 5 am for Barry’s Bootcamp than because they never slept. The very deadliness of smoking—the conceptual stink that famous people are now trying to avoid when they are being photographed in public—is of course part of its power. Lucas often makes work that pairs sex with death, and which directly addresses the erotic aspect of the death drive. In her hands, a Pall Mall is not really any different from a smashed-up Jaguar, or a burned-out couch. The vape, with its candy colours and its fruity scents, will never telegraph horny recklessness or Freudian oral fixation or passively self-destructive tendencies in quite the same way, however many articles about the danger of “popcorn lung” end up being published. (Besides which, its greatest celebrity advocate might be Leonardo DiCaprio, who is one hell of an actor, but not much of a style maven or a bad boy.) I am no longer a committed smoker myself, and I know—I know, I know—that I should quit completely. Nevertheless, I still found myself guiltily lighting up outside the Sarah Lucas show. What more apt time could there be to smoke, I reasoned, than immediately after all of that exuberant, filthy sex?