Tracey Emin: Art into Life 9781350160606, 9781350160637, 9781350160620

Citation preview

Art into Life

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Art into Life Essays on Tracey Emin Edited by Alexandra Kokoli and Deborah Cherry

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in hardback format in Great Britain, 2020 This paperback edition first published 2022 © Editorial content and introductions, Alexandra Kokoli and Deborah Cherry, 2022 © Individual chapters, their authors, 2022 Alexandra Kokoli and Deborah Cherry have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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978-1-3501-6060-6 978-1-3502-9615-2 978-1-3501-6062-0 978-1-3501-6061-3

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Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Deborah Cherry and Alexandra Kokoli 1 Rethinking Tracey Emin Mark Durden 2 ‘It was just me, Tracey’ Camilla Jalving 3 A Black Cat Crossed My Path Glenn Adamson 4 Twenty Years in the Making Deborah Cherry 5 The Bonfire of the Fallacies (or Is it Phalluses?) Alexandra Kokoli 6 Early Emin John White 7 ‘I Do Not Expect to Be a Mother’ Joanne Heath 8 Dream and Diaspora Alev Adil 9 All at Sea Gill Perry List of Contributors Index

vi 1 17 29 41 45 71 89 103 119 133 147 151

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Acknowledgements Our warmest thanks go to our contributors for their bold and insightful writing as well as their patience in the long gestation of this collection. This collection has greatly benefitted from the careful copy-editing of Hannah Turner, supported by a grant from the Faculty of Arts and Cultural Industries, Middlesex University London, and the expert editorial guidance of Lisa Goodrum (IB Tauris), and Rebecca Barden (Bloomsbury). Alexandra Kokoli and Deborah Cherry Given the wide variance on Emin’s titles, we have standardized them throughout.

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Introduction: The Last Great Adventure Is Me1 Deborah Cherry and Alexandra Kokoli

With a few deft strokes of a generous brush Tracey Emin captures a woman in profile, her head tilted down and resting on an upraised hand as if deep in thought. The title, The dream to dance with you, hovers between a line from a poem, a declaration and an unspoken wish, offering a prompt, on the threshold of the lower edge, that conjures desire, longing, a maybe, maybe not. The whisper of a handwritten line skims its border, opening, closing, reversing, counterpointing. With its rapid grace, confident, fluid lines contrasting to broadly touched areas, it signals Emin’s artistic distance from her early work and the creative journey of her practice, as well as continuing her focus on the female figure. At the outset of her career, Emin collected and embellished found objects: a blue camping tent in Everyone I have ever slept with 1963–1995 (1995), a chair given to her by her grandmother for There’s a lot of money in chairs (1994), an ottoman for All the loving (underwear box) (1997), and numerous blankets. Her work emphasized materiality and tactility, the texture and surfaces of textiles, the variations of appliqué, patchwork and stitching. In her ‘memorabilia works’2 she assembled photographs, handwritten notes and small items which were mounted, framed and installed as wall pieces. The interplay between media extended to adroit relays between writing, performance, sculpture and photography. In 1994 Emin toured the United States of America, giving readings from Exploration of the Soul, a passionate account of her early years up to the age of thirteen, self-published in a limited edition of 200. She took with her a chair belonging to her grandmother, which she embroidered along the way with the names of the cities where she performed.3 The chair itself became an art work, adorned with decorative texts including the first page of her book, handwritten onto fabric, along with her grandmother’s title-giving observation and the exchange ‘OK Puddle/Thanks Plum’. In the photograph Monument Valley (Full Scale) (1995–97) Emin poses in this chair, her book in hand. Emin was also making short films shot on Super 8 and Hi8 video, such as Why I never became a dancer (1995), Emin & Emin (1996), How it feels (1996) and Tracey Emin C.V. Cunt Vernacular (1997) in all of which she performed, this last scanning the space and stuff of her London home. The presentation of the artist’s belongings, along with the ready use of her distinctive handwriting and misspellings,4 was widely perceived as offering a special, personal connection to the artist, as testimony to the events, experiences, relationships and encounters of her life. 1

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Emin’s output was very much of her time, channelling a raft of new developments in the arts in imaginative and often innovative ways. Her art, especially her short films, had much in common with photographic practices of intimacy, in which individuals, their friends, family and environments are revealed with a seemingly spontaneous artlessness.5 Alive to feminism, feminist theory, art and writing, Emin was bringing into the open women’s experience and feminine corporeality; she was speaking out about conception, pregnancy, abortion, the desire for a child, the anxieties of childlessness, about sexual desire and emotional proximity, about failure and despair, joy and exhilaration. For some, Emin and her art belonged to a 1990s cult of public confession that relished public revelation of private sorrow and the exposures of reality TV. Young women artists of Emin’s generation, wrote Jane Beckett, took up ‘a cult of subjectivity, the cultivation of the self ’, shared with consumerist and celebrity cultures.6 Emin’s works tapped into and developed modes of autobiographical and confessional creative practice in vogue in the 1980s and 1990s,7 which coincided with a pronounced interest in individual biography in art historical writing. Nicholas Green asked: ‘Why in the late 1980s this ongoing obsession with the individual artistic creator as the structuring principle of art history? Why this deep-set investment in self-expressive individualism?’ In a sharp dissection of the artist monograph, Green noted how its ‘intimate narrative of personal life . . . complemented by a wealth of documentary detail’ that ‘acts as an extension, a deepening of the function of witness’ resulted in a ‘fluid interplay’ between art and life.8 Green’s assessment bears similarity to the ways in which Emin’s art was presented and perceived within an expressionist vision in which art and life, life and art are perpetually and inescapably conflated. A contemporaneous orientation of museums towards entertainment, the market and popular appeal centred on the visitor, produced the self-curated gallery wander (in the shop and cafe as much as in the galleries), spectacular installations, displays that offered participation and interaction, invitations to select a sweet or sheet (as in the art of Félix González-Torres), and solicitations of a personal, even affective encounter with the work of art.9 If for some these changes produced awkward and uncomfortable confrontations with matters deemed unsuited to the public domain, for others they were empowering and revelatory. As Emin came to fame as the ‘bad girl’ of British art and a Young British Artist (yBa), her media personality and her own acting-up – she walked out of a pompous televised discussion about the Turner Prize in 1997 – deflected attention from her serious intent as an artist, her deep knowledge of the history of art, and the raft of visual references and research on which her practice is founded. Emin has continued to assemble objects, though these are no longer claimed as personal possessions. Dead Sea (2011) presents a cast of a leafless branch on a mattress on the floor, while The Vanishing Lake (2011) displays an old metal bath with a degraded British union flag. She has essayed sculpture, notably her small and exquisite Baby Things (2008), painted bronze casts of tiny clothes and shoes as if discarded or mislaid in the street for Folkestone Triennial or on the vast scale of Knowing my enemy.10 The boisterous colour contrasts and extravagant patchwork of earlier blankets or the startling brilliance of neon have given way to a more muted palette. A print-maker from her art college years, Emin has worked fairly consistently in monoprint, becoming increasingly multi-media in her approach.11 Drawing from life and from memory with

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nervous, restless, flickering lines, Emin returns again and again to a solitary female figure. Filled with paintings, bronze sculptures, works on paper, photography, neons and video, her exhibition The Memory of Your Touch at Xavier Hufkens gallery in Brussels in 2017, indicated that inter-media exchange has remained characteristic. Motifs in paintings reappear in tapestry: Black Cat (2008) was later executed as a hanging (2011). Emin is one of several artists whose works have been realized in tapestry, an art form whose high-end production values and high costs are reliant on specialist makers.12 Emin has often relied on makers and fabricators, including skilled casters for her sculpture, and specialist weavers at the West Dean Tapestry Studio. If Emin was once a conceptual or post-conceptual contemporary artist,13 by now she is an assured painter and sculptor whose work continues to testify to her longlasting concern with the female body. A Fortnight of Tears (White Cube Bermondsey, London, 2019) expands and consolidates Emin’s engagement with the female form across different media, from tactile bronzes (from maquettes modelled from kneaded clay, also on show) to gestural applications of paint in different degrees of dilution, testing it through extremes of emotion and scale: The Mother (2017), a bronze kneeling nude of imposing proportions (266 × 177 × 235 cm) is contrasted with large-scale paintings of parental ghosts, Mum & Dad (2017), demonstrating admirable mastery across sculpture and paint in conveying degrees of presence and absence, comfort and discomfort.14 Emin’s most enduring contribution to contemporary art may be defined as her refiguring of feminine corporeality, her summoning of feminine desire, pain and resilience, in all its psychic and physical complexity. The dream to dance with you appeared on the cover of the November 2017 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, distributed at Frieze London 2017. It is one of several artist commissions that confirm this magazine’s enduring connections to contemporary and modern art as well as the multiple intersections of fashion, journalism and celebrity.15 While Emin’s celebrity status has been reiterated in her many and much-photographed appearances in stylish dresses at modish parties and her collaborations with luxury brands, she has been astute in maximizing some of the benefits and she is known for her charitable donations. Proceeds from her exhibition at Louis Vuitton’s New Bond Street Maison boutique (coinciding with her retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011, Love Is What You Want, supported by Vuitton) were gifted to ‘fund arts projects’ at Forest High School, Kikandwa, Uganda. In 2008 Emin had provided funds to build the Tracey Emin Library for the school.16 Emin’s first dealer gallery appearance was My Major Retrospective 1963–1993 in 1993 at Jay Jopling’s newly opened space White Cube in London’s Duke Street St James, and this gallery still represents her. Although Emin’s art has a relatively limited presence on the secondary art market, prices for her work at auction lifted in the past few years. When My Bed was auctioned at Christie’s London on 1 July 2014, it realized £2,546,500, more than twice the top estimate; released by Charles Saatchi, the installation was purchased by Jopling for Count Christian Duerckheim who gave it on long loan to Tate.17 The following year Exorcism of the last painting I ever made sold for £722,500.18 In common with her contemporaries, Emin’s trajectory as an artist has taken place within the marketization, commercialization and globalization of the art world that took off in the 1990s, trends that benefit from media figures and stand-out individuals.19 While these sales register a

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marked rise in the financial value of Emin’s art, it is by no means as stratospheric as the rise in value of art by Damien Hirst, whose work achieves substantially higher prices than Emin’s. Such disparities evidence the enduring gender inequalities in the art market, comparable to those more widely present in the world of work. Emin has been variously characterized as a ‘bad girl’, a working-class girl made good, ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’. While some women artists, curators and art writers embraced and relished the bad girl label,20 it is also an indicator of the high stakes and intersectional risks that extensive media exposure can carry for young women when femininity is over-identified as dysfunctional, wayward and out of control. Perhaps the most problematic sobriquet, because the most familiar for Emin, was as ‘young British artist’ or yBa, a frame of reference with which Emin has often been identified and in which she gets assessed. As several studies have noted, study at Goldsmiths and the take-up by Charles Saatchi were influential in forming the group.21 Aidan While emphasized the pre-eminence of London as a global city with its ‘density of networks, associations and facilities necessary to sustain an international art movement’.22 The yBas have been viewed as a publicity-generating marque that coincided with increasing branding in the art world and bound together a disparate group of artists.23 Introducing his influential study of the yBas in High Art Lite, Julian Stallabrass remarked that ‘these artists showed in the same do-it-yourself exhibitions, were presented by the same dealers, live in the same part of London and socialize together.’24 While Emin became a White Cube artist, this gallery also representing Marcus Harvey, Gavin Turk, Sam Taylor-Johnson and Damien Hirst, several London galleries promoted artists associated with the group. While many yBas were London-based, with Gavin Turk, Gillian Wearing and Chris Ofili studying at Chelsea College of Art, Emin was a student at Maidstone College of Art (1983–6) before registering at the Royal College of Art for her MA (1987–9). Emin’s commercial acumen lay in the Bethnal Green shop she set up with Sarah Lucas, her investment bonds and her subscription letters. She participated little in the DIY shows (she did not exhibit at Hirst’s Freeze, London, 1988 for example) and she did not benefit substantially from Saatchi in these years. She reportedly declined to sell Everyone I have ever slept with 1963–1995 to the collector and advertising executive because of his connections with Margaret Thatcher whom she accused of ‘crimes against humanity’. Saatchi purchased it nevertheless, also acquiring My Bed and The last thing I said to you is don’t leave me here (The Hut) (1999).25 She pursued her career with independence and autonomy in art making, writing and performance. From the outset her distinctive autobiographical voice, articulated in Exploration of the Soul, differentiated her work from others associated with the label. Her first west-end showing, My Major Retrospective 1963–1993 presented souvenirs and keepsakes, family mementoes, writings and small photographs of art works she had already destroyed.26 Time Out was enthusiastic: This is the show that every artist wants to put on but doesn’t dare . . . It’s the funniest and most disturbing show in town, a brilliantly simple idea which takes one step further the fashion for bringing real-life into the galleries . . . It isn’t an ego trip. It’s ordinary. It’s the Tracey Emin show but here is Everywoman . . . The show is radical, innocent, crazy, passionate and brave. A coup.27

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As a young artist Emin made prints at the Curwen Studio, contributed to small independent shows and staged her own occasions, such as The Shop in Bethnal Green with Sarah Lucas (1993), or The Tracey Emin Museum (near Waterloo Station in London, 1995–8). Selected for Minky Manky (South London Gallery, 1995) she contributed an assemblage of objects and texts describing ‘her little season in hell’ along with Everyone I have ever slept with 1963–1995, showing alongside Damien Hirst, Mat Collishaw, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume as well as Gilbert and George, Steven Pippin and Critical Decor. In 1997 the reappearance of her ‘tent’ at Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Gallery, a solo show I Need Art Like I Need God (South London Gallery) and her television walk-out confirmed her as a yBa and one of the group’s ‘enfants terribles’.28 On the cover of Gregor Muir’s celebrated memoir Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art (2009) Tracey Emin appears twice, in name and in a photograph.29 Of the six endorsements for the 2010 paperback edition, only Emin’s is printed on the front: she describes Muir’s book as ‘a fantastic historical document’ which renders the time of the yBas ‘really clearly and accurately’, ‘because Gregor was actually there’. On the lower half, a tinted black and white photograph by Johnnie Shand Kydd shows Muir and Emin in their mid-thirties, on an angled Chesterfield two-seater sofa.30 Emin appears engrossed in conversation with someone cut out of the frame, seemingly oblivious to her friend’s actions behind her back: with comically exaggerated concentration, Muir aims a gun at Emin’s head. Muir’s book is a vitally important document of the London art scene in the 1990s, written by someone who not only was there, as he and his endorsers are keen to stress, but also whose influence in the British and international art world has vastly grown since the publication of Lucky Kunst.31 While the contents of Muir’s book fall outside the scope of this one, its cover image is evoked here because it condenses some of this book’s key concerns and motivations. The selection of this humorous image for the cover of Muir’s memoir may or may not speak to its author’s ambivalence towards his friend, but far more interestingly it reveals the role that Emin has been culturally assigned as a representative of the yBas and, more specifically, of their most notorious and reprehensible excesses. In an overwhelmingly positive review of Muir’s book by Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times Culture Magazine also uses a photograph of laughing Emin in a lacy bustier, drink in hand, to illustrate an appraisal of this ‘inside account of Britain’s most vulgar art movement’, with a small inset of Damien Hirst (also with a drink in his hand) pretending to pick his nose.32 Such prevalent and visually enforced associations between Tracey Emin, the young British artists and yBa excess if not vulgarity, have slipped into tacit assumptions of contiguity. Most studies of Emin continue to prioritize this association insisting that her practice can be reduced to her involvement with a group of her peers, despite that group’s questionable coherence. As has been widely recognized the appearance of the yBas coincided with the promotion of Cool Britannia and continuing debates over national identity. Kobena Mercer identified the yBas’ ‘highly stereotypical invocations of Britishness’, localism and vernacular nationalism as a ‘defensive and, above all, regressive response’ to globalization.33 Emin’s diasporic and intersectional identity and the often overlooked, though widely declared, references in her art and writing to her

