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I've never given Tracey Emin much real thought. Until a few weeks ago I passed her off as the artist who displayed her bed in the Tate and lurched about pissed on TV. I'm of a mind to blame celebrity for this, because of course Tracey Emin is a celebrity. A big one. The kind who only has to sneeze to make it into the red tops. I'm not immune to her fame. I've had my fair share of celebrity thoughts about her. They're not all that interesting. Here are some: 'She looks like Frida Kahlo', and 'I wonder what she'd be like in bed?' and 'She must be worth a bloody bomb' (I did warn you). But as for real live-and-kicking ideas, actual neural sparks, genuine considered opinions about Emin as an artist, well, they have been a bit thin on my intellectual ground. So here's where I begin. These thoughts aren't entirely worked out yet. I'm still in a process of discovery. But then you probably are too.
So what you're about to read is a sort of travelogue of ideas, a trip across my mind as it considers Tracey Emin. You'll add in your thoughts and feelings and if we're lucky we'll get somewhere by the end. My first thought isn't very out of the ordinary. You might have had it too. In fact, if you're reading this, you probably have. It's this: I don't know whether Tracey Emin is a great artist. I say this thought isn't very out of the ordinary, but you won't see it written down in many places.
On account of her celebrity, Emin gets very little serious or considered attention from the art world. What you will see is a lot of knee-jerking. Crude, primitive, uninteresting, ill-informed, objectionable. All these words have been used in print to support the opinion, held by many, that Tracey Emin is a worthless con-artist. These words: fresh, primitive (again), direct, genuine, have all been used in print to support the opinion, held by many, that Tracey Emin is a genuinely great artist. So I will not use any of those words myself and I will not tell you whether I think Tracey Emin is a great artist. Because, as I've said, I don't know.
Margate's most famous daughter, Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963. She graduated with a first in fine art at Maidstone College of Art in 1986, and was awarded an MA in painting by the Royal College of Art in 1989. Her first solo exhibition, at White Cube, London, in 1994, was entitled 'My Major Retrospective', and she opened the Tracey Emin Museum in Waterloo the next year. Her solo exhibitions have included Stockholm, Brussels, Istanbul, Helsinki, Paris and Berlin, and she was nominated for the 1999 Turner Prize.
What I do know is this. Since I've started thinking about Tracey Emin's work, I've come to appreciate it more than I thought I would. A lot more. Certain of Emin's monoprints are etched in my head. Her blankets have popped up in my mind's eye while I've been sitting on the bus. But then, Emin's insistence is part of her power. She demands to be regarded. And this explains why the Tracey Emin Celebrity Phenomenon gripped me long before I allowed her art to do the same. Her power unnerved me. I didn't know what to do with it but to unhook it and hang it on a safer peg. Honey Luard, Emin's exhibition organiser at White Cube, her London gallery, says, 'Tracey's art presents the world in a way you haven't seen it,' which is true but not quite the whole truth. At its best, Emin's art presents the world in ways you've always known about but never admitted, or you've never wanted to admit, or never perhaps until that moment articulated. If it's any good, art does this. It acts as the key to an unopened cupboard in some remote corner of your heart, a cupboard you once filled then locked some time so far distant the memory of it is like mist. Once the cupboard is open you can't close it again. The memories and objects and images it contains have already spilled out and are lying there in a confused and half-familiar tangle.
Not all Emin's work draws me like this. But when it does, my sense memory is summoned in ways that are emotionally challenging, even dangerous. Emin is dangerous. She shouts, she often bullies, she will not let you look away. At the same time, her work radiates vulnerability. At times it is even delicate. A sense of accompanied loneliness pervades the monoprints and blankets; the remote, often truncated figures struggling to claim their place on the paper, the raging words sewn on to pretty fabric backgrounds. Paradoxically, its intimacy comforts me. Here's the thing about Emin's art. It is comfortingly dangerous. It is at one and the same time subversive and conservative. I like this contradiction. I don't fight against it. It gives her work its dynamism and context. It allows her to reach beyond the academy. It tells of life the way life is. Most of all, it keeps me interested.
