Natalia LL: Consumer Art 1. (1975)

The Polish Natalia Lach-Lachowicz assumed the name Natalia LL, which later became the trademark of her art in 1971, which was the time she made the first pieces of her Consumer Art series, which can be regarded as the first feminist artworks in Central Europe. There were many interpretations of the photographs of the artist’s surrogates (nude models) licking phallus-shaped bananas or frankfurters, and applying various white, liquid stuff (whipped cream, jelly, pudding) to their faces, but all of them emphasized the provocative character of the gesture. By the means of popular culture (which often paired erotic motifs with the promotion of commodities), the artist criticized the puritanical character of the Polish communist mass culture and, on the other hand, the role attributed to women that treated them as a passive object exposed to the male gaze. Since 1974, the erotic overtones bordering on pornography have faded in the works belonging to the series, but the sexual references are still there; the girls in the picture are nibbling on a melon, the symbol of fertility. K. D.