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Turkish Cypriot heritage complicate her positioning in this frame as well as its definitions of Britishness.34 Today Tracey Emin is one of the most famous living artists, with a high public profile and extraordinary media visibility. For nearly three decades Emin has been a notable public figure. By 2000, as Patrick Elliott affirmed: ‘David Bowie interviewed her, Elton John and George Michael collected her work, Vivienne Westwood dressed her; she even advertised a brand of gin. She became a regular panellist and interviewee on television and radio shows’.35 Details of her personal life continue to be widely circulated: no occasion seems to escape public notice, whether her marriage to a rock or her application for an extension to her London studio to be designed by starchitect David Chipperfield.36 The ‘bad girl’ has morphed into a conservative middle-aged celebrity who models for Marks & Spencer,37 a profile better suited to her representation of Britain at the Venice Biennale (2007), her election as a Royal Academician (2007), her Professorship in Painting at the Royal Academy (2011–13) and the award of CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2013. Interestingly, Emin’s ability to surprise and shock has survived the passing of her bohemian youth into settled maturity, when she came out as a voter for the Conservative Party and a Royalist.38 Her generation have become members of the British establishment, with country houses, properties overseas, art collections, and in the case of Hirst a private museum and London art gallery. It is her public persona that has made Emin’s popularity, as she seems to speak out for women and to women with a highly emotive voice on abortion, sex, desire, loneliness, belonging and identity, and more recently on ageing, the menopause and bereavement. Yet it is also this public personality that has tended to shield her art from scholarly analysis, or else to provide an excuse for its absence. Her position thus comes to represent that of many women artists and their work in recent accounts of contemporary art, caught between over-exposure and under-analysis. Emin’s critical fortunes are both singular and shared. If few attain her celebrity, many women artists are critically neglected, stereotyped, and have their work overdetermined by autobiography, tropes of femininity, or their rejection of them. Emin’s engagement with her publics has also changed over time: while the bronzes of children’s cast-offs have been exhibited in public spaces at Folkestone (2008) she has also represented Britain internationally and returned to the shop format with the online Emin International Shop.39 Since her retrospective, Tracey Emin: Twenty Years (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 2008) Emin has participated in numerous solo shows and international exhibitions in Amsterdam, Austin Texas, Berlin, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Miami, Munich, New York, Sydney and Vienna, as well as in the UK. She has also made a point of withdrawing from the metropolitan social scenes of which she had long been a fixture, by moving to the south of France and devoting herself to making work (mostly painting) in isolation.40 After her mother’s death in 2016, she announced a return to her home town of Margate,41 towards which she famously harboured profound ambivalence, suggested by the conclusion to her film Top Spot (2004) in which she air-bombs this seaside town into oblivion. Emin now has a new studio in this coastal resort. Her reconciliation with Margate was foreshadowed in her pink neon I never stopped loving you, commissioned and exhibited by Turner Contemporary and later auctioned in aid of its Trust.42 In spring

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2018 Emin unveiled her largest public art work in celebration of the 150th anniversary of St Pancras International and the 250th anniversary of the Royal Academy. I want my time with you stretches 20 metres across the station shed roof, hanging directly below the St Pancras clock.43 Emin, who is opposed to British departure from the European Union, said that she wanted to make ‘a statement that reaches out to everybody from Europe arriving in to London’.44 While public art commissioned from starchitects and prominent artists has become a recurrent presence in animating the semi-public spaces of the global city, this installation could be construed as a farewell to London but also testament to the lives of voluntary and imposed mobility of those passing through the station, and the familiar condition of being in transit, and perhaps in a global scale, migration, diaspora and statelessness. Questions of post-coloniality and national (un)belonging permeate the artist’s practice and self-perception. In a 2011 instalment of Who Do You Think You Are?, a popular BBC One series in which celebrities trace their ancestry, Emin set out to delve deeper into her mother’s East London roots, which revealed her Roma ancestry: ‘I’m gypsy, I’m beautiful, proper gypsy. They were tent-dwelling, travelling, broom-making, creative people. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.’45 In 2011 Love Is What You Want, an extensive retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, prompted a reassessment of Emin’s art, career and trajectory as an artist, confirming her continued popularity and by now favourable critical reception. The exhibition and its accompanying symposium provided inspiration for this collection. Its accompanying catalogue marked an increasingly scholarly attention to Emin’s art, stemming from The Art of Tracey Emin (2002), in which Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend reclaimed Emin from the conflation between her art and celebrity to situate her as as an artist whose work deserves careful and sustained analysis. Art into Life: Essays on Tracey Emin builds on a wide range of academic studies of Emin that have interrogated the legacies of feminism, attitudes to sexuality, intersections with popular culture, the materiality of her practice especially in textiles, the recasting of memory, the literary and visual strategies of her autobiographical modes. Like this book, these studies contest the mythology of expressive genius sustained in authorized publications which continue to emphasize Emin’s art as autobiographical, ‘candid’ self-revelation, and ‘disclosure’.46 This approach enjoins what Catherine Belsey calls ‘expressive realism’, a perspective which validates ‘the text as a means of access to the author’s view of life’. Rather than shaped by formal practices, artistic strategies and methodologies, or provoking pluralities of possible meanings, art and literature are considered to ‘reflect the reality of experience, as it is perceived by one (especially gifted) individual, who expresses this perception in a text which enables other individuals to recognize its truth’, thus celebrating a romantic conviction that art is, in the words of poet William Wordsworth, ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.47 More widely, feminist and deconstructionist critiques of authorship, writings on selffashioning, on the performance of subjectivity and the instability of identity have substantially reconsidered issues of authorship. Critical theory has played an important role in reassessments of Emin’s art and writing. In his study of the radical potential of transgressive art, Kieran Cashell draws on recent French philosophy to argue that Emin’s art is redemptive, an ethical practice

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of reflection on and understanding of the traumatic events of her life. Her work, he contends, ‘originates in an engagement with her own past experience . . . it is the result of a difficult yet ultimately affirmative process of retroactive self-investigation’. He continues: ‘Making art for Emin, perhaps uniquely, has a definite existential and moral purpose: through the creative process she hopes to come to some understanding of her life.’48 Cashell wisely challenges any polarization of authenticity and construction. Authenticity has been a recurring issue in debates about Emin, at a simple level in adjudications of veracity and truth-telling. But, as Outi Remes deftly notes: ‘All the attempts to discover the “true” Emin have been unsuccessful, because they have aimed at distinguishing the undistinguishable.’49 This search for Emin’s authenticity has also taken place within recent debates about authenticity in philosophy and aesthetics. In what has been identified as ‘an age of authenticity’, a ‘turn inward’ has investigated the inner self and its relation to the individual’s actions, values and choices; authenticity is thus construed as ‘committed, personal expression, being true . . . to one’s artistic self.’50 Feminist writings have investigated Emin’s contradictory relationship to the legacies of feminist art and questioned the creative genealogies of her practice. Rosemary Betterton argues that while Emin’s ‘use of a domestic aesthetic, a personal life story and craft techniques’ connected her to a feminist inheritance, her art does not participate in the collective and shared politics of feminist practice.51 Feminist studies of autobiography have emphasized the distinctive characteristics of women’s life-writing. Laura Marcus has clarified the ‘textual production of the self in autobiography’, explaining the ‘autobiographical “I”’ as ‘a rhetorical figure within the text supplying the illusion of full identity’.52 Marcus has foregrounded ‘what it means to put a life into narrative, to make a story or stories out of a life, as well as the question of autobiography as a staging of memory’.53 Emin’s deployment of the autobiographical I, the formal autobiographical and confessional strategies of her art and writing, her self-referentiality, repetitions, reiterations and stagings of memory have been subjected to skilful and detailed feminist analysis.54 As Betterton concludes:‘Through her work and performances, she brings “Tracey Emin” into being as an artistic identity whose honesty of self-exposure is her trade-mark.’55 Emin’s art has provoked a wide range of responses. While sceptics remain unmoved, others have experienced heightened emotions. Clare Johnson examines the ‘empathic encounter between artist-as-artwork and viewer-collaborator, which is necessarily affirmative in its co-emergence of the “work” of art.’ She writes: ‘Empathy requires the listener to say yes to the one who speaks, to allow space for his or her story and remain open to this testimony. It is to say yes to the experience of another rather than treat it with suspicion. . . . To say yes in the way I have proposed requires a temporary aligning of self to other, a partial loss of distance more commonly associated with complicity than critique. It is an additive process, not a deconstructive project.’56

Art into Life: Essays on Tracey Emin provides scholarly appraisal of Emin’s work, while recognizing that Emin’s art, public personae, her popular reception and populist (mis) understandings form part of one and the same uncomfortably stretched (art) story. Emin and her work, its careful consideration and its journalistic glosses, are considered

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alongside and in dialogue with one another, not as a coherent whole but as a cluster of evocative agonisms, the significance of which exceeds any monographic appraisal. If indeed ‘with Emin people see what they want to see’,57 then looking at Emin and her oeuvre becomes more than an art historical endeavour narrowly defined to include feminist reflection on the visual and media culture and politics of contemporary Britain and beyond. In locating Emin within the changing conditions of the art world and social life over three decades and more, this collection offers multiple sketches of these conditions and their vicissitudes. This volume examines the gendered implications of an intensely autobiographical practice, sheds light on the problematic encounter between the worlds of art, mass media and celebrity, and probes the disciplinary limits of art history by demonstrating how deeply embedded art has become in the public life and culture of contemporary Britain. Art into Life: Essays on Tracey Emin spans Emin’s career from her early years to her most recent output. The first four chapters direct their focus to works of art, from Emin’s early films, such as Why I never became a dancer, to Exorcism of the last painting I ever made, My Bed and Black Cat. They consider questions of authenticity and authorship from different perspectives in critical theory and artistic practice. The relation of art and life encompasses discussion of visual and written representations of traumatic events and the question of the self that Emin presents in her art. The chapters share an emphasis on foregrounding Emin’s art, and its materiality, whether in diagnosing links to contemporary documentary, craft traditions, textile art or installation art. The fifth chapter on public discussions of Emin is a pivotal point in the volume, highlighting an often fevered attention that swirls around the artist in a convergence of populism, misogyny and antifeminist discourses. The four chapters that follow pick up themes and moments across Emin’s career: the formative factors that shaped her early years as an artist; attitudes to motherhood and ageing; intersectional identity and the legacies of a Turkish Cypriot heritage; questions of ‘home’ and shelter in a global, transnational world. Across all the essays in this volume is a shared understanding that Emin, her art and its interpretation have been and remain situated within conflicting strands of the contemporary present, from the fortunes of feminism, debates on post-coloniality, race and ethnicity, the rise of neo-liberalism and right-wing populism, global patterns of migration, diaspora, and social change. The collection includes varied voices and perspectives from personal recollections to academic assessments, a range of opinions from scepticism to enthusiasm, and different writing styles, from conversational to formal. Emin’s is frequently an art of memory, bringing to the present her recollections of events that mostly took place, as Rosemary Betterton notes, in the years before she became a recognized artist.58 Memory inevitably plays a part in writing about her art, from recollections of Emin herself – John White taught her at Maidstone and encouraged her work at the Curwen Studio – to encounters with her work – Glenn Adamson’s essay was triggered by seeing her work at a craft fair – or evaluations based on memories of seeing works in exhibitions. Emin’s art is continually evolving, and older artworks reappear in new settings. A number of contributors revisit their earlier assessments, reflecting on and updating their considerations for the present. Our title reverses the familiar channelling of life into art to highlight the constantly shifting and always contradictory relations examined in these pages between art and life. Emin and her art offer a conundrum, posed recently by Zadie

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Smith: in her essay ‘The I Who Is Not Me’ she asks who is the I that is speaking?59 It is this riddle of the relations of art and life, life and art, that is at the heart of this collection. Mark Durden’s opening contribution focuses on the issues of authenticity which have frequently been the focus of analysis of Emin’s art. In a pioneering article for Parachute (no. 105, 2002) he situated Emin’s work in terms of documentary, or rather the problems of documentary, locating her practice within what he identified as an excessive documentary mode that had entered the art gallery, notably through Boris Mikhailov’s Case History (1999) and Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh (1997). The commonality of such work consisted in their low-grade aesthetic in which the photography corresponded to the poverty and often abject states depicted – legible in terms of Mikhailov’s photographs of those he referred to as the ‘new homeless’ of his native Ukraine in terms of Western stereotyping of Eastern Europe and in Billingham’s portraits of his family that allied itself with the family album photo which fitted his subject matter. Tracey Emin’s art, like Billingham’s and Mikhailov’s, offered up a spectacular abject exoticism. In revisiting his earlier article, Durden challenges pervasive interpretations of the artist’s work as populist and self-exoticizing which have persisted, despite its evolution over the years which demands a re-orientation of critical evaluation away from the preoccupations of the later 1990s. Based on close readings of selected art works, Camilla Jalving examines Emin’s practice of self-presentation discussing the ways in which the artist performs her ‘self ’ in her work and to what effects. Informed by theories of performativity and autobiographical narration from across the disciplines of literary and critical theory and art history, Jalving’s chapter casts Emin’s self-representation as neither fully ‘authentic’ nor ‘staged’, but as oscillating between being and performing, in as much as performing constitutes a way of being. Jalving argues that in representing the story of the ‘I’, Emin equally presents the ‘I’ as a story. This re-presentation of the self is attained visually and verbally through diverse strategies of narration, acting and re-enacting. Jalving pays particular attention to the situations that Emin’s artworks create and the affect they produce in the beholder. The chapter addresses also some of the technical and material qualities of the works, asking what do the blotted line of the monoprints, the crafty sewing technique found in the quilts and the persistent misspellings that pervade parts of her practice actually do apart from representing? Glenn Adamson expands on Ulrich Lehmann’s casting of Emin’s artistic strategies as a ‘trademark faux authenticity’60 through a close consideration of Black Cat, a tapestry made at West Dean Tapestry Studio, based on one of Emin’s paintings. A craft historian and curator, Adamson draws comparisons, notably to the embroidered work of Ghada Amer. He revisits some of the formative questions of Emin’s reception in art criticism and art theory alike, around her performance of naivete and her purposefully low-skilled aesthetics (at variance with her employment of skilled fabricators), to conclude that the artist’s most defining feature and greatest strength – ‘at once corporeal and corporate’ – consists of her propensity to set chains of contradiction in motion. Deborah Cherry examines the making of My Bed (1998), the artist’s signature work, over twenty years. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s writing on the social life of things, she establishes three distinct chapters in the social life of this art work. In its first chapter My Bed appeared in three exhibitions, in Tokyo and New York in 1998 and in

