Tracey Emin- My Kind of Artist

As Oscar Wilde said, ‘There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about’  that cannot be said for controversial and iconic British Artist Tracey Emin.  Not many artists have been exposed to fierce public scrutiny in the British Media like Emin.  As a result, she has been criticised for being nothing more than a biographical documentarist, narcissistically playing her life out on stage in the form of neon lights, tapestries, and mono prints. Her public appearances in the media with stories of sleeping around, getting pissed, (she was sponsored by Bombay Sapphire Gin) and depression have contributed to her uncalled-for public reputation as the “Bad Girl of British Art”.  Persecuted by moral judgement she was listed at position 41 in the Channel Four programme 100 Worst Britons  in 2003.  However, in the same year she ranked 41 of the most important people in the art world by Art Review  raising her above David Hockney and Damien Hirst.  Like Marmite you either love Mad Tracey from Margate or hate her.’

Photo credit: Arthur, the digital museum

Emin was born in 1963 in Croydon, London, UK and grew up in the seaside town of Margate, Kent. Her parents ran the Hotel International and the business crashed when she was seven. At that point, her parents split up. Emin’s difficult childhood turned traumatic when she was molested at eleven on a beach and raped at the age of thirteen. When recollecting the incident of the beach she writes in  Strangelands:  “He ran his hands all over me, and I pulled at his willy until a giant spray of white covered my limbs.”  Emin has said  “When living in Margate sex was a form of escapism, on the beach, down an alley, green, park or hotel.” In ‘Strangelands’ she writes “When I was 14- 15 there was nothing to my life but dancing and sex. I would go to nightclubs and dance then I would meet someone and have sex. It was fine and easy nothing to do but think with my body, like a bird I thought I was free.” 

Despite having no qualifications and leaving school at thirteen, she managed to get accepted on an art degree course in Maidstone. She received a first and went on to the Royal College of Art . She met Carl Freedman an art curator and in his 1995 mixed show Minky Mandy she produced her famous tent ‘Everyone I have ever slept with 1963-1995’ . Inside the tent she had sewn and embroidered the names of anyone she had shared a bed with. One could argue that this controversial piece was the one that launched Emin’s career into the public eye but her ‘arrival’ was undoubtedly her appearance on a Channel 4 debate at the 1997 Turner Prize, which she famously walked out off during a live discussion saying she was ‘drunk and wanted to be with her friends.’ In ‘Strangelands’ she recalls her friend Gillian a fellow artist ringing her the next day and relating the highlights to her of the night before. “But I was not on tv, I blew it to celebrate with you. Very funny Gillian. What a wind up. Hey Gillian get off the phone, my hangovers too bad. Just take your humour somewhere else.” It was only when she opened the Guardian that day and was splashed all over the page that  it all came flooding back to her.

After a mini mental breakdown in 1998, Emin spent four days straight in bed, lifeless, vodka and cigarettes her only companion. Around her bed lay empty bottles, cigarette packets, condoms, blood-stained knickers, contraceptive pill packets, reflecting the grim state of Emin’s health. When she left the bed to go to the bathroom, she noticed that the bed itself was a work of art – Her inspiration was to display her embarrassing depravation. Her own unwashed unmade bed that conveyed anguish, depression, and sexual behaviour which revealed one of the bleakest moments of her existence, so she turned it into an installation.  My Bed 98 was nominated for the 1999 Turner Prize. The nomination received backlash from an art world not yet ready for Emin’s conceptualism or a woman so open and frank about her emotional health and sexual encounters.  The bed sold for 3.77 million dollars in 2014.  

Via the Tate Museum.

Confessional art brings controversy and debate. By its nature, it tends to provoke intense reactions. While some people find confessional art inspirational and relevant, many others consider it distasteful. Some even simply deny that it is art at all.  Speaking of Emin’s art  Julian Stallabrass a critic said ‘It’s so unmediated, I wonder if it’s art,’ whilst Chair of Arts Council England  Nicolas Serota  said “The Young British Artists like Hirst and Tracey Emin made art that people could understand, even if they didn’t like it. Since then the commercial art world in the capital has burgeoned.”  

