“I’m so glad we took the stairs,” she said.
The viewer, by observing, was implicated in the act. In the stairwell that led up to the next floor, Bolz-Weber passed a sculpture of a disembodied arm in the middle of masturbating, set inside a mirrored box. On a film in the next room, the artist massaged her partner’s naked body with raw eggs. “ ‘Bush is just another word for cunt,’ ” Bolz-Weber read from the wall text. They were there to see “ Au Naturel,” an exhibition by the English artist Sarah Lucas, and they wandered among Lucas’s plaster casts of penises standing at all manner of attention, and her sculptures of what looked like either potatoes or people, fashioned out of panty hose. On a recent Sunday afternoon, Nadia Bolz-Weber, a forty-nine-year-old Lutheran pastor, visited the New Museum, in Manhattan, with her eighteen-year-old son, Judah, and her twenty-year-old daughter, Harper.