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the artist’s entry for the Turner Prize the following year. Its second and third chapters each opened with a ‘tournament of value’, the sale of My Bed in 2000 and in 2014. In each chapter My Bed has been marked by its variant installations, in the arrangement of its elements and in its curatorial presentation. Initially, and again in 2008, My Bed was presented in dialogue with Emin’s multi-media output. In its later chapters it has been extracted from the artist’s oeuvre, first as part of the Saatchi collection, and most recently, with its reappearance at Tate Britain in 2015, it has been inserted into narratives of British art. My Bed’s engagement with many of the concerns of its contemporary moment, migration, diaspora, the shape of Europe, and homelessness, evident in its London showing of 1999, has been replaced with a trans-historical valency that retains a close association with the artist’s autobiography. Alexandra Kokoli revisits her 2010 article ‘On Probation: “Tracey Emin” as Sign’, to pose the question anew of what ‘Emin’ stands for in the widely diverse discourses that claim to address her and her work. Even in her recent (relative) retreat from media exposure, Kokoli argues that Emin still looms large as a cipher of artistic deskilling, narcissism, and the assumed money-grabbing vulgarity and inauthenticity of the most heavily promoted British art at the end of the twentieth century, while also making a convenient target for right-wing backlash against feminisms and conceptualisms. The chapter is largely devoted to a close reading of a minor exhibition and its catalogue that received some media exposure largely thanks to its deployment of Emin’s image: in Treason of the Scholars (2015), painter Peter Goodfellow and his conservative allies make ‘Emin’ into a malleable sign that encompasses all the ills of contemporary culture as they see it. ‘Emin”s malign manipulation represents an extreme case of the widespread practice of (ab)using ‘Emin’ as sign and of consistently overdetermining her by emptying her/it out. John White outlines Tracey Emin’s experience, development and working practice as a Printmaking student at Maidstone College of Art, and later a Painting student at the Royal College of Art. In this considered and thoughtful recollection, White offers a contemporaneous view of Emin’s art within the prevailing trends and influences of the time, tracing her creative journeys through the cultural landscapes of the Medway towns to London in the mid-1980s. A distinguished print-maker, one of Emin’s teachers and an early mentor, White encouraged her with invitations to work at the Curwen Studio, introducing her to leading artists working there. White discusses underexplored aspects of Emin’s oeuvre, dwelling on her affinity with expressionist practice and her attentive interests in art’s histories as well as contemporary practice. He situates this new trajectory of Emin’s early years within reflections on the changes to art education, the art world and the art market in Britain in the later twentieth century.61 Many of Tracey Emin’s published writings and interviews are characterized by a tension between the artist’s expressed longing for and simultaneous rejection of motherhood. While Emin often makes use of gestational imagery in her recent drawing practice, depicting herself in an imaginary state of pregnancy in works such as Insane Reflection (2006), she also acknowledges that motherhood is likely to remain, for her, a fantasy rather than a reality (as e.g. in the appliquéd blanket I do not expect, 2002). Joanne Heath examines Emin’s negotiation of ageing, and with it childlessness, in her artistic practice, as well as the ways in which critics attempt – on the whole unsuccessfully – to accommodate the phenomenon of an ageing woman whose art practice continues to

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deal with issues of female corporeality and sexuality. While Emin came to fame as the maddest and the baddest of the yBas, critics now seem acutely aware of the fact that she is no longer young, but rather decidedly ‘middle-aged’. In contrast to the critical tendency to read Emin’s most recent work as a shift away from the anger of her earlier and more visceral pieces into a gentler (and more aesthetically pleasurable) phase of work, Heath understands Emin’s artistic project as a continuously unfolding exploration of those aspects of women’s bodily experience (including termination, menopause and childlessness) that are rendered taboo by a culture that persists in figuring femininity through the tropes of youth and motherhood. Alev Adil evaluates the many ways in which Tracey Emin has explored and referred to her Turkish Cypriot heritage in her work. Those familiar with Emin’s art will know her troubled and colourful life story because her art seems viscerally autobiographical, insistently confessional. The offspring of an affair between a married Turkish Cypriot man and a young English woman, Tracey and her twin brother Paul grew up in Margate, initially in rather gothic grandeur then, following her father’s bankruptcy, in increasing poverty. Emin’s art fictionalizes as much as it reveals, employing intimacy, hyperbole and abjection in her installations and films, weaving a palimpsest of dream, fantasy, alienation and innocence in her writing. This chapter explores how Emin’s understanding of and approach to her Turkish Cypriot identity can be read as an extension of her troubled but tender relationship with her father. Much of her work can be seen as an attempt to map the elusive fatherland, to chart an incomprehensible territory. Adil also explores the unspoken political upheavals that mark her personal history – Tracey was born a few months before war broke out in Cyprus – and considers wider questions around diasporic identities, and Turkish Cypriot diasporic identity in England in particular, raised by her work. In the closing chapter, Gill Perry explores Emin’s use of the theme of the beach hut in relation to fantasies of ‘home’, the seaside, ‘hut myths’, diasporic family histories and representations of Emin as feminine ‘celebrity’. With close reference to Knowing my enemy (2002) and The last thing I said to you is don’t leave me here (1999), Perry investigates the iconography of the beach hut or cabin by Emin and others as a fluid signifier of memories, identity and transgressive sculptural ambitions. The appropriation of the beach or fishing hut as a ‘pure’ or mythical form of domestic shelter is reworked by Emin to become part of the feigned or ‘public intimacy’ of Emin the celebrity artist. A major focus is the relationship between the many sculptural, gendered and cultural resonances of these rickety wooden structures, positioned on the fluid, liminal spaces of the beach, and the seductive autobiographical or confessional readings that are offered to us by the artist. Perry argues that these huts not only follow a rich architectural and cultural tradition of ‘hut myths’ but can also be seen as feminized re-workings of that tradition, transplanted onto the fluid margins of the beach – and the sea.

Notes 1

Our title is taken from the title to Emin’s exhibition of 2014 at White Cube, Bermondsey, London. The gallery states: ‘The title “The Last Great Adventure Is You”,

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3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12

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which was transcribed in neon within the exhibition, was originally intended by Emin as a reference to the “other person”; however, over the two year period since she began creating this body of work, she came to realise that the implication was once again coming back to the self.’ https://whitecube.com/exhibitions/exhibition/tracey_emin_ bermondsey_2014. This exhibition is discussed in Joanne Heath’s chapter. Carl Freedman and Honey Luard, ‘Break through to the other side: interview with Carl Freedman’, Tracey Emin: Works, 1963–2006 (New York, 2006), p. 256. Tracey Emin: Works, 1963–2006 (New York, 2009), p. 256. Cliff Lauson, ‘Love is what you want’ in Ralph Rugoff and Cliff Lauson (eds), Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want (London, 2011), p. 13. Rugoff and Lauson (eds), Tracey Emin, p. 247. Ali Smith, ‘Emin’s emendations’ in Rugoff and Lauson (eds), Tracey Emin, pp. 21–30. Charlotte Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art (London, 2014, third edition), pp. 136–65. ‘Saturday Profile: Tracey Emin Art’s Ache’, The Scotsman, 23 October 1999, p. 14. Tim Adams, ‘The tent is empty’, New Statesman, 16 July 2009, https://www.newstatesman. com/arts-and-culture/2009/07/tracey-emin-art-melodramatic (accessed 14 June 2019). Jane Beckett, ‘History (maybe)’ in History: The MAG Collection: Image-based Art in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century (Kingston upon Hull, 1997), pp. 136–9. Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (Manchester, 1994). Nicholas Green, ‘Studies in self-expression: art history and the politics of individualism’, Art History, 10/4 (1987), pp. 528, 529. Lisa G. Corrin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2000). Nicholas Penny, ‘On holiday with Leonardo’, reviewing Peter Vergo, The New Museology (London, 1989) in London Review of Books,11/24 (21 December 1989), pp. 11–13. Nicholas Bourriaud characterized the art of the 1990s in terms of Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, 2002). Jennifer Doyle, ‘Lost and found’ in Rugoff and Lauson (eds), Tracey Emin, pp. 33–40. Emin’s account of monoprinting is given in Neal Brown, Tracey Emin (London, 2008). See also John White in this volume. Grayson Perry, Cornelia Parker, Chris Ofili, Laure Prouvost and William Kentridge among others have created works realized in tapestry, as did their modernist predecessors. For Glenn Adamson, ‘tapestry, along with large scale marble and metal sculpture, is the most long established type of high-end outsourced production’ and the outcome of ‘the linked phenomena of an increase in competitive production values on the one hand, and a concomitant rise in capital investment in art production’. It is ‘a material reflection of the escalating financial value of contemporary art and its capture by the 1% (not just buyers but also galleries, which have become ever more hierarchical)’, email to Deborah Cherry, 29 May 2017, with many thanks to Glenn Adamson. Features abound on this luxury object and its acquisition, such as Scott Reyburn, ‘Renaissance tapestries are out. But today’s are having a renaissance’, New York Times, 20 April 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/arts/art-collecting-tapestries.html (accessed 14 June 2019). Tapestries shown at Art Brussels 2019 received glowing reviews. Peter Osborne, ‘Art beyond aesthetics: philosophical criticism, art history and contemporary art’, Art History, 27/4, pp. 651–70. A Fortnight of Tears was enthusiastically received by the critics, most of whom, however, remained confined within the well-rehearsed assumptions that this book seeks to parse and problematize. For instance, Hettie Judah notes Emin’s progressive

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17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

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Art into Life mastery of paint while at the same time affirming the anticipated confessionalism of the practice ‘Tracey Emin review – brutal portraits of female pain’, Guardian, 5 February 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/05/tracey-emina-fortnight-of-tears-review-london-white-cube-bermondsey (accessed 2 July 2019). Emin’s cover for Harper’s Bazaar, March 2016, featuring her neon You loved me like a distant star with handwritten inscription, ‘Thank You Mr Bowie, Tracey Emin 2013’, coincided with David Bowie Is, Victoria and Albert Museum London. See also Chris Townsend, Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion (London, 2002). http://www.richardfeildenfoundation.org.uk/Projects?project=Forest_High. Tracey Emin, ‘In a place where nobody knows who I am, or what I do, stands my library’, Independent, 25 January 2008. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/ tracey-emin-my-life-in-a-column-773709.html. The Vuitton exhibition included a limited edition scarf and new suite of etchings in a leather case. Ella Alexander, ‘Emin at Vuitton’, Vogue, 12 May 2011, https://www.vogue.co.uk/gallery/tracey-eminexhibition-at-louis-vuitton (accessed 14 June 2019). Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘Tracey Emin’s Bed is sold . . .’, Guardian, 1 July 2014. https://www.christies.com/Features/Tracey_Emin_Exorcism-5639-1.aspx. Chin-Tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London, 2002) is a major work on this area. For example, Bad Girls curated by Marcia Tucker, New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1994. See also Rosemary Betterton, ‘Undutiful daughters: avant-gardism and gendered consumption in recent British art’, Visual Culture in Britain, 1/1 (2000), pp. 13–30. Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art (London, 2006). Aidan While, ‘Locating art worlds: London and the making of Young British Art’, Area, 35/3 (2003), pp. 251–63. Michael Archer, Art Since 1960 (London, 2002). Stallabrass, High Art Lite, p. 3. Colin Gleadell, ‘The Old Faithfuls’, Daily Telegraph, 28 March 2003, https://www. telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3591995/The-old-faithfuls.html (accessed 14 June 2019). Emin recalls she smashed up all her paintings on wood, and ‘destroyed all of the paintings I made at the RCA by throwing them into a skip’, https://www.rca.ac.uk/ studying-at-the-rca/the-rca-experience/student-voices/rca-luminaries/tracey-emin/ https://whitecube.com/exhibitions/exhibition/tracey_emin_duke_street_1993/ (accessed 14 June 2019). Quoted in Janet McKenzie, ‘Tracey Emin: Twenty Years’, Studio International, [2008], http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/tracey-emin-20-years, published 15 January 2014. This tag often returns as in Ailidh Maclean, ‘A guide to Tracey Emin, Britain’s art enfant terrible’, Dazed Digital, 16 September 2016, http://www.dazeddigital.com/ artsandculture/article/32721/1/a-guide-to-tracey-emin-britain-s-art-enfant-terrible. Gregor Muir, Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art (London, 2009); the cover under discussion here is of the paperback edition of 2010. Six endorsements are printed on the cover with a further five on the first page of the book, including a second endorsement from Emin: ‘It’s a brilliant journey into the political landscape of the time and I passionately enjoyed not only the descriptions of my fellow artists’ work but also many of the hilarious anecdotes.’ The cover photograph of Muir’s book is attributed to Shand Kydd but not dated, and the cover design to www.headdesign.co.uk. An unedited print of the photograph can

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32 33 34 35 36

37

38

39 40

41 42 43 44

45 46

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be found in the announcement of a talk by Gregor Muir at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, https://artmuseum.pl/en/wydarzenia/gregor-muir (accessed 13 February 2018), which dates it in 1999. Emin and Muir were born in 1963 and 1965 respectively. Muir was director of the London branch of Hauser and Wirth at the time of his book’s original publication (2009). Since then he has served as executive director of the ICA, London (2011–16) and was appointed Director of Collection, International Art, at Tate, 2016. Waldemar Januszczak, ‘A talent to abuse’, The Sunday Times Culture Magazine, 18 January 2009, pp. 39–40. Kobena Mercer, ‘Ethnicity and internationality, new British art and diaspora-based Blackness’, Third Text, no. 49 (Winter 1999–2000), pp. 51–62. Betterton, ‘Undutiful daughters’, pp. 13–30. Patrick Elliott, Tracey Emin: Twenty Years (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2008), p. 32. For example, ‘Artist Tracey Emin marries a rock . . .’, Daily Mirror, 23 March 2016, https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/artist-tracey-emin-marriesrock-7612781 and ‘Tracey Emin to exit London after rejection of her Chipperfielddesigned extension’, Dezeen, 19 December 2016, https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/19/ tracey-emin-exit-london-studio-extension-plans-david-chipperfield-architectsrejected/ (accessed 14 April 2018). Adam Sherwin, ‘This isn’t just any grumpy picture . . . Tracey Emin features in new M&S advert advertising campaign’, The Independent, 18 August 2013, http://www. independent.co.uk/news/media/advertising/this-isn-t-just-any-grumpy-picturetracey-emin-features-in-new-ms-advert-advertising-campaign-8773472.html (accessed 13 March 2018). Grayson Perry, Playing to the Gallery: The Reith Lectures 2013, episode 3 of 4, ‘Nice Rebellion, Welcome In!’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03f9bg7 (accessed 12 March 2018). http://emininternational.myshopify.com/ (accessed 13 March 2018). Jonathan Jones, ‘My three days at Tracey Emin’s mountain hideaway on the Cote d’Azur’, Guardian, 4 October 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/ oct/04/my-three-days-at-tracey-emin-mountain-hideaway-on-the-cote-dazur (accessed 13 March 2018). Waldemar Januszczak, ‘ “Going home is one of the most humble things you can do”: Tracey Emin (interview)’, The Sunday Times, 11 March 2018, pp. 8–11. https://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/tracey-emin-i-never-stoppedloving-you (accessed 13 March 2018). https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/terrace-wires-tracey-emin (accessed 13 March 2018). Evening Standard, 10 April 2018, https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/arts/ tracey-emin-neon-sculpture-i-want-my-time-with-you-unveiled-at-st-pancrasinternational-station-a3809911.html Who Do You Think You Are? Tracey Emin, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ p00kwl72 (accessed 13 March 2018). Tracey Emin, artist’s profile, https://whitecube.com/artists/artist/tracey_emin (accessed 14 June 2019). Neal Brown, Tracey Emin; Carl Freedman and Honey Luard, Tracey Emin; Jonathan Jones, Tracey Emin, 2006–16 (New York, 2017) as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London, 2002), 2nd edition, pp. xi, 6.

