"Tracey Emin at Lehmann Maupin," Bill Arning.
Art in America, December 1999, Brant Publications, Inc.

At Tracey Emin's first U.S. solo show, titled "Every Part of Me's Bleeding," you saw scores of drawings, self-portrait photographs, personal letters, press clippings, sundry detritus, neon wall texts and videos on TVs as well as an anthology of video works projected in a separate theater. Even an actual cabana or "hut" and a bathtub had been lugged in. All this aimed to make each and every viewer walk away feeling as if she or he had shared profound intimacies with Tracey, the person. Of course, that is beyond what art can do, but Emin came damn close.

The complexities of Emin's persona were obvious from the first piece, The Interview, comprising two old-fashioned TVs placed on a low platform. On each screen was a video of the artist sitting on opposite ends of the same couch. In one she is tarred up, sexy and stylish, while in the other she is dressed more practically, as if ready for a hard day in the studio. The two sides of her personality bicker about how she deals with the world, whether she overplays her sexuality and how screwed up she really is. "Don't you ever think about how you look?" serious Tracey asks party-girl Tracey, only to be told, "I'm 35, alcoholic, psychotic, overdramatic."

A wall of drawings, done in a seductively scratchy, overcaffeinated hand, also recounted the tribulations of being sexy Tracey, though her mischievous humor was in evidence, too. One drawing shows her in a tub with the sweet caption, "And sometimes I imagine nice things, like laying in the bath masturbating again and again." The main gallery was dominated by a hut (jointly owned by Emin and artist Sarah Lucas) from Margate, the resort town where, as we learn from the video Why I didn't become a dancer, Emin triumphed over the boys who called her a "slag" at a dance contest. Tales of transcending dismal reality continued in the lengthiest video, the 30-minute How It Feels, in which Emin wrenchingly recounts a botched abortion that nearly did her in, but instead led to her commitment to art.

Trying to absorb this much about the artist might have exhausted her less ardent fans well before they came upon the re-creation of her bedroom in the rear of the gallery. Empty vodka bottles, a carton of Marlboro Lights, pills and used tampons littered the room. Of course, bloody tampons call to mind a certain long-ago time in feminist art's provocative history. But according to Emin, her reiteration of the gesture is an effort to link her ambivalence about having children with her abandonment of painting, by using the quintessentially women-only pigment: menstrual blood. Here, as elsewhere, Emin's art defies all notions of universal spectatorship or objective criteria. I, for one, found myself worshiping her as a goddess and eating up even the most banal details.