Art into Life

Art into Life

Alexandra Kokoli, Deborah Cherry, Alexandra Kokoli, Deborah Cherry

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350160613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Tracey Emin has undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis from a young, unknown artist into the 'bad girl' of the Young British Art (yBA) movement, challenging the complacency of the art establishment in both her work and her life. Today she is arguably the doyenne of the British art scene and attracts more acclaim than controversy. Her work is known by a wide audience, yet rarely receives the critical attention it deserves. In Art Into Life: Essays on Tracey Emin writers from a range of art historical, artistic and curatorial perspectives examine how Emin's art, life and celebrity status have become inextricably intertwined. This innovative collection explores Emin's intersectional identity, including her Turkish-Cypriot heritage, ageing and sexuality, reflects on her early years as an artist, and debates issues of autobiography, self-presentation and performativity alongside the multi-media exchanges of her work and the tensions between art and craft. With its discussions of the central themes of Emin's art, attention to key works such as My Bed, and accessible theorization of her creative practice, Art into Life will interest a broad readership.

1

Rethinking Tracey Emin: Life into Art

Mark Durden

The Authority of Authenticity¹

It’s about very, very simple things, that can be really hard. People do get really frightened, people do fall in love, people do die, people do fuck. These things happen and everyone knows it but not much of it is expressed. Everything is covered with some form of politeness, continually and especially in art because art is often meant for privileged classes.²

So much of people’s life isn’t there in what they do, they have a veneer over their work and no association to it apart from the fact that they do it. I’m different. The climate has changed more toward my way of thinking – everything is more personal – things have caught up with me.³

With Tracey Emin, the bodily and personally affective aspects of human life are never excluded from her art. Her celebrity status stems from trading predominantly on the ‘lows’ in her life for her art, one involving graphic and blunt detailing of often painful personal experiences: sexual abuse, rape, underage sex, attempted suicide, abortion, alcoholism and depression. Turning such life experiences into art could be seen to provide the privileged classes of the art world with an abject exoticism. In many senses her practice fits with a wider vogue for degradation and ‘hard core’ realism within contemporary visual art, exemplified by the attention bestowed upon certain documentary photographic practices, a genre that was given hyperbolic visual forms and twists in the work of Richard Billingham through raw pictures of his own working-class family’s poverty, and by Boris Mikhailov with his shocking and relentless documentation of the ‘new’ homeless in the Ukraine.⁴

Emin was brought up in the English seaside town of Margate. Her father was Turkish Cypriot and never married her mother. He had two families and spent half the week in each household. She ‘lived like a princess’ when her parents ran the Hotel International in Margate. But all this ended when the business crashed when she was seven years old, her parents split up and she was brought up by her mother. Raped at 13 she became promiscuous. Emin’s video (transferred from Super 8) Why I never became a dancer (1995), like much of her art, recounts sexual experiences, here underage sex with older men. Like a number of her fellow British artists, Emin’s art and identity also circulates within the media. If her subjective outpourings entail her revisiting and replaying clichéd expressionist forms, such as hastily made monoprint drawings, it is coupled with a savvy business acumen, a canny ability to market and promote herself.

Emin’s practice involves a mix of media, including diaries, letters, personal objects, family photos, paintings, videos, prints, neon, sculptures, appliqué and written book works. For all the many forms her work has taken, it is an essentially testimonial art, characterized by the persistent process of talking and writing about past personal experiences. It is the power of the word, her word, which is key: ‘when it comes to words, I have a uniqueness that I find almost impossible in terms of art – and it’s my words that actually make my art unique.’⁵ Even when the form of the work is without words, as in the series of ready-made objects – things from her life that have been exhibited and sold as art, such as her bed and a dilapidated wooden beach hut – their significance and import have a dependency on what she has told us about herself. With autobiographic narration legitimizing and animating such artefacts, Emin appropriates the ready-made for an expressionist cause.

Emin’s art is characterized by an improper use of language – all the misspelt words, the swearing. Such bad language could be seen to signal cultural difference and aids in the portrait of Emin as some kind of contemporary naïf. Emin further endorses this image with such remarks as these, taken from Vogue in 2000: ‘I don’t read very much. I don’t go to the cinema very often. I can count the times in my life I’ve been to the theatre. Most of the time I’m fucking happy watching Brookside, y’know?’⁶

Julian Stallabrass, picking up on the picture of her painting naked on the cover of a catalogue issued by her dealer Jay Jopling, describes Emin as the ‘art world’s very own post-modern primitive.’⁷ Her performative allusion to Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo) in a short video from 1998 could also be seen to suggest this, showing the artist naked and curled up in a foetal position on a jetty in Norway, turned away from camera and letting out a terrified and frantic scream, which lasts about a minute. However, with the full title locating her suffering to her experience of abortion, Homage to Edvard Munch and all my dead children (1998), her angst-ridden homage to the Norwegian expressionist is not simply about an abstract and universal sense of loneliness and despair.