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48 Kieran Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (London, 2009), pp. 121, 125. 49 Outi Remes, ‘Replaying the old stereotypes into an artistic role: the case of Tracey Emin’, Women’s History Review, 18/4 (2009), p. 567. 50 Dennis Dutton summarizing Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca, 1995). Dennis Dutton, ‘Authenticity in Art’, in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (New York, 2003). The ‘age of authenticity’ is discussed in Somogy Varga and Charles Guignon, ‘Authenticity’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017). https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/authenticity (accessed 14 June 2019). 51 Rosemary Betterton, ‘Why is my art not as good as me?’, in Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin (London, 2002), p. 30. 52 Laura Marcus, ‘Enough about you, let’s talk about me: recent autobiographical writing’, New Formations, no. 1 (Spring 1987), p. 93. 53 Laura Marcus, ‘The face of autobiography’ in Julia Swindells (ed.), The Uses of Autobiography (London, 1995), p. 13. 54 For example, Christine Fanthome, ‘The influence and treatment of autobiography in confessional art: observations on Tracey Emin’s feature film Top Spot’, Biography, 29/1 (2006), pp. 30–42. Christine Fanthome, ‘Articulating authenticity through artifice: the contemporary relevance of Tracey Emin’s confessional art’, Social Semiotics, 18/2 (2008), pp. 223–236. Rachel Robson, ‘For real: Tracy Emin and the problem of authenticity’, Graduate Journal of Social Science, 9/3 (2012), pp. 65–71. Laura Lake Smith, ‘Telling stories: performing authenticity in the confessional art of Tracey Emin’, Rethinking History, 21/2 (2017), pp. 296–309. 55 Betterton, ‘Why is my art’, p. 33. 56 Clare Johnson, ‘Emin is screaming: empathy as affirmative engagement in Tracey Emin’s Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1998)’, Parallax, 16/3 (2010), pp. 97, 103. 57 Januszczak, ‘ “Going home . . .” ’ p. 10. 58 Betterton, ‘Why is my art’, p. 27. 59 Zadie Smith, ‘The I who is not me’, in Feel Free (London, 2018), p. 337. She writes ‘I want to try to find a place to reconcile the “I-who-is-not-me” of the writer with the “I-who-I-presume-is-you” that the reader feels they can see.’ Thanks to Jane Beckett for this reference. 60 Ulrich Lehmann, ‘The trademark Tracey Emin,’ in Merck and Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, pp. 60–78. 61 Emin wrote of her Royal College years: ‘Alan Miller was a true ally. He showed me how to be a painter’, Independent, 22 January 2009.

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 workingclass 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 17

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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

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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

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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 returns to this decisive turning point again in a television interview in 2001. She says how, after having an abortion, the idea of painting was repulsive, the idea of creativity made no sense. I had suddenly found out where the essence of creativity can be, which is so profoundly important. It is not about slapping a bit of oil paint on canvas and making a picture, that is not art . . . It is something to do with the essence and integrity with which people do things . . . I realised I was better than anything I had made.11

I mentioned at the outset parallels between Emin’s detailing of lived experience and Richard Billingham’s representations of his working-class family’s poverty and violence. Both artists trade upon states of personal degradation and suffering. Both escape their ‘low’ origins by making art from them, an art appearing exotic through its class and cultural difference within the privileged spaces of the art world. Emin’s art also entailed invitations to dwell in the transgressive but guilt-ridden act of looking across classes which characterizes so much documentary practice. Hers is an art whose popularity, like that of Billingham’s family pictures, relies a lot on the fact it allows viewers the voyeuristic pleasures of ‘slumming it’. Turning aspects of her dramatic life into art signals a hyperbolic version of lived reality, as sensational and exciting as her abject bed or her infamous tent of disclosure, sewn with the 102 names of Everyone I have ever slept with 1963–1995 (1995), (sexually or platonically). Emin’s work is typical of young British artists. It is an accessible, straightforward, even media-friendly art that marks a weakening of the boundaries between specialist forms of attention – usually reserved for high and elite culture – and dominant forms of visual communication, the mass media, where art’s interests and pleasures are judged by non-specialist audiences and are not the exercise of acquired taste. Using her self as subject matter, Emin’s art invites accusations of being nothing more than self-promotion, vacuous PR. Its power and force, however, rests in its frankness and openness. Tapping into both the art world’s and media’s fascination for states of degradation and debasement, her painful subjective art nevertheless begins to stake out a space and voice from which women may speak and act as subjects. In dredging up and engaging with repressed feelings, Emin’s art bears certain similarities with the photo-therapeutic work of Jo Spence, both ‘getting under the skin of the normative bourgeois conscience that wants to repress the disturbing and the dirty’.12 The celebrity status and the high fashion dresses might be far from a practitioner and educator such as Spence, but like her, Emin and her art signal a ‘need to act, rather than be acted upon’.13 Emin’s resurrection of the idea of an authentic troubled selfhood as bearer of meaning is repeatedly identified and championed as non-ironic. This is in part the appeal of her work. Working within an essentially expressionist paradigm, what comes across is a strong sense of an artist whose position and identity is hard won, overcoming

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the barriers created by her social background. As she says in How it feels, all her life she has ‘been fighting against what should have been’. The overriding sense is of an embattled subjectivity, which, despite the hype and inflation, manages to convey a strong sense of a particular lived history. But there is nevertheless a danger that with so many repetitions she exhausts this history. Like Billingham’s, Emin’s work is trapped by its over-attachment to a certain content and a certain state of misery and pain. Her stated desire to move away from ‘the confessional thing’ acknowledges this.14 Only with her art and life so enmeshed, it would be hard to escape.

Jagged Realism, Excess and Loss in the Art of Tracey Emin For three successive days, force yourself to write, without denaturalizing or hypocrisy, everything that crosses your mind. Write what you think of yourself, your wives, Goethe, the Turkish war, the Last Judgment, your superiors, and you will be stupefied to see how many new thoughts have poured forth. That is what constitutes the art of becoming an original writer in three days.

In an interview in 2013, the contemporary French writer, Emmanuel Carrère spoke of the ‘excellent advice’ contained in the above statement by the German Romantic writer Ludwig Börne.15 When ‘not working on anything’, Carrère explained: I’ll take a notebook, and for a few hours a day I’ll just write whatever comes, about my life, my wife, the elections, trying not to censor myself. . . . Without being afraid of what is shameful or what you consider uninteresting, not worthy of being written. . . . Everything you think is worth writing. Not necessarily worth keeping, but worth writing. And fundamentally, that’s what a large part of literature attempts to do – reproduce the flow of thought.16

Tracey Emin is an artist who has certainly tried not to censor herself, or been afraid of what is shameful or what might be considered uninteresting. And Emin’s art has always had a close relationship to writing: borne out by the words scrawled across so many of her monoprints or sewn into her blankets, the multi-vocal messages lit up in her neons, the intimate letters and diaries she has framed and exhibited, and the frank accounts of her life and her family made in her videos. She has also written books, Exploration of the soul (self-published, 1994) and Strangeland (London: Sceptre, 2005). Countering assumptions of culture being difficult and demanding, her work has sold itself on its immediacy of impact, its sensation, its authenticity and, most of all, its sincerity. Stripping back the polite bourgeois veneer that tends to screen over the messy aspects of human lives, her art has entailed a succession of uninhibited disclosures about her life. Such work has tended to be identified and consumed as a kind of outsiderism. It has created and fed media attention, giving a popular revision of a romantic tradition of the artist as an expressive and tortured individual. Emin is an artist who clearly sees herself in an expressionist tradition: Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele are often cited as points of reference. From the outset, her

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work was framed in terms of a reaction to the dominance of theory and irony that had been seen to characterize the art practices that had become popular and dominant in the UK in the 1990s: the press release for her first retrospective at London’s White Cube in 1993 includes the credo: ‘While most artists these days wear their Derrida in their jacket pockets, I wear my art on my sleeve.’17 Neal Brown’s florid essay for the catalogue accompanying her South London Gallery show (1997) stresses how her art is ‘blessedly free from the leprosies and gonorrhoeas of irony, parody and the other contemporary etceteras.’18 A rough, damaged and flawed aesthetic seems an appropriate way to communicate her painful experiences. Language and form seem to go awry, are broken, ‘jagged’, in accordance with what is often described and pictured.19 Her monoprint ‘stream of consciousness’ (Emin’s words) drawings exemplify this. Their production is quick, involving inking up a sheet of glass, placing a sheet of paper on top and drawing through the back. The one-off prints can only be seen when the paper is lifted off the glass. The drawings are primarily linear and any words that are written have to be written backwards. The print also picks up the movements and pressure of her hand on the surface of the paper, smudges in the printing process that add to their grubby rough aesthetic. There is a sense of wounding, and injury, with monoprint drawings alluding to her sexual abuse as a child and her botched abortion in 1991. In an interview in 1998 she spoke of having trouble with her drawings in the USA because people thought they were paedophile drawings. But as she says, the drawings are of me, and it’s me coming to terms with those things in my life, not me trying to turn on some pervert to wank off over. The fact that I want people to look at the drawings is that I want people to confront what I’ve had to confront – what other people have.20

In Why I never became a dancer, Emin’s voice-over narration, in which she frankly tells us about her sexual experiences with older men, having left school at 13, accompanies over-exposed film footage of the seaside resort of Margate, keyed into the nostalgic sentimental look of home movies. Sex at the time for her was an ‘adventure’, ‘some wild escape from all the shit that surrounded me’. The video recounts how she turned from sex to dancing as an escape. As much as sex gave her moments of empowerment and pleasure, it also brought humiliation, culminating in her entry to the local disco championships and stopped from winning by being driven off the dance floor by shouts of ‘slag, slag, slag’ by a gang of boys, most of whom she had had sex with. Held at the venue Top Spot, near where she was raped at 13, her dancing was as Yxta Maya Murray has put it, an attempt to ‘reconquer the site of her abuse’ and ‘on her own terms’.21 While this effort fails, the film nevertheless ends on a triumphant note with Emin saying how this event made her determined to leave Margate, how she was better than all those boys. Dancing to Sylvester’s You make me feel (mighty real) (1978) and addressing the camera, she names and shames those who had wronged her: ‘Shane, Eddy, Tony, Doug, Richard. This one’s for you.’ The context in the video as she dances to camera affirmatively and joyously is no longer Margate. It suggests, perhaps, the clean white space of a studio. It is a dance of defiance, resilience and freedom, a freedom

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signalled by the metaphor of the little bird that flies away at the end of the film. (Birds are a recurring symbolic element in her work; she made many monoprint drawings of them, a foil to the abrasive and wounding subject matter of so many of her drawings.) But at the same time, Emin has merely exchanged one competition for another and now has to dance to the call of men such as Jay Jopling who occupy positions of power in the art world. This is something she has been very successful at, but paradoxically only by finding aesthetic forms for the very experiences that drove her away from Margate. In Tracey Emin C.V. Cunt Vernacular with its obscene variant on the Latin acronym and a word that she has reclaimed in a positive assertion of her sex and sexuality throughout her art, she recounts events in her life, including her rape ‘down an alley’ at 13, shortly before the celebrations of New Year 1977. The voice-over chronology of her life accompanies handheld shots of her everyday as the camera moves around her messy flat and gives us an accumulation of evidence of how she lived at that time, a documentary visual mode that is there to give authority to what is divulged. This is, then, a double self-exposure: we view her private space as she tells us intimate details about her life. Emin only makes one appearance in this video at its close; curled up naked in a foetal-like form before her mother; it is a self-depiction that is redolent of vulnerability and the desire for protection from further harm. Emin gave more detail about her abuse and rape in Strangeland. Here she names her rapist as Steve Worrel, and she describes the fear and sexual abuse she endured as a child from her mother’s lover, named as Chris. At one point the book incorporates a transcript of her handwritten declaration of sworn revenge, signed at the bottom, which, as Murray has noted, renders ‘the document similar to evidence used in legal proceedings’:22 I’m Going to Get You, YOU CUNT YOU FUCKING BASTARD. And when I do – The Whole world will know That you destroyed Part of my childhood. Tracey Emin.23

One important form for Emin’s writing is the neon sign. It introduces a particular aesthetic. She has commented: ‘I like neon because it’s moving constantly and like drawing. The chemicals going through the neon really turn me on. It’s sexy.’24 With her pink, blue and orange neon Fuck off and die you slag (2002) it seems to be the aggressive language of her abusers and tormentors at Margate that is lit up. That her neons emulate her handwriting gives them expressive force; they are like utterances. And neon is a light that is perfect in evoking the pleasures, illicit and licit, appropriate to the seaside front, its fairgrounds and sex shops. (Emin describes a brief one-day stint at working in a sex shop in Strangeland.) The messages conveyed by the neons are varied – ranging from the assaultive to such sugar-sweet expressions in candy-coloured neon as You

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forgot to kiss my soul (2001). The use of white neon introduces further variations, such as the unforgettable first-person shockingly frank admission about the thrill of sexual arousal on being afraid, charged of course by our knowledge of her experience of abuse: My cunt is wet with fear (1998). Like her neons, Emin’s appliquéd blankets can also combine sumptuous form with violent language. These are her most embellished and decorative artworks and contrast with the monoprints that are marked by a sparseness, since the monoprint process allows only lines to be printed. Made from the clothes of friends, the fabric of a family sofa or a comfort blanket, the material she uses is often personalized and suits the intimacies, feelings and situations they draw upon and communicate. The use of crafted blankets involves not a mainstream fine art medium, but brings with it associations of the domestic and everyday. Unlike the neon signs, they are suggestive of the interior rather than exterior public world, a quality exemplified in the (now destroyed) appliquéd tent and mattress, Everyone I have ever slept with 1963–1995. The production of her textile works involves a love and care expended over time and an emotional value associated with the handmade gift. Temporally, they are distinct from her monoprints, which convey a sense of immediate production, something hastily put down. My Major Retrospective 1963–1993, which included framed intimate personal memorabilia, including diaries, letters, souvenirs and fragments connected with both herself and her family, can be seen as a rehearsal for the gesture of the public gallery display of the artist’s double bed, My Bed. This work set up an abject memorial to a personal agony. Emin aptly once referred to it as a ‘crime scene’. It is familiar now, how the extraordinary excitement in the media over this work when exhibited at Tate Britain in 1999, when she was short-listed for the Turner Prize, helped make her a celebrity. It reiterated the bad girl image of Emin that had already begun to be established with press coverage given to Everyone I have ever slept with 1963–1995 when shown at Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection (Royal Academy of Arts London, 1997) and her drunken appearance during a live arts television programme about painting on British TV the following year. The media frenzy over Emin’s My Bed has its precedent in the controversy over the discovery of the Tate’s purchase in 1976 of Carl Andre’s minimalist sculpture Equivalent VIII (1966) made up of 120 firebricks. Then it was primarily because of an inability to accept as sculpture, as art, the use of such common objects as bricks. While there is the same anxiety over a lack of craft and fear of fraudulence in relationship to My Bed, what is different in the later 1990s is how the work was already personalized and viewed in relation to the wild life of the artist. The controversy around the acquisition of Andre’s Equivalent VIII was very much about value and labour at a time of economic crisis in the UK, the way state-sanctioned money was seen to be being spent irresponsibly. The attacks by the press were not personally directed at the artist; in fact, Andre found some cartoons about his art so amusing he turned them into postcards. Andre’s work was part of the formal late-modernist concerns of minimalist art. The British press brought it back into the vernacular with a series of photographs of bricklayers shown making their own works of art. In appearing to preserve and fix a slice of her turbulent life and as evidence of selfneglect and damage, the realist qualities of Emin’s My Bed fuelled the fire of controversy.

