Welcome to Short Arts. This is my take on Sarah Lucas' two-fried eggs and a cabab from 1992. The work features two eggs and a cabab, arranged in a stereotypical reference to breasts and genitalia. There is a photo of the artwork placed on top of the table. Every day, two new eggs and a cabab are placed on the same spot to keep the food fresh. This simple act appears at first to be a practical concern. However, for me, it is the key to understanding the whole work. So, what is this work about? Well, it's a joke. It's a pretty good one. Lucas excels at these types of online jokes, playing with visual puns as gender cues. Very simply, gender is a joke, right? But like so many forms of humour, the joke softens us up to receive a deeper meaning and critique. So, let's focus on the replacing of the food every day. What we see is a slow build-up of grease on the table as new eggs and cababs leech oil and fat into the wood. This means that by the end of the exhibition, the food can be removed, but the stain on the table remains. I'm going to read this through Judith Butler and her notion of performativity. Butler was formulating these ideas around the same time this artwork was made. And in the 1990s, performativity became a key theory to explain the social construction of gender, sexuality and ultimately identity. Butler states, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat. We can understand this quote in relation to Lucas in a few ways. Firstly, the repetition alone generates the significance. Butler argues that the first time we do something, there is no significance, no inherent meaning in it. But through repeating it, it gains significance to us and to those around us. So, the first time we choose to put on pants rather than a skirt, it means nothing. But after years of doing this, it becomes significant. It is attached to notions of gender and how we gender identify. This is why little kids can play dress-ups without their parents seeing it as significant. But as soon as that kid reaches a certain age, after a certain number of repeating, in a particular gender identity, dress-ups are seen as problematic, even deviant. By the time we go to school, the uniform we wear every day is typically divided into a gender binary. Our gender must be set. This is not only about what we wear, but what pronouns we use, what jokes we tell, what domestic chores we do and so on. All of these are crew significance and signification through repetition. It is interesting to note that most of the performances we repeat are things that we are told to do. We don't choose them for ourselves. Secondly, what is normal is not judged by the action itself, but simply because it has been repeated. This is the opposite of what most people think. In fact, what is normal is justified precisely as being in itself moral, healthy or productive. Surely, normal is something God given or scientifically proven. It can be liberational to think of the normal as something that is not fixed, but rather just the thing that most people unthinkingly repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. As such, the normal can be undermined simply by refusing repetition, however, is also really important to recognise the risk associated with refusing repetition. People face abuse, intimidation, alienation and threats, simply because they refuse such normative repetitions. Finally, Lucas's artwork shows us that the power of repetition is that it makes external influences feel internal. So why don't more of us reject repetitions, especially as we rarely decide on what we repeat? Well, part of it is that for lots of us it's easier not to. We avoid thinking critically about what we do every day. It's exhausting and it can be dangerous. But actually, repetition ingrains external, social, cultural and political conventions to the point that they start to feel like they come from the inside out, rather than the outside in. What we do over and over often feels like it is us, our identity. Rather than a construction of our identity. And this is why I think Lucas's work is so brilliant. Lucas shows us that you can remove the external influences. You can remove the eggs in the cababs, but the stain remains. The stain of seemingly innocuous jokes, the stain of Eurocentric history classes, or the stain of binge-watching TV series, or etched their way into us. If we attempt to remove these external repetitions, it can feel like we are soaring off a piece of ourselves.