In a voice-over to her video, Tracey Emin C.V. Cunt Vernacular (1997), Emin gives a succinct chronology of the dramatic events in her life as the camera roams around the messy interior of her flat. The gaze of the mobile camera, moving over a disarray of personal possessions, establishes a ‘dirty’ realist aesthetic. This look was integral to her first solo exhibition at London’s White Cube in 1993, only tempered by the mock museum display that the often grubby personal scraps and mementos were given. Titling this show My Major Retrospective 1963–1993, Emin conducted a mock anthropology of selfhood, valorizing and celebrating quotidian and everyday things from her own life, including a memorial to her beloved Uncle Colin who died in a car crash, made from a handful of pathetic tokens including the crumpled gold Benson and Hedges cigarette packet Emin says he was holding when he died and which to her ‘looked like real gold’.⁸ The trading in personal objects of the famous and infamous signifies the banal fringe of celebrity status. Emin’s display of useless personal memorabilia is a warped version of this. Her reliquary of the everyday mixes sentimental attachment with the desire and need for self-aggrandizement. There is also a latent mysticism in relation to such objects, as they become talismanic, more than they are. Letters and other tokens take on an aura of value, signs of the authority of the self, an index and register of a person’s agonies, fears, desires and also pleasures.

This is integral to the viewers’ relation to Emin’s sculptural installation My Bed (1998) with its bed, dirty sheets, used condoms, pills, a bottle of vodka and other items now standing for the tortured self of the artist, a further variant of the expressionist angst of Munch’s The Scream which had inspired her video Homage to Edvard Munch and all my dead children (1998). Emin revealed a close connection between the Norwegian painter and My Bed. In a South Bank Show TV interview she says how on visiting the Munch museum she realized ‘his bed becomes important, more important than his work … Because you can touch it, like an alchemy of transmission of substance, something happens’.⁹ As an index of her depression and crisis, accruing aura connected with Emin’s star status and a well-publicized £150,000 sale, My Bed provided both the art world and the media with a spectacle of degradation and decadence. Emin vividly describes the epiphanic moment of its realization, of coming out of the deep depression which had led her to stay in bed for a number of days, and her realization how she could turn all this into art:

I looked at that bed and I thought ‘Crikey!’ There was almost a screen between me and it. At one point I was in bed, part of all the decay and debris, and then I had this distance you have when you make a drawing.¹⁰

While her crude display of self accords with an established aesthetic of abjection in art, Emin’s work is at its most potentially subversive when she is not spectacularizing that state – as she does in My Bed – but through the power and force of language, both written and spoken. In her film, How it feels (1996), Emin talks openly to camera about the traumatic experience of her first abortion, revisiting the locations connected with the trauma and recalling what happened there. It is also an account of how she realized life, her life, was more important than picture making. The film adopts a documentary mode, with Emin facing and talking directly to camera, occasionally responding to questions by an off-screen interviewer. How it feels begins with a declaration of the difficulty of the testimonial: ‘I don’t know what to say, I’m too upset.’ Emin is on the steps of a church near the doctors where she was first told she was pregnant. Her frank disclosures to camera are also mixed with certain poetic moments when she struggles to convey the pain she has experienced: ‘I’m like a branch in a tree in winter which will never blossom.’ The film contains a portrayal of neglect and insensitivity on the part of male doctors. It tells us of the pressure put on her by doctors to keep the baby. Once the operation was over, she says how she still felt it inside her, how her whole inside felt as if it ‘was ripped to pieces’. The abortion had not been successful, she was carrying twins and Emin spares us no detail about the gruesome incident when the second ‘mashed up’ foetus slips down her leg.

But like Why I never became a dancer, this dredging up of her painful past ends on a relatively affirmative note. Such traumatic experience gives her, she says in the voice-over to How it feels, a ‘greater idea of creativity’, how if she was ‘going to make art it couldn’t be about, it couldn’t be about a fucking picture, it couldn’t be about something visual, it had to be about where it was really coming from’. After such an experience it ‘would be unforgiveable for me to start making things.’ She r...