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Combined with the character she presented to the media, My Bed tapped into anxieties and hypocrisies very much to do with British identity, polarized between, on one hand, a behaviour of uptight, prudish restraint and inhibition, and on the other, the notorious carnivalesque excesses that have come to typify Britain’s drunken nightlife. The work also chimed with a popular cultural climate marked by prurience, gossip and a fascination with the salacious. Beds have been in galleries before. In his 1964 installation, Room 1, Lucas Samaras moved his New Jersey studio, including his bed, into the Green Gallery in New York City. Describing the distinction in class terms, Brian O’Doherty said how Samaras was exhibiting a ‘life style – frugal, messy, indifferent to the gallery person’s etiquette of taste.’25 It was ‘a dandy’s gesture’, an act of self-aggrandizement, a clever piece of selfpromotion and myth-making that also accorded with a romantic fascination with art’s somewhat mysterious creative site of production.26 Valued at $17,000 (the equivalent of about $130,000 today), in 1964, Samaras’ room did not sell. Emin’s My Bed sold to Charles Saatchi for £150,000 in 2000, the year after it was included in Emin’s submission for the Turner Prize at Tate Britain. It returned there in 2015, lent by a private collector who had bought it for £2.54 million in 2014. My Bed, first exhibited in Japan in 1998 and then New York, was never identical from one installation to the next. For the Tate exhibition, Emin removed the clunky and theatrical addition of a hangman’s noose. She has also said how she tidied it up; it was much messier in reality. Despite this, My Bed is best seen in the ready-made tradition, with its effect and impact very much to do with the way it fixes and eternalizes a moment. It is ‘embalmed in the paralysed time of the white cube’, to quote O’Doherty’s description of another bed displayed as art: Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955, MOMA, New York), stained and marked by gestural paint marks and drawings, in a hangover from Abstract Expressionism.27 O’Doherty’s description suggests an analogy with photography and how we might begin to see My Bed as having a photographic effect. The analogy is further borne out by the way in which a tearful Emin described her relationship to the work when installed at Tate Britain in 2015, finding it sad and depressing, ‘a time capsule of my past’.28 Photography’s painful power is its fixing of a past that we can never have back and Emin’s emotive response to My Bed is to do with how the work extends the photograph’s stillness and temporal fixing to physical things. And yet, as much as the objects are preserved, they will inevitably change over time; the newspaper has yellowed and the condoms rotted away. My Bed was followed by a number of large installation sculptures that also served as powerful corollaries for emotional states. But these later sculptures were constructed by hand and moved away from the evidential and forensic form of My Bed. Her rickety sculptural installation from reclaimed wood of a pier-like structure with a hut at the end, Knowing my enemy (2002) is captioned, or rather cued, by the exhibition of a framed personal and intimate faxed letter from her father, which gives his life story, speaks about his demons, sex, gambling and drink, and advocates temperance and moderation on the part of his daughter. The hut draws upon a recurrent motif in her sculpture, going back to Everyone I have ever slept with 1963–1995. The shelter motif expresses a desire for a sanctuary from the emotional storms that can also be seen to include My Bed, which had been her refuge during a bout of depression, and the

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blankets which, despite some of the messages sewn upon them, in the main carry associations of warmth, comfort and protection. Knowing my enemy has something of the tawdry glamour of the seaside resort and thus a connection with the romanticism of escape, of being somewhere else – an idea integral to her film Why I never became a dancer. At the same time it is a precarious structure and becomes a metaphor for the state of teetering on the brink. Knowing my enemy is not just about her father. In some ways it can be seen to exemplify Emin’s own emotionally turbulent life and her desire for sanctuary and respite. While photography has not been an important medium for Emin, her photographic work, I’ve got it all (2000), offered both a memorable comment on her own predicament as a successful artist and a response to the pervasive currency of documentary photography at that time. Emin spoofs the intimate realist look popular in fashion photography. The digital colour print enlargement from a scanned Polaroid snapshot depicts the artist, dressed in Vivienne Westwood and wearing gold jewellery, sitting on a bare red floor, looking down at a pool of international coins and banknotes spilling out between her splayed legs, and attempting to gather them up or stop them flowing out of her crotch with her hands. The photographic form is amateur and low fi, yet what is shown is deliberately vulgar, crude and over-the-top. There is a suggestion of the fruit machine jackpot or the tabloid pictures of those who have won big money prizes on the lottery. The point of this work is that such greed and excess in this display of self comes at a cost. Money is not everything. The brash display is a cover up for loss: ‘That work was about fecundity and saying that even if I seemed to have it all, I didn’t actually have anything.’29 The iconography is redolent of sexual display and the link between her sex and money a blunt acknowledgement of the wealth she has got through making sex the subject of much of her art. There is also the sense of excess, of over-production and waste. And Emin’s pose links with a recurring motif in her drawings of female figures with splayed legs – an openness that is not just sexual but is also a way of visualizing the pain of loss. Coins were also used in Something’s wrong (2002), an embroidered brown blanket, suggestive of hospital bedding, in which the sewn outline of a female figure with legs open and head thrown back, bled out a pool of money. I’ve got it all makes evident Emin’s felt sense of entrapment, the vulgar but sad reality of the commodification of her sexuality and the ultimate hollowness behind the picture’s staged greedy wallowing in filthy lucre. Alongside the more familiar jagged aesthetic, an elegiac aesthetic of loss and absence, which she talks about in terms of her loss of fecundity and her childlessness, became increasingly evident in her work. Her reprisal of My Bed in Dead Sea (2012), for example, presents the ready-made of an expensive but stained mattress, empty but for the bronze cast of a solitary leafless branch resting upon it. My Bed fixed that decisive moment that Emin has frequently described in interviews, of looking back at the messy sanctuary of the bed after days of depression, a memorial to a state of despair. With Dead Sea, the work functions not so much as a realist form or evidential trace of an experience, but as a poetic response to Emin’s experience of physical ageing, alone and childless. In The vanishing lake (2011), a discarded Union Jack lies at the base of an old-fashioned empty rusty steel bath. It offers a shift from the note of the photograph from 2011 that adorned the cover of the catalogue for her major London retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London that

Rethinking Tracey Emin

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year: showing a naked Emin, shoulders draped in the Union Jack as she runs down cobbled streets, this image played with the way in which class, gender and sexuality have made her into a British media icon. In contrast, The vanishing lake speaks of depletion and physical loss, the sense that the partying and flag-waving are over. With candour, fearlessness and humanity, Emin has used the arena of art to relentlessly communicate her traumatic life experiences and indict those who had wronged her. The injustice of her unreported rape as a child, as Murray has argued, can be seen as a major motivating force behind her ‘multi-voiced’ art.30 But much as her jagged realism cuts through the pretences, affectations and posturing of the art world, the publicity and attention given to herself because of her art has come at a cost. The self-degrading scenario that Emin plays out to camera in I’ve got it all, in which she can be seen either scooping up or trying to stop the flow of money from between her legs, acknowledges the vulgar excesses of an art world that has made her centre stage. In enacting the absurdity of her position as a wealthy artist she has shed the innocence of her dance of freedom at the end of her early video Why I never became a dancer. In I’ve got it all, the conspicuous and brazen display to camera is shown to be unavoidably caught up in the relentless flow of capital and, as Emin has acknowledged, figured around a lack that money can never fill.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

As mentioned in the Introduction, a version of this section was first published in French and English in Parachute, 105 (2002), pp. 21–37. The author added the second part for this collection of essays. Emin quoted in Stuart Morgan, ‘The story of I’, Frieze, 34 (1997), p. 60. Emin quoted in Rose Aidan, ‘The business of being Tracey’, Independent on Sunday, 22 April 2001, p. 4. See Richard Billingham, Ray’s a Laugh (Zurich, 1999) and Boris Mikhailov, Case History (Zurich, 1999). Emin quoted in Lynn Barber, ‘Show and tell’, Observer Magazine, 22 April 2001, p. 12. Emin quoted in Justine Picardie, ‘Indecent exposure’, Vogue, April 2001, p. 257. Brookside was a television series centred on the residents of a suburban street in Liverpool (1982–2003). Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite (London, 1999), p. 39. Emin quoted in Morgan, p. 58. Emin interviewed on British television, The South Bank Show, 2001. Emin in an interview with Andrew Billen, Evening Standard, 19 July 2000, p. 30. Emin interviewed on The South Bank Show, 2001. Jessica Evans, ‘An affront to taste? The disturbances of Jo Spence’ in Jessica Evans (ed.), The Camerawork Essays (London, 1997), p. 247. Jo Spence, Cultural Sniping (London, 1995), p. 165. Emin interviewed on The South Bank Show, 2001. ‘Emmanuel Carrère, the art of nonfiction no. 5’, interviewed by Susannah Hunnewell, Paris Review, 206 (Fall 2013). Available at: http://www.theparisreview.org/ interviews/6254/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-5-emmanuel-carrere (accessed 29 June 2017).

28 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Art into Life Ibid. White Cube, Tracey Emin, My Major Retrospective, press release, 1993. Neal Brown, Tracey Emin (London, 1998), p. 6. Tracey Emin’s Strangeland (London, 2005) is subtitled ‘Jagged Recollections from a Beautiful Mind.’ Yxta Maya Murray makes the connection with this statement and her work as a whole in ‘Rape trauma, the state and the art of Tracey Emin’, California Law Review, 100/6 (2012), p. 1667. Emin in Neal Brown, Tracey Emin (London, 2006), p. 29. Murray, ‘Rape trauma’, p. 1684. Murray, ‘Rape trauma’, p. 1668. Tracey Emin, Strangeland, p. 16. Patrick Eliott (ed.), Tracey Emin: 20 Years (Edinburgh, 2008), p. 29. Brian O’Doherty, Studio and Cube: On the Relationship Between where Art is Made and where Art is Displayed (New York, 2007), p. 4. O’Doherty, Studio and Cube, p. 5. O’Doherty, Studio and Cube, p. 17. See: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tracey-emins-my-bed (accessed 10 January 2014). Interview in Ralph Rugoff, Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want (London, 2011), p. 167. Murray, ‘Rape trauma’, p. 1680.

2

‘It was just me, Tracey’: Strategies of Self-presentation in the Art of Tracey Emin Camilla Jalving

‘While most artists these days wear their Derrida in their jacket pockets, I wear my art on my sleeve’. In this way, in 1993, Tracey Emin expresses her autobiographical point of departure in the press release announcing her first solo exhibition, My Major Retrospective at the White Cube gallery.1 However casual it may appear, this remark is typical of Emin’s anti-theoretical standpoint that has been refined and carefully safeguarded throughout a long career in which art and life are conflated and mirrored, both by the art critics and the artist herself. Despite the wariness on Emin’s part towards the French philosopher, in what follows I introduce some of his thinking along with current theories on performativity and self-narration. This will be done not as an attempt to fully explain the art of Tracey Emin, but to point out how Emin’s autobiographical practice, which very cleverly puts the idea of the ‘self ’ into play, has philosophical and theoretical implications. Emin’s autobiographical practice can in many ways be said to embody the major discussions of subjectivity and identity as they unfolded in the 1990s and especially into the 2000s. Informed by theories of performativity, in particular the speech act theory of the linguist J. L. Austin, the writings of the philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler and recent theoretical writing on autobiographical narration, I unfold the theoretical propositions implied in Emin’s autobiographical practice. This is a practice which I frame as ‘a performative practice of self-presentation’, whilst interrogating questions: What kind of ‘self ’ is presented in the art of Tracey Emin? How does it come into being? And how can we, with Tracey Emin at our sleeves, think about identity as a performative practice?

Life Model Goes Mad In 1996, Emin undertook a two-week performance called Exorcism of the last painting I ever made in a gallery space in Stockholm. During this fortnight, Emin would spend day and night in a room built within the gallery. The room had no windows, but through 16 fish-eye lenses set into the wall the public could watch Emin at work painting, sleeping and eating completely naked. Emin was the exhibition. The performance was not the artist’s first. Her first solo exhibition at White Cube, grandiosely titled Tracey 29

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Emin: My Major Retrospective 1963–1993, may be considered as an act of performance that not only pronounced a new formal direction for her practice, but also as Cliff Lauson, curator of Love Is What You Want (the extensive Tracey Emin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011) has remarked, was ‘a powerful declaration of self ’,2 just like The Tracey Emin Museum, which opened in 1995. As Lauson writes, the ‘museum’ was less a collection of artefacts than it was a project space for Emin, ‘an activity that seamlessly integrated artworks, performance and everyday life.’3 Thus, the 1996 performance in Stockholm was one in a sequence of performative acts, or to use Lauson’s term ‘activities’, that situated the artist as an artist, first with a ‘retrospective’, secondly with a ‘museum’ and here with an act of exorcism that would revise her artistic oeuvre as if Emin was already well into her mid-career. According to her personal mythology, the paintings that Emin made in this confined space were the first undertaken after a six-year block about painting. In an interview with the critic Jean Wainwright, Emin was asked whether she felt she had to perform during those intensive days in Stockholm. The answer Emin gave surely rejects such an idea. ‘I was just me, Tracey’, she said, thus solidifying the dichotomy between being and performing that Wainwright somehow evoked by her question.4 Emin does this by rhetorically placing herself off-stage, far removed from any notion of theatrical acting. Even without putting too much weight on the remark ‘I was just me, Tracey’, this utterance still raises the question of how and in what ways Emin is ‘herself ’ in her work. And whether the opposition between ‘being’ and ‘performing’ that the remark implies is discernible in general and in particular in Emin’s practice? To investigate these issues, I will try to pin down the way in which Emin is ‘just me’; that is, how she appears in her works. Exorcism of the last painting I ever made does not stand alone; it is one of a long series of radical self-exposures that have made up Emin’s rather varied practice, centred around her life, history and intimate memories, often using a direct mode of language, of words and sentences, that are written down, stitched on, bent in neon or spoken by Emin herself. What she tells us about in these works is her childhood, her teenage years, her drunken escapades, boyfriends, lovers and her sex life in particular. Sorrow, happiness and personal crises are communicated in an intense and direct way. Just as direct is Exorcism of the last painting I ever made, even though there is no such thing as ‘just’, neither when it comes to the practice of Emin nor to this specific performance piece. Rather, there are several repetitions, displacements and reenactments going on. ‘Just’ takes the myth of the male artist, who in lonely majesty loudly proclaims his tormented soul in paint through an expressive, almost cathartic act of creativity. Is this not the myth that Emin re-enacts in her performance in which the artist fulfils herself in the studio – for the occasion fittingly chaotically furnished with pieces of clothes and empty wine bottles discarded in the corners of the room? Or take the naked, posing female body, if possible an even more worn-out motif. Sprawling on the mattress, Emin makes herself into an image, the passive object of the male gaze and occasional desire, all too familiar in the history of art. However, in front of the canvas Emin becomes the acting subject, or the life model that runs amok, which is also implied by the title of the photographic series documenting the performance: Naked photos – The life model goes mad. This title rather literally points towards the reversed power relations that Emin performs in her performance: the life model, who hijacks the studio

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and lets herself go with paint and brush. With these tools she repeats the image of the male artist as well as his iconography, but equally important, because of her gender and nakedness she repeats with a difference. During the two weeks, Emin produced a Schiele, a Picasso and three versions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, together with an Anthropometry by Yves Klein, the result of a performance in which she instructed herself how to roll her paint-covered body over the canvas.5 Klein’s Anthropometry is interesting in this context as it makes up one of the many art historical hooks on which to hang Emin’s performance. In the original performance from 1960 the artist was not engaged in the act of painting himself. He directed a group of women, whom he called ‘pinceaux vivants’ or living brushes,6 to roll their bodies in paint and afterwards to make an imprint on paper.7 Although performed with irony and tongue in cheek, Klein’s performance still reiterates the well-known hierarchy of painter and model. It is this hierarchy, which Emin destabilizes by making herself into both painter and model – occupying both positions at one and the same time. Other hooks are constituted by the feminist body art of the 1960s and 1970s, for instance the photographic performances by Carolee Schneemann. In the performance, Eye Body – 36 Transformative Actions, from 1963, Schneemann created a living collage in her studio, a performance made for the camera in which she merged her own body with the environment of her paintings. In the photographs she appears in the double role of both model and artist, both image and creator, both object and subject. In this way, Schneemann’s performance disturbs the gendered power structures that, according to some feminist theorists, govern the gaze.8 Emin’s performance, Exorcism of the last painting I ever made, thus places itself in an already existing discourse and takes part in an act of repetition without which there would not be any performance. Or differently put, the performance is this series of repetitions of different artistic and cultural tropes and codes.

