Food art/food porn: Sarah Lucas

I wish I could say I'm such a connoisseur that I just happened to know about the Sarah Lucas survey exhibition at Tate Liverpool and thought you might find it interesting but no, I learned about this by wondering what the hell was going on with Google search strings. Why were British searchers seeking fried egg gender? Sarah Lucas is why. From the exhibit's website:

The grungy, abject appearance of many of her works belies the serious and complex subject matter they address. She makes constant reference to the human body, questioning gender definitions and challenging macho culture. This approach is encapsulated in the classic Two Fried Eggs and Kebab 1992, in which a reclining naked female body is constructed from a table with two eggs and a kebab, and Au Naturel 1994, consisting of a mattress on which an empty bucket and a couple of melons represent female genitalia while the male is represented by a cucumber and a pair of oranges. Similarly, Lucas makes provocative self-portraits that question traditional depictions of women and challenge the cliched image of the modern artist in work such as Eating a Banana 1990.

A BBC writeup offers this:

Sarah Lucas' work is described as challenging representations of gender, using the language of media and popular culture. The artist takes objects that would usually be seen as ordinary and functional and gives them a new, often sexual reference, from chickens stretched across the springs of a bed tofluorescentt lights pushed through sofas and protruding from underwear dressed over a dining table and chairs.

There's a food porn connection here but I can't put my finger on how it functions. Is it counter-food porn, making representations combining food and sex seem unsexy, unenticing, unpleasurable? Is Lucas the anti-Giada?

This Self Portrait With Fried Eggs, 1996, doesn't strike me as the least bit naughty. What are the eggs doing over her breasts? Covering them up while also drawing attention to them. Commenting on consumption, on breasts as a source of nourishment. Asserting that women's bodies are commidified. Replacing a conventional representation of a woman's body as something displayed for your pleasure with a radical, aggressive image of a woman's body as a site of confusion. Being absurd in a surrealistic, Freudian way. I see possible meanings proliferating from the image but all of them seem banal or very old hat. I don't get a charge from looking at the picture, I don't find it titillating or provocative, disgusting or unsettling, and I barely find it interesting. It certainly doesn't challenge any of my notions of gender, of femininity. I don't see what eggs have to do with breasts and the picture doesn't tell me what motivates the comparison. I suppose they have a formal similarity; both are rounded, both enclose a round shape. But that's true of a lot of things.

By comparison, Chicken Knickers (above) is engrossing. Is the chicken cavity a barrier or a surrogate vulva? Can one have a sexual attraction for a dead, headless, kitchen-ready chicken? How is it affixed to the model's knickers? This one succeeds, for me, at animating a tension between turning me on and turning me off, which is what I think this kind of art is supposed to do. Food porn, by contrast, is just supposed to turn me on.