Emin uses the raw material of her self-mind, body, and soul. Nearly all the experiences Emin draws on for her art are based on her body, like her relationship with sex and the devastation of her abortions. “I realized I was my work, I was the essence of my work”, she said on ITV’s Southbank Show in 2001.  Art becomes, as it always has for Emin, more about a life as art.  Plato asserted that when artists are making or performing art they are imitating.  Emin’s work relates everything we could ever want to know about her life. Her sadness and happiness are her art. Bad luck, shit men, poor sex, treacheries, anorexia, mental health, infidelities, and survival. In Strangelands she penned:

“I remember, when I was about ten years old, working out that I would be thirty-six in the year 2000. It seemed so far away, so old, so unreal. And here I am, a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless beautiful woman. I never dreamed it would be like this.” 

Emin has consistently supplied an autobiography, relating to the harrowing events of her past, so that her work can be read like a confessional.  However uncomfortable her disclosures appear: troubled childhood, absent father, abortion, rape - they provide an absorbing storyline and they help to explain the underlying emotional reasons for her work which include jealously, fear and revenge. Emin is a possessor of her own sexuality. She is not a silent passive object. She is not subject to patriarchal conditioning: for want of a better example, ‘the-women-on top’. She sticks her middle finger up to the sexist art-historical and popular images that trivialize women. She celebrates sexuality and reclaims her body for herself. Emin is raw in her work. She is direct and uninhibited, tough on men; she is the voice of the single metropolitan female, telling it like it is. She is a champion for the disillusioned generation. Her new feminist is a formidable, self-reliant personality with a sharp, unflinching voice. Emin has re-invented feminist perceptions, the power bitch boasting an uncompromising, seedy eroticism. Emin’s work is her real response to her environment, the world that she deals with.  Her work is about surviving as a woman. Her art speaks volumes to any woman who has struggled through a disadvantaged background. 

Via the Tate Museum.

In 2011 she was made the Royal Academy's Professor of Drawing, one of only two female professors in the history of the institution. Whilst today Emin steers away from the subversive topics of her earlier work, she still powerfully addresses the most emotive qualities of life. Like her most well-known sign on the wall of London’s St Pancras station that reads: ‘I want my time with you’. In the recent ‘self-isolation’ she revealed new autobiographical paintings called ‘I thrive on solitude.’ During the lockdown she said  “I’m in it for the long haul, this is the last stage of my life and I am really going to make the most of it,” she insisted. “I’m not going to fuck up like I have in the past. I expect my work to change dramatically over the next year and if it does not, I will be disappointed. I am very excited to be going into this new phase.”

Emin’s work is liberating. Womanhood and female tragedy as subjects are interesting and fascinating art. In an era where it is still considered shameful to discuss women’s issues, where period talk is still considered appalling, abortion is taboo, and cunts and vulvas are not what a nice lady says, she forces us to look at reality right in the face. By displaying ‘My Bed’ she revealed not only her own conflicts and suffering but the battles many women face in the process of finding themselves. Emin has systemically contested the continuing male bias of the cultural world/gender imbalance, playing a critical role in changing both the art industry and the ways in which we see our world.  Many have accused her of pandering to the lowest form of voyeurism, but ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’ brought attention to issues that desperately needed it, and still do. Emin’s work remains more important than ever. 

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Justina Jameson is an emerging writer from the UK. When she is not writing at the weekend, she can be found holding down a 9 to 5 as a Senior Administrative. Justina has  a Social Welfare and Community Degree which examines the quality of human life in a society in all its dimensions. She feels strongly in female empowerment and believes that women should make personal and professional choices that they want  and not let society make them very guilty about those very choices. Justina likes art,dogs, books, laughter and lives with her long tern partner and their dog Cooper-Star.