The Self as Narration This is a beginning, an initial attempt to pinpoint what I term Emin’s performative practice of self-presentation. In my account this is a self, which becomes a ‘self ’ through a certain kind of visual and discursive practice, containing elements of re-enactment, repetition and narration that undermines any strict division between ‘being’ and ‘performing’. This account is inspired by the theories on gender performativity that were formulated by Judith Butler during the 1990s, the same decade in which Emin’s art took shape. Judith Butler’s concepts of performativity find their grounding in the idea of the performative utterance put forward by J. L. Austin in his lectures, posthumously published in 1962 under the significant title How to Do Things with Words. In these lectures Austin presents a specific category of language, the ‘performative’, which does not refer to a world outside itself. Rather it creates one when uttered, or as Austin puts it, it is implicit in the performative that ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action’, such as ‘I promise’ or ‘I bet’.9 Ten years later, Jacques Derrida picks up on Austin by pointing out that words repeat ‘a “coded” or iterable utterance’ as he puts it: ‘Could a performative utterance succeed’, he asks, if ‘the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable in some way as a

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“citation” ’?10 The answer is of course in the negative. Language finds its meaning through the act of iteration. Judith Butler develops this idea on iterability in relation to gender and identity, most explicitly in her book Bodies That Matter from 1993.11 As Jonathan Culler has remarked with a nod to Butler, it is ‘the notion of the citation of norms, important in Derrida’s account of the performative, that brings together the performative utterance and the gender performative.’12 For Butler, the idea of the performative structures the way in which sex and gender are constituted through a forcible repetition of certain codes and norms, a ‘stylized repetition of acts’, as Butler also puts it, without which there would be no ‘I’.13 This repetition of acts lies at the core of Butler’s notion of ‘gender performativity’, that is, the process by which gender is constructed as a seemingly stable category through the act of repetition. Returning to Tracey Emin, this idea of repetition becomes crucial, not only to the performance in Stockholm, but to the way in which Emin appears as an ‘I’ in her work. In the following, I pursue this idea of the autobiographical as a performative practice of self-representation, based on the logic of repetition.

The Autobiographical Pact Conventionally, the autobiographical account has been defined as a story told by a real person about his or her own individual life and personality.14 The academic Philippe Lejeune has termed this narrow tie between the individual life and the narrative account the ‘autobiographical pact’. The promise of this pact is that the ‘I’ of the text refers to the one who has written it, literally the name on the cover of the book.15 In relation to Emin’s practice, the autobiographical pact entails that when Emin says ‘I’ she refers to herself and her own experience. The signature confirms this idea, but so also do Emin’s own statements such as: ‘What travels through me is what I make’.16 Just like the phrase, ‘I was just me, Tracey’, this statement unequivocally connects life and art in a cycle that is both unbreakable and unavoidable. The promise of the autobiographical pact also echoes in the early art critical reception of Emin’s work in the media and art press, which have predominantly regarded her work as self-referential.17 As Time Out critic Sarah Kent wrote in 1998, ‘Emin’s subject matter is herself; her life story is the source of her pain and her pride.’18 This stance was echoed by the critic Neal Brown, who characterized Emin’s art as, ‘a fecund song-cycle of the self; an undeodorised song of poetic extremity about the human need for celebration and consolation.’19 To perceive Emin’s works as self-referential is to perceive them as part of an authentic discourse, which in line with scientific or historical discourse, aims to convey information on something outside the text.20 However, this approach overlooks how these testimonies to a life lived, contained in the works, not only refer to a reality but also produce one. These ideas of a performative self resonate in recent theory on autobiography. As the literary scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have argued, the autobiography is always performative in as much as it ‘enacts the “self ” that it claims has given rise to an “I” ’.21 Following this idea of the performative autobiography proposed by Smith and Watson, it is worth lingering a little on the ‘I’ of the speaking ‘I’.

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What does it mean to say ‘I’? What is performed in this utterance? Following the logic of Judith Butler, it is exactly the ‘I’ that is performed by saying ‘I’. As Butler writes, if gender is constructed, it is not necessarily constructed by an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who stands before that construction in any spatial or temporal sense of ‘before’. Indeed, it is unclear that there can be an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ . . . Subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves.22

Where Butler writes ‘gender’, we could as well write ‘identity’ as this idea of a performative self not only concerns our gendering, but our being as such. Hence my analysis must diverge from Lejeune’s idea of the autobiographical pact. In focusing not only on what Emin says, but also on how she tells it, it becomes evident that her works relate to the world in ways which are not solely referential, but self-referential, like the performative utterance. In Why I never became a dancer (1995) Emin narrates her genesis following the classic plot of the ‘Bildungsroman’ or modernist novel. As the scholar of narrative studies Kristin Langellier has put it: ‘Modernist stories with driving, linear plots – of suffering, coming out, survival – told in unproblematic language assume that one is discovering the truth of the self’.23 This narrative structure is recognizable in Emin’s story of growing up; as the main character, Emin herself, is transformed from a humiliated youngster to a triumphant adult, who in a last, celebratory gesture declares: ‘I’m getting out of here, I’m better than all of them, I’m free’, before she lets herself go on the dance floor. The ‘Bildungsroman’ or modernist account can be said to mirror how many people remember. As the psychologist Jerome Bruner has pointed out, experiences and memories are frequently organized in narrative constructions – in stories, excuses and myths that explain why we did this and that and not something else.24 As Bruner writes in an article from 1991: ‘Particularity achieves its emblematic status by its embeddedness in a story that is in some sense generic.’25 In the case of Emin, I argue that her practice does not solely mirror a generic mode of remembering. Rather, it suggests a more selfconscious mode of organizing memory, ‘a staging of memory’ to use a formulation by the scholar Laura Marcus, that points towards the autobiography as a mise en scène of memory, a strategic enactment of the self.26

The Perlocutionary Speech Act As has already been stated, narration is a key element in Emin’s practice. Indeed, her practice is narration – the narration of the self, often built on a generic, already codified structure that guarantees a certain effect. Drawing on the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, Emin’s accounts may be characterized as perlocutionary speech acts, meaning speech acts that are uttered with the intention of producing certain effects in the receiving party. As Austin expresses it: Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or

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Art into Life of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them . . . We shall call the performance of an act of this kind the performance of a ‘perlocutionary act’.27

These kinds of perlocutionary speech acts can also be found in Emin’s text-based works, for instance in the appliqué blankets containing letters, words and sentences that refer to her life.28 Even though the blankets have been extensively analysed,29 it is worth re-visiting them with a view to their repetitious structure. In an early example, Hotel International (1993), in the upper right corner is the date ‘3-7-1963’, Emin’s birthday, whilst the upper left corner bears the name of the artist and her brother Paul. MARGATE refers to Emin’s hometown, CYPRUS to her Cypriot father, HOTEL INTERNATIONAL to the hotel in Margate where Emin and her brother grew up. Between the words, longer stories and anecdotes appear, all part of Emin’s autobiographical account. These stories are handwritten directly on small patches of textile in the style of quickly jotted down notes, whispering diary entries that because of their small sizes establish an intimate dialogue between the viewer and the work, as if what is said is ‘between you and me’. Two different modes of addressing the viewer, two distinct kinds of perlocutionary acts, are thus visible in the blankets. One addresses the viewer by speaking out loud, the other by whispering. Depending on how well the viewer knows Emin’s biography, they are able to relate to the specific localities and expressions that appear on the blanket. In this way the blanket functions as an accumulation of traces that are decodable to the initiated. Where Hotel International is kept in a rather strict composition, the blanket Mad Tracey from Margate. Everyone’s been there (1997) looks more chaotic and much more intense in regard to the density of appliqué words and their audible and expressionist power. ‘LEAVE HIM TRACE’ the blanket shouts from its left, whilst the bubble on the right proclaims: ‘AND I SAID FUCK OFF BACK TO YOUR WEEK WORLD THAT YOU CAME FROM’. The brutality of the utterance is stressed by the extensive use of capital letters apart from the longer stories and diary entries which are mounted on the blanket like fluttering post-it notes. Where Hotel International consists mainly of years, names and place names, Mad Tracey from Margate. Everyone’s been there appears like a pile up of everyday talk, thoughts and associations, communicated to the viewer in phrases like ‘ITS NO BIG DEAL’, ‘EVERY TIME I PASS DUNKIN DONUTS I THINK OF YOU’ and ‘ITS THE SORT OF THING I SAY ALL THE TIME’. Even though the phrases pay witness to a specific life lived, the stitched-on sentences also mime a generic use of language. Sentences like ‘ILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU’, ‘I LOVE ALL MY FRIENDS’ or ‘YOU JUST GOING TO LEAVE ME HEAR SWEET HEART’ seem to repeat words from a repertoire of everyday talk. Texts are repeated across different blankets. ‘PEOPLE LIKE YOU NEED TO FUCK PEOPLE LIKE ME’ featured in Mad Tracey from Margate also figures on the blanket It always hurts (2005), on which a motif of a crouching woman also appears, seen from the back in Emin’s monotype I see it thoe (1998), as well as in a neon of 2002. ‘THE PERFECT PLACE TO GROW ’ from the blanket Hotel International from 1993 becomes in 2001 the title of one of Emin’s sculptures. ‘IS ANAL SEX LEGAL ?’, a question raised in the blanket Garden of Horror (1998), is legible in the neon from the same year.30 This act of repetition brings

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to mind what the art historian Hal Foster has termed ‘coded expressionism’, that is, a calculated expressionism that deliberately repeats the codes of expressivity and through this very act of repetition creates a kind of coded confession.31 Yet such calculated expressionism also points to the status of language as always already ‘coded’, since it must repeat itself in order to make sense. It is therefore questionable whether any differentiation can be made between a ‘coded’ and a supposedly ‘uncoded expressionism’, although the code may still be strategically foregrounded in different degrees.

The Strategic Spelling Error and the Tonality of Language Staying with the idea of a strategic or self-conscious use of language, the many spelling mistakes in Emin’s blankets are crucial. In the utterance cited above, ’YOU JUST GOING TO LEAVE ME HEAR SWEET HEART’, ‘HERE’ has become ‘HEAR’. What looks like a spelling error makes possible the hidden exclamation: ‘hear me’. This spelling error is by far not the only one; on the contrary it seems like Emin is indeed cultivating this mode of writing, not only through inversions of letters, but also through the act of crossing out. In the small embroidery As Always from 2005, the word SORRY is repeated six times with a grey thread on a white background. This act of repetition can be approached in two ways. On the one hand it reaffirms the iterability of language as argued by Derrida. On the other it seems to undermine the meaning of the word ‘sorry’ and prevent it from performing the possible ‘doing’ that this performative utterance could have. This is emphasized by the title of the work, As Always, visible in the lower left corner in relation to Emin’s signature. ‘As always I say sorry, but it makes no difference’, it seems to suggest. The word SORRY is crossed out, or rather embroidered out, as is the sentence BELIVE ME I AM. With this gesture of crossing out, Emin seems to point towards the double existence of the excuse and its negation. ‘Believe me, I am sorry’ is supposedly the message. But what is said is crossed out and it is difficult to know how sincerely the message should be understood as the crossing out both draws attention to the word ‘sorry’ as well as excludes its postulated meaning. The crossing out thus mimics what Derrida described as the act of putting ‘sous rature’. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains in the introduction to the English translation, ‘sous rature’ or ‘under erasure’ denotes the double gesture of writing a word whilst at the same crossing it out, then printing both the word and its deletion: ‘Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible.’32 This act of erasure can be regarded as a symptom of, and as a deliberate display of, the insufficiency of language. Within this argument the act of crossing out takes part in a more general deconstruction of dichotomies by creating a kind of strategic indecisiveness. Another reading of Emin’s writing that foregrounds Emin’s spelling errors as ‘retakes’ rather than ‘mistakes’ is presented by the writer Ali Smith. In the catalogue to Love Is What You Want, Smith writes of the embroidery So Picaso (2008), where the artist’s name ‘Picasso’ appears as ‘Picaso’: The missing letter makes you look twice, look again. It makes you wonder if it’s a mistake or a retake. It makes you resee, reread what you’re seeing. Emin, by leaving

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Art into Life something out, or by turning a letter back to front, by adding something extra, by splitting a word into its component parts, returns you to the word so that the eye is reminded to be open – the mind too – in an engagement about whether something really says what it seems to say, really means what it seems to mean.33

Smith’s more phenomenologically informed argument nuances the effect of Emin’s practice. The ‘spelling mistake’, as Smith indicates, makes you see anew and so takes part in an investigation of language. But Emin’s ‘retakes’ go further. On the one hand the spelling mistake and ‘crossing out’ point towards a spontaneous and childish writing, whilst on the other they seem like the result of a highly planned one. Hence, they can be described as errors, performed strategically so producing spontaneity as an effect. This also goes for the blankets in which the choice of direct speech seems to collide with the laborious process of producing them. The words have to be cut out and stitched on by hand. This is done with a rather coarse thread that becomes part of the ‘honest’ expression of the blanket as it stresses its homemade look and refers to the hand of the artist. The stitch plays a role similar to the one of the brushstrokes in the work of the modernist painter. Even though Emin’s needlework does not speak of the same kind of virtuosity as does a painting by Jackson Pollock, it still refers indexically to the artist. ‘I was here’ seems to be the most immediate message conveyed by the blankets, not very different from Pollock’s dictum ‘I am in the painting’. This indexicality is of course problematized when we acknowledge Emin’s use of assistants. However, the stitch still produces the effect of indexicality. It still appears ‘personal’.