Since giving Emin's work the time it deserves, I have been very taken with a series of monoprints from 1997 entitled Something's Wrong. Here there are forlorn figures surrounded by space, their outlines fragile on the page. Some are complete bodies, others only female torsos, legs splayed and with odd, spidery flows gushing from their vaginas. They are all accompanied by the legend 'There's Something Wrong'. The series sets off in me an overpowering anxiety, a sense that we cannot always think our ways out of our bodies, that our bodies are uncertain companions. These drawings, and their lost, vulnerable legend, conjure memories of times when my own body and specifically those mysterious parts of my own body that are concerned with creating new, other bodies — has behaved in unexpected and unmanageable ways. They remind me of how intensely lonely it can be to live inside a body. And I don't think their power is wholly female. They bring back memories of stories I have heard about other bodies, reminding me of something a lover told me a long time ago. As a child, this man found a cyst on his penis. Troubled by the thing, he eventually squeezed it out and kept it for years in a matchbox. He would look at it from time to time and worry that it was his penis's brain. The worry became an obsession, and the idea that he had lobotomised his own member lived deep inside the boy and refused to leave him. The cyst was always there in its box to remind him of his foolishness and his very secret betrayal. There, you see? For the past ten years or so that story has been in the mental cupboard that was opened when I looked at Emin's monoprints. And now it is out.
The source of these drawings' power is the mysterious and slightly sinister connotation of the phrase 'There's something wrong'. What's the something? We don't know. It's just a sense, some rather murky aura emanating from the image. What's wrong? Anything and everything? Emin only hints. It is up to us to imagine. I want to think some more about Tracey Emin's artistry as a writer. Why does this aspect of her work get so little attention? Perhaps it's because the literary and visual arts are so often held apart, two arms of a compass destined to travel in the same direction but never to meet. For the most part, writing appears in visual artworks as typography. When visual art appears in the midst of writing we assume it's just illustrative. Emin closes up the compass. She challenges us to think of writing as visual art and visual art as a kind of text.
There's no doubt Tracey Emin loves words. She is quite maternally protective of the alphabet. When I visited her in her studio for this piece, she was gathering all the 'spare' letters she had cut from fabric over the years and not yet used and sewing them on to a blanket so as not to waste them. Emin had allotted her letters an orderly space on the blanket. She had arranged the letters alphabetically and had cut out a 'G' and a 'Q', which had been missing, to accompany the rest. Looking at that blanket I felt I'd learned a great deal about the considered and conservative fashion in which Emin constructs art from the giant, and sometimes ugly, tangle of her life. Words, letters, writing are Tracey Emin's order. It's not easy to write as open-endedly as Emin does without losing the sense of the language. It's not easy to scoop out such numinous sentences. Here too, Emin is comfortingly dangerous, insisting on the meaningful authority of both the words and their author, but also displaying a more subversive recognition of the importance of what is not said, of what can only be felt through the space between the letters. Her sentences are celebrations of words and their shapes, and because this is Tracey talking, anxiety creeps in and out of those shapes as clearly as if the words themselves were watching their backs: 'Did you see Tracey? 'Yea, she was Running Over black friars Bridge — it was 12 at night — she was wearing a Face Mask — And a small oxygen tank — on her back. 'Aprarently [sic] she swims with it. 'Does she still Look beautiful? 'NO SHE LOOKED STUPID 'No she looked LIKE A FOOL' So here's Tracey doing her thing, chasing over London's Blackfriars Bridge and looking ridiculous.
And this brings me to something important about Emin and her work. It's important but it's difficult to say without being misconstrued. You see, Tracey Emin is narcissistic. And by that I don't mean that she loves herself. I mean that Tracey Emin loves an image which may or may not be herself but of which she can never be sure. I mean that Emin only half recognises her own projection. And this, of course, is why her work is so lonely, so furious and so demanding of attention. When you look at Tracey Emin's work you see the artist struggling to reach herself, compelled by her own self-consciousness to fail and condemned by the self-same thing to begin again. What you see up on the wall or in the bed or on the screen is Emin's own reflection, exiled. As a result Emin has been criticised for being nothing more than a biographical documentarist, concerned only with the mundane minutiae of her narcissistic personality. 'It's so unmediated, I wonder if it's art,' says Julian Stallabrass, a critic of Emin's work. But that is both to misunderstand and to miss the point. While it's true that little of Emin's work is a commentary on the business of art itself, Emin is herself the mediator between her experience and its expression. The human world consists in individual lives lived and the connections between them. By exposing her own life to public view, Emin makes those connections. Anxiety, neediness, powerlessness, exhilaration, tenderness, the fear that one is condemned to live inside a reflection of oneself, attached only to the image. Who hasn't felt these things? Who hasn't looked in the mirror and thought, 'There's something wrong'?
"Few Artists are Subjected to Fierce Public Scritiny in the British Tabloids Like Tracey Emin. But Is She A Great Artist?" by Melanie McGrath.
Available: http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue1/something.htm.
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