The Personal as Performative Gesture Summing up, Emin’s art and specifically the works considered here produce the effect of authenticity through their mode of address that seems to confirm the autobiographical pact. This includes the materiality of the works, the character of the stitching, the assumed spontaneity of the written sentences and the ways in which they are written, the handheld quality of the video, the use of narrative schemas, and I would add, Emin’s own voice, which plays a crucial role in the video works. Neal Brown has described Emin’s voice as ‘melodiously intimate’, a quality that he relates to Emin’s ‘natural storytelling ability.’34 The critic Lorna Healy is less romantically inclined. For her Emin’s voice, with its texture and sound, takes part in this production of affect and authenticity: ‘It can be literally the voice that conveys authenticity, perhaps through its human imperfections, rather than what it tells us about.’35 Thus, what matters is less what Emin tells us about, but more the way in which she tells it. It is the pitch, the ring, the ‘grain of her voice’. Or, as Healy writes, it is her sibilation, the way that the rhythm of her voice gains momentum as the story reaches its climax, her dialect and her idiomatic vocabulary. In her argument, Healy draws on the writings of Roland Barthes, who in his essay ‘The grain of the voice’ (1972) tries to describe the specific materiality of the voice: the ‘grain of the voice’, he writes, is ‘the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue . . . It is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.’36

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The ‘grain of the voice’ – or ‘the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs’ also appears in Emin’s monotypes from the late 1990s onwards. These works are central to the argument on a performative practice of self-presentation that I am making here. Even though the monotypes do not contain biographical narratives in the same way as the blankets, they are still tied closely to the artist through motifs and technique. But like Emin’s other works they also seem suspended between ‘being’ and ‘performing’. On the one hand the direct tracing technique of the monotype proposes a very spontaneous act, almost like a ‘performance’ understood as an unscripted doing.37 Or as Ali Smith has remarked, it is ‘a live form, a thing caught exactly at its moment of coming into being’.38 This directness of the monoprint is made even more manifest from the fact that it often bears the traces of the artist’s hand, a finger, a smudge made by the pressure of the artist’s body – the ‘hand as it writes’ or the ‘limb as it performs’. Hereby it bears an indexical mark of the artist, just like a performance in which the artist uses his or her own body. On the other hand (and this is important in the context of Emin’s selfperformance), the repetition of the same motifs is hard to ignore. In the monotypes the naked body appears again and again, thus paradoxically linking the unique act of the monoprint to the mode of repetition – the ‘mono’ to the ‘again’ and ‘again’. Through this act of repetition, the unique trace becomes a pattern; the original becomes a script to be repeated. As in Emin’s other works this act of repetition foregrounds not what is shown, but the very act of showing it. It enacts a displacement from what is told to the very act of ‘telling’ it. These acts of repetition can be said to support the view that history is always written from a here and now, a present moment that informs what is remembered and makes ever new retellings possible as the same event can be remembered differently. Or they can be regarded as the artist’s ‘trademarks’, a recognizable signature in line with the artist’s own written signature.39 This is a pop art inspired gesture not unlike the stylized ‘brush-stroke’ by Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol’s use of the ready-made object like the Brillo-box or the Campbell’s soup can. No matter what explanation(s) one chooses – the one does not exclude the others – the effect of Emin’s discursive repetitions is that her autobiography becomes self-generating or self-producing as her works increasingly refer to each other rather than exclusively referring to a world ‘outside’, understood as Emin’s history, her life, herself. The result of this self-reflective and self-producing loop is that the very act of ‘telling’ becomes more urgent than what is being told.

The Performative Self From these down strokes in the practice of Tracey Emin it should be clear in what ways this practice functions performatively – and how it produces the effect of authenticity as well as the ‘self ’ of the artist through its various performances. This is a self, which in spite of its presumed immediacy seems to oscillate between ‘being’ and ‘performing’. Emin is because of her performance – not in spite of it. This self can be termed a ‘performative self ’ as it appears through the performative speech act of language, rather than being an already existing entity to be represented and told. Within this framework being is not a contradiction to performance, but a function of

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performance, which is why any clear demarcation of ‘being’ from ‘performing’ does not make sense. The power of Emin’s practice – and its theoretical implications – is not that it shows Emin as ‘just’ Emin: ‘I was just me, Tracey’. Rather her art and writing deliberately stay in constant flux between the spontaneous and the staged, the true and the constructed. This oscillation leaves space for a both/and rather than an either/or and provides the art encounter with the thrill of indeterminacy. With the art of Tracey Emin ‘at your sleeve’ it is indeed possible to learn to cherish and understand the ways in which the spontaneous is always also coded, the personal always also generic, and the ‘undeodorised song’ of which Neal Brown once spoke, is always also a function of a much more strategic performative act – a performance without which there would be no being.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13

Quoted in Marcus Field, ‘Emin for real’, Modern Painters, 15/3 (2002), p. 114. Cliff Lauson, ‘Love is what you want’ in Ralph Rugoff and Cliff Lauson (eds), Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want (London, 2011), p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. Jean Wainwright, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’ in Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin (London, 2002), p. 198. Ibid., pp. 196–7. Yves Klein, ‘Le vrai deviant réalité’ in Marie-Anne Sichère and Didier Semin (eds), Le dépassement de la problematique de l’art et autres écrits (Paris, 2003), p. 283. For a more detailed description of the performance see Amelia Jones, Body Art/ Performing the Subject (Minneapolis, 1998), p. 86 and Paul Schimmel (ed.), Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979 (London, 1998), p. 35. I refer to Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ (1975) that demonstrated how this dichotomy of looking and being looked at, expressed as ‘woman as image’ and man as ‘bearer of the gaze’ structured the narrative cinema of Hollywood and its pleasures. Mulvey’s ideas have been subject to debate by the next generation of feminists and queer theorists in the 1980s and 1990s. Claims have been made for a more diverse understanding of the subject/object relation and for models of visual pleasure that work across stable categories of sex, gender and race. For a critique of Mulvey, see, for instance: E. A. Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York, 1983) and Jackie Stacey, ‘Desperately seeking difference’ in John Caughie, Annette Kuhn and Mandy Merck (eds), The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London, [1987] 1992), pp. 244–57. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1975), p. 6. Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature événement contexte’ (1972), ‘Signature event context’ in Limited Inc (Evanston, 1988), p. 17. Butler outlines this theoretical framework in the introduction to Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York, 1993), pp. 1–23. Jonathan Culler, ‘Philosophy and literature: the fortunes of the performative’, Poetics Today, 21/3 (2000), p. 514. Butler puts forward this idea as early as December 1988 in an essay in Theatre Journal, 40/4 (1988), pp. 519–38. ‘Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory’ later published in Sue-Ellen Case (ed.),

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14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

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Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore and London, 1990), pp. 270–82. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique (Paris, 1975), p. 14. Ibid., p. 33. Stuart Morgan, ‘The story of I’, Frieze, 34 (1997), p. 57. This one-to-one relationship between art and life still seems to structure much thinking around art – especially in popular culture where films such as Pollock from 2000 and Frida from 2002 reaffirm the close coupling of art and life in the public imagination. Sarah Kent, ‘Tracey Emin: flying high’ in Tracey Emin. I Need Art Like I Need God (London, 1998), p. 37. Neal Brown, ‘God, art and Tracey Emin’ in Tracey Emin. I Need Art Like I Need God, p. 4. Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique, p. 36. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds), Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/ Performance (Ann Arbor, 2002), p. 9. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1993), pp. 1–2. Kristin M. Langellier, ‘Personal narrative, performance, performativity: two or three things I know for sure’, Text and Performance Quarterly, 19 (1999), p. 139. Jerome Bruner, ‘The narrative construction of reality’, Critical Inquiry, 18 (1991), pp. 4–5. Ibid., p. 7. Laura Marcus uses the term ‘a staging of memory’ in Laura Marcus, ‘The face of autobiography’ in Julia Swindells (ed.), The Uses of Autobiography (London, 1995), p. 13. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 101. In this regard, the blankets bear resemblance to traditional quilts that have a long history in both the UK and USA, both as a traditional women’s craft and as part of a feminist art tradition stemming back to the 1970s. See Rosemary Betterton, ‘Why is my art not as good as me? Femininity, feminism and “life-drawing” in Tracey Emin’s art’ in Merck and Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, p. 34. See, for instance, Rosemary Betterton, ‘Why is my art not as good as me?’. The neon is one of a pair, complemented by another that inverts the question: Is Legal sex anal? See: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-is-anal-sex-legal-t11890 (accessed 28 June 2017). See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA and London, 1996), p. 153. Jacques Derrida, in De la Grammatologie (1967), Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London, 1974), p. xiv. Ali Smith, ‘Emin’s emendations’ in Rugoff and Lauson (eds), Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want, p. 26. Brown, ‘God, art and Tracey Emin’, p. 6. Lorna Healy, ‘We love you Tracey: pop-cultural strategies in Tracey Emin’s videos’ in Merck and Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, p. 162. Ibid. This view of performance as an unscripted ‘live’ act resonates in most writing on the subject. Performance is ‘live art by artists’ for RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York, 1979), p. 9. It is that which is ‘live (and alive)’,

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connected to ‘spontaneity’, ‘the present’ and even ‘authenticity’ for Noël Carroll, ‘Performance’, Formations, 3/1 (1986), p. 63. Peggy Phelan famously states: ‘Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance’. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York, 1993), p. 146. 38 Ali Smith, ‘Emin’s emendations’, p. 27. 39 See Ulrich Lehmann, ‘The trademark of Tracey Emin’ in Merck and Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, pp. 60–78.

3

A Black Cat Crossed My Path Glenn Adamson

My heart sank the moment I saw it was her. It was May 2011. I was at the Saatchi Gallery in London for the opening night of Collect, the annual fair held by the British Crafts Council. It is an event that does not change much from year to year; a similar roster of galleries shows a similar roster of makers. Most of them offer safe and polite objets d’art, which I regard with affection, even while recognizing that – with the best will in the world – it is hard to marry artisanal values to high-end commerce. The craftsperson’s unpretentious individualism so often looks out of place under the hot lights, and naked without the context of its creation. And so I felt a certain restlessness as I toured the show, a desire for something with a bit more edge. This was my mindset when I first saw a tapestry, hung prominently right at the top of the stairs leading to the mezzanine, that was anything but safe and polite. Tapestry is perhaps the most demanding of craft mediums, the product of many hundreds (often, thousands) of hours of hand knotting. Historically, it has tended towards stiffly rendered versions of self-declaratively important art: history paintings by Raphael, neo-medieval pageantry by William Morris, large-scale French abstraction. But this tapestry was nothing like that. Despite its hard-won materiality, it had a quickness to it, as if it had been dashed off in a moment. It showed a winsome figure garbed in black crow-like garments, standing off-kilter, a blur of red at the feet. Despite the sketchiness of the rendering, the portrayal was full of presence and personality. It had life, immediacy – just the sort of edge I had been wanting to find. I stepped up to the label to find out who had made it. And of course, it was by Tracey Emin. Not one of my own people, as it were, someone from the contemporary craft scene, but one of Britain’s most famous (and infamous) artists. My disappointment was at least twofold. Not only had I failed to discover a fresh new talent in the world of contemporary tapestry. I also had been taken in, unawares, by Emin’s trademark faux authenticity. That had never happened to me before. By the time I moved to the UK in 2005, Emin was already a household name, and I had never encountered her work without a fanfare of publicity preceding it. Ruefully, I had to admit to myself the brilliance of this artist, the way that the slightest of her gestures commands full attention. Perhaps I should explain why taking pleasure in Emin’s work was anything other than uplifting. For starters, I was tired of her. Like many people in the arts in Britain, I had 41

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gone through my ups and downs with Emin. At first her work seemed to me arrestingly frank. Gradually though, her directness came to seem less and less affecting; on repeated encounter, her confessionalism came to seem less driven by internal necessity, and more of a self-indulgent act. Then, too, I had a specific axe to grind concerning her use of craft, which she has always treated with an off-handed shrug. Among Emin’s breakthrough works were a series of appliqué textile works, which she sewed by hand in a manner that could charitably be called approximate. That was fine with me – I am not one who prizes perfectionism for its own sake. Her choice of medium had read as modest, and also as a direct allusion to feminist narratives about needlework. Her persona, that of a marginalized woman speaking her own truth to power, had blazed brightly in works like Hate and power can be a terrible thing (2004) with its furious assault against the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher (1979–90). Over time, though, the vocabulary began to wear thin. Like her bad spelling (‘ensign’ does not have Z in it), her purposefully inept craftsmanship seemed increasingly contrived as the years rolled by. When Emin hired skilled studio assistants to make her fabric works, in what seemed a clear concession to market demand, it was almost a relief, because the pose of the naïf had ceased to be convincing a long time earlier. And yet, the works died a little when she resorted to outsourcing. They looked like what they were: the art equivalent of ready-to-wear, rather than couture. The tapestry I saw at Collect was a further step in this direction. It was created in a collaboration between Emin and West Dean Studios, which is one of the few highly skilled tapestry production facilities still in existence in Europe. The work I saw at Collect was based on Black Cat, a painting that the artist had made prior to the collaboration. It was woven – let us give them the credit – by Carron Penney, studio director at West Dean, and Philip Sanderson. Comparing this ‘cartoon’ (to use the traditional weaver’s term) to the tapestry, one cannot but be struck by the disparity between Emin’s rapid painterly application and the laboriousness of the finished work.1 Even the dribbles of thin paint that cascaded down the canvas in seconds have been replicated painstakingly, knot by knot. Whether the image is deadened in the process is a matter of opinion: I find the woven version to be just as effective as the original, though different in its affect. That does not change the fact that the work provoked me, leaving me with an undefined but palpable bad feeling. My encounter with Emin’s tapestry bothered me so much that I started to think about it a little further. First, I considered parallel cases, such as Urs Fischer’s Big Clay series (2008 onwards) in which the artist squeezes a little lump of clay in his hand and then has it scaled up to Brobdingnagian proportions through an elaborate process, in which the lump is first scanned, then used to carve an enormous foam model, which is then cut apart, used to make aluminium castings, which are finally welded together and finished. In Fischer’s case, the joke is clear: it is ridiculous that the least action of an artist should become the basis of such capital-intensive production. Another relevant point of comparison can be found in the embroidered works of the Egypt-born artist Ghada Amer, which offer an implicitly feminist riff on action painting. In these pictures, Amer uses thread to outline figures (the images are often drawn from erotic magazines), often enlivening the image further with ink or paint. She lets the loose ends of the threads hang down, in a manner that evokes the downward drips in

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Black Cat, but is instead the result of a slow hand process. Amer identifies strongly with sewing as an expressive medium and her work evinces a high degree of care in its making. The loose threads play a multivalent role in these images, simultaneously obscuring the subject matter and reading as a metaphor of liberation (as in the phrase ‘letting down one’s hair’). Emin’s tapestry is comparable to Fischer’s sculpture in that it presents a roughly similar ratio in its artist-to-fabricator labour and is similar to Amer’s work in its materiality. Yet it has neither the note of authorial self-satire that Fischer brings monumentality, nor Amer’s expressionist directness. The particularity of Emin’s authorial stance can best be understood by returning to a phrase I used earlier in this chapter: her ‘trademark faux authenticity’. This is an idea I borrow from Ulrich Lehmann’s ingenious 2002 essay on the artist, in which he explores her irreconcilable duality.2 Adopting Charles Baudelaire’s term le poncif, meaning both an imprint and a trademark in the business sense, Lehmann argues that the artist’s persona as a totality has overtaken her work. The writer Tamarin Norwood has enlarged on his point, using the example of flyers that Emin put up around her neighbourhood of Spitalfields in east London in 2002 when her cat ran away. Members of the public quickly grabbed the flyers, which had her easily recognizable handwriting; her gallery White Cube was obliged to issue a statement invalidating them as works in her oeuvre. As Norwood notes, this proved Lehmann’s argument perfectly: ‘We might say that Emin has created a convincing, life-sized tableau of her life, and it is difficult to exclude from this tableau anything she does or produces.’3 Within the expansive domain of her persona, Emin’s authenticity operates like a slogan, as heartfelt as it may seem on first blush. She cannot ever be taken at face value. In this respect she has something in common with Coca-Cola,® which goes to great pains to persuade people that ‘it’s the real thing’. Or, to slightly recontextualize a phrase of Lawrence Grossberg’s – he was writing about rock music’s double identity, simultaneously cathartic and commercial – we might say that she exhibits a paradoxical ‘inauthentic authenticity’.4 It is interesting that so much of her work revolves around the body, her own and others; it is at once corporeal and corporate. Lehmann uses an ingenious metaphor to illustrate this dynamic: the familiar ‘duck– rabbit’ drawing that Ludwig Wittgenstein discussed in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), which can be seen as representing either a duck or a rabbit, depending on how one looks at it. The puzzle of the image is that one cannot read it simultaneously as a duck and a rabbit. One cannot hold both figures in the mind at once; the image oscillates between them. As Wittgenstein notes, such kippfiguren (turning figures) may seem dual in their nature, but they are actually triadic. The drawing is at once duck, rabbit and duckrabbit, the third term not one that can be envisioned literally, but can certainly be conceptualized (as I have just been doing). Lehmann suggests that Emin’s use of ‘trademark’ or ‘signature’ devices operates precisely in this way, flipping back and forth between sincerity and cynicism, and also positioning the artist in the viewer’s mind as someone who stands clear of both categories. I would apply this to her use of craft. This goes some way towards explaining the bad feeling that her work evoked in me, and among other respecters of craft. She is constantly deploying skilled handwork, only to simultaneously reject any presumption

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of its value. Craft is never simply expressive, poignant or natural in her work. Neither is it affirming, critical or humane. She eludes all of these easy equations, toying with them much as she toys with the idea of bad handwriting. She knows that you know that she knows how to spell perfectly well. Similarly, she knows that you know that her use of handwriting is a put-on; it is pointedly inappropriate that her neon works, which are executed by a skilled sign-maker, approximate her scribbled penmanship.5 Her Black Cat tapestry may not visually resemble these neons, but they present an identical gamesmanship with regard to the work of West Dean weavers Penney and Sanderson. Ultimately, one must admire the adroitness with which Emin sets these chains of contradiction in motion; she is always both unashamedly present and entirely elusive. This constant ‘turning’ in her work does indeed produce an impressive complexity, which has rightly earned her the status of a major artist, and has created space for her to legitimately critique settled British ideas about class and gender. As a craft specialist, I must admire her skill at managing the hands of others to suit her own purposes. After all, I did find the Black Cat tapestry extremely compelling on first sight. I would just like to point out, however, that the turning faces both ways: she is also dependent.6 As her work spins through its conceptual rotations, we should remember that it is craft that provides the motive force.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6

It is worth noting that such a ‘cartoon’ is typically created for the express purpose of being rendered in thread. Emin’s collaboration with West Dean was unusual in that the painting had been made with no intention of being translated into tapestry. Ulrich Lehmann, ‘The trademark Tracey Emin’ in Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin (London, 2002), pp. 60–78. Tamarin Norwood, ‘Lehmann: Tracey Emin’s lost cat’, blog post, 30 October 2012, available at http://www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk/lehmann-tracey-emins-lost-cat/# (accessed 28 June 2017). Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York, 2002). It seems only fair here to record the view of Kerry Ryan, the Spitalfields sign-maker who has fabricated many of Emin’s neon works: ‘I do feel essential to the process’, he says, but ‘no artist who uses fabricators ever sits on their behind and lets other people get on with it. I don’t know any people who work harder than artists.’ Quoted in Dan Glaister, ‘I’d like 11 and a half tons of resin, please: the artisans behind the artists’, The Guardian, 1 April 2012, available at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/ apr/01/artists-assistants-hirst-emin-dean (accessed 28 June 2017). My concluding argument here parallels the work I have done with Julia Bryan-Wilson in our co-authored book, Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials From the Studio to Crowdsourcing (London, 2016).

4

Twenty Years in the Making: Tracey Emin’s My Bed, 1998–2018 Deborah Cherry

This chapter traces two moments in an encounter with Tracey Emin’s My Bed, the first at its initial presentations at the end of the last century and the second over the past two decades.1

On the Move, My Bed, 1998–99 Tracey Emin’s My Bed made its first appearance in Tokyo, after which it was shown in New York, receiving an enthusiastic critical reception as part of the artist’s first exhibition in the United States of America. In London, by contrast, as the central exhibit of her show for her nomination for the Turner Prize in autumn 1999 it became a sensation. What happened to the work as it travelled from London to Tokyo and back again, re-routed through New York? Analysing the globalized art world of the later twentieth century, Miwon Kwon drew attention to the necessary return of the author. As ‘itinerant artists’ travel from one place to another, reprising work for disparate audiences in heterogenous spaces, the artist has become, she contends, a primary guarantor of the art work, a preferred source of its meaning. It is now the performative aspect of an artist’s characteristic mode of operation (even when working in collaboration) that is repeated and circulated as a new art commodity, with the artist him/herself functioning as the primary vehicle for [the art work’s] verification, repetition, and circulation.

In the expanding transnational networks of dealers, galleries, venues and biennales, it is the figure of the artist who carries and fixes meaning, so ensuring the intelligibility of the artwork from site to site. As Kwon explained: ‘the myth of the artist’ has become ‘a privileged source of originality’. She concluded that this renewed emphasis on the artist as narrator and chief protagonist results in the ‘hermetic implosion of (auto)biographical and subjectivist indulgences’.2 Kwon’s commentary is particularly apt, for 45

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although in crossing continents My Bed has been varyingly re-assembled, its creator has been consistently installed as both the source of its meaning and its explanation. In what Kwon calls the ‘intricate orchestration of literal and discursive sites’,3 the figure of the artist arrests the possibility that the art will not signify in its transnational locations, or will be rejected by or indecipherable to new audiences. The art of the young British artists is an art of late twentieth-century Britain, its culturally specific references not necessarily comprehensible beyond its borders. This insularity has been underlined by Kobena Mercer who characterized yBa art and its reception as ‘defensive and, above all, regressive responses to the bewildering effects of globalization’. Where Britain has attempted to come to terms, however uneasily, with cultural diversity, these artists have, he argues, traded relentlessly in stereotypes of Britishness.4 Given this isolationism, it has been a deft move to put the artist up for global transfer, for this figure inhibits what Jacques Derrida has identified as débordement, the chaotic and unmanageable overflow of meanings into the unpredictability of difference and deferral. To map the global movement of My Bed is thus to interrogate débordement, the potential for its meanings to overspill or run over the limits or boundaries into the disjunctive yet overlapping domains of sexual politics, homelessness, migration and displacement at the end of the twentieth century. With their cartographies of diaspora and their address to the unresolved longings of identity, the variant installations and presentations of My Bed touch on and point to some of the key concerns of a contemporary moment.

Making My Bed made its first appearance in the autumn of 1998 at the Sagacho Exhibit Space in Tokyo. From its opening in 1983 to its close in 2000, Sagacho Exhibit Space was acknowledged as Japan’s first independent art space, becoming a renowned alternative gallery on the international circuit. Sagacho showcased international and domestic artists, encouraged experimental practice, springboarded the careers of artists such as Res Nato and Yasumasa Morimura, and showed emerging and established artists such as Shinro Ohtake, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Anselm Kiefer and Tadao Ando. Taking its name from the Sagacho area on Tokyo’s outskirts, the gallery was located in a 1920s warehouse that once housed Japan’s central rice market.5 Sagacho Exhibit Space provided artists with spacious galleries with high ceilings, well suited to installation, the predominant art form of the 1990s. Emin certainly seems to have relished the scope offered by the venue. In an elongated rectangular space with windows ranged on one side, the bed was placed at an angle, a rope noose suspended above it; the bed with its associated items was juxtaposed to a box, somewhat resembling a coffin or a seat, beside which were two suitcases padlocked, chained and roped together. A collection of drawings was arranged on the long wall, painted blue, and two neon signs gleamed in the distance. The space was accessed through a curtain which had to be drawn aside, so creating a scene akin to a stage set: deep in the space, the bed was positioned beyond the coffin box and the suitcases. In an interplay of spatial geometries, emptiness counterpointed the cluttered wall, brilliant white contrasted with the surfaces of paper and creased linen, flat horizontality was set against the strong vertical of the rope. On

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the front cover of the accompanying brochure ‘Soba Sex’ was scratched out, and below was written in Emin’s distinctive handwriting, ‘And I know its better to have a straight spine than a broken neck’. On the back cover is an alternative title ‘Soba Sex: My Cunt is Wet with Fear’, taken from the two neons. The brochure also reproduced two monoprints – Terribly wrong (1997) and No clear thoughts as well as Eugene Doyen’s photograph of Emin wearing black underwear, sprawled across a low bed and the floor, ropes secured around each ankle, and a noose encircling her neck. This ‘Portrait of the Artist Age 18 – 1983’ is accompanied by another handwritten text: Don’t make me bleed – Dont make me cry – To scream uncontrollably is enough – The hole things breaking my Fucking Heart – I sit in front of the mirror trying to smile – to remind my Soul that once I Felt beautiful – But the truth is I Feel like I just died – And I know and You Know Its the Lack of Love that just killed me X My cunt is wet with fear. Tracey Emin Summer 1998

A scream emitted in Emin’s video, Homage to Edvard Munch and all my dead children (1988) also shown here, heightened the melodrama.6 Emin’s career took off over the 1990s. She first showed at White Cube in 1993; Jopling remains her primary London dealer. Her work was included in several group shows, such as Minky Manky (curated by Carl Freedman for the South London Gallery in 1995) and the high-profile exhibition of Charles Saatchi’s collection, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Gallery (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1997); her solo show I Need Art Like I Need God (South London Gallery, London and Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen, Germany) was promoted as comprising ‘Emin’s internationally-acclaimed past work alongside more recent pieces’, and accompanied by a growing literature.7 My Bed reappeared in Emin’s first solo show in the United States at the New York gallery Lehmann Maupin in 1999. It was this exhibition that was cited when Emin was listed as a candidate for the Turner Prize later that year. The show’s title, Every Part of Me’s Bleeding, was announced in one of the neons. Like I Need Art Like I Need God, this exhibition showcased the many media in which Emin was working: neon – Soba Sex (1999) and My cunt is wet with fear (1998), drawing, video, memorabilia, appliquéd textile with Psyco Slut (1999), and small installations such as The first time I was pregnant I started to crochet the baby a shawl (1999–2000), The history of painting part 1 and The history of painting part 2 (1999). Leaving Home (1999) juxtaposed the two bound suitcases shown in Tokyo with a metal tub part-filled with gin, two keys and a spool of thread. Many of the works employed declarative first person enunciation,

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articulating a personal, confessional voice which had been building over the decade. The show testified to the artist’s predilection for found materials from personal memorabilia to salvage, such as the re-assembled wooden beach hut, to everyday items associated with women’s fertility and menstruation: pregnancy tests, morning-after pills, used tampons. My Bed was situated in the far room, beyond The Hut; it was thus approached through and seen between a maze of interrelated installations, similar objects, and still and moving images that, in the logic of supplementarity, added to and displaced it. Seeing them at once distracted the gaze and intensified the viewing of My Bed, positioned in a spatial narrative of distance and deferral. In response to her Turner Prize nomination, Emin created a multi-media show, at the centre of which was My Bed. Unlike in Tokyo and New York, in London the bed was installed without the rope noose or the melodramatic theatricality of its Tokyo presentation. The two suitcases, secured together with ropes and chain were removed from Leaving Home and placed close up beside the bed on the side opposite to the objects: they have remained in this proximity ever since. A blue-painted wall was scattered with her drawings and monoprints; also on show were an appliquéd blanket No Chance (what a year) (1999), the neon Every part of me’s bleeding (1999) and a selection of videos including Why I never became a dancer (1995) and Tracey Emin C.V. Cunt Vernacular (1997), screened in a separate room. While many of the elements that comprise My Bed were established in Tokyo, the repertory of objects that have made up the work has been far from fixed. If some items remain fairly consistent – sheets, pillows, towel and pantyhose on the bed, and beside it a small table, blue rug, bottles, slippers, cigarette packs, condoms, contraceptives, soft toy, self-portrait photographs, other items have changed. So too have the pieces with which My Bed has been shown. What constitutes My Bed is thus open to question. Is it a singular piece solely comprised of a bed base and its immediate objects or, as suggested here, constituted by its re-assembly, its exhibition and the ensemble of surrounding art works with which it interacts. Characteristic of the exhibitions in New York and London, and of Emin’s practice in general, is an intermediality. It is not just that the artist experiments in and with diverse media, nor that her shows demonstrate artistic versatility; rather her exhibitions stage juxtapositions, repetitions and layerings between works created in different media. In London, the still, sculptural forms of My Bed were offset by the video shot in Emin’s Waterloo apartment, Tracey Emin C.V. Cunt Vernacular. Accompanied by the artist’s voice-over, a camera wanders through scenarios of clutter, scanning her apartment to collect small objects not dissimilar to those of My Bed. This visual duplicity incited identification, and prompts quests for recognition. Promising and refusing the repetition of the same, it tempted critics to ascribe a singular and stable referent to Emin’s art, the artist herself.

Framing American art critics accepted, indeed promoted, Emin’s art as disclosure. They enjoyed what they perceived as autobiographical revelation and ‘controversial subjects, taken from her sordid life’.8 On the whole they were not hostile to or doubtful about these

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strategies. In a piece titled ‘True Confessions’, Christopher Bagley praised Emin for her ‘profane, provocative, unflinchingly honest pieces shaped by the traumas of her childhood and adolescence’.9 The New York Times celebrated an artist who, in a language akin to that of Jean Rhys and Jean Genet,‘tells all, all the truths, both awful and wonderful, but mostly awful, about her life’, concluding ‘the best thing is simply Ms Emin herself ’. The New Yorker hailed ‘the vulnerability of this promising début’.10 Emin’s exhibition was granted serious evaluation. A sympathetic and informed discussion over two pages in Art Forum assessed Emin’s place in the history of twentieth-century art. Recognizing the plentitude of artistic citations in which Emin’s art delighted, Jan Avgikos perceived her as reworking feminist traditions of textile art, and taking a critical stance in regard to major modernist art movements: ‘You feel her willful occupation of Conceptual art’s formal turf (think Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Joseph Kosuth) as well as her wicked put down of its pompous austerity and authority’.11 In London, however, a rhetoric of shock, sensation and controversy prowled around the artist and her work. A celebrity from the moment she stormed out of a Channel 4 discussion on the Turner Prize of 1997, Emin regularly appeared in the British press. The Guardian proclaimed ‘the birth of a phenomenon’, hailing her as ‘a dedicated media tart and headline junkie’, giving pride of place to My Bed on the cover of G2 with the headline ‘How this bed turned from work of art to modern icon in less than two weeks’. And to be sure that readers identified the prodigy herself, the text was accompanied by a life-size photograph of Tracey, smoking a cigarette.12 Notoriety was whipped up with reports of audience responses. The Independent on Sunday ran a debate asking readers ‘would you show your bed in public?’ The News of the World, a tabloid Sunday newspaper dedicated to sex scandals and celebrity gossip, related with relish how a ‘furious housewife who attacked controversial artist Tracey Emin’s bed’ with a proprietary cleaner was pulled away in the nick of time.13 The Sunday Times’s claim that ‘at least the naughty schoolgirls liked it’ traded on the appeal of transgression, while a tongue-incheek(?) report in the Sunday Mirror recounted that ‘elderly readers have written in their thousands to grumble about the so-called art work’.14 Richard Cork, however, observed that ‘nobody inside the show was fulminating about her unwashed knickers, or doubling up in satirical mirth at the revelations about her unbridled teenage libido and its disastrous consequences. Rather they were attending, quietly and seriously to a young women’s frankness about the calamity and mess of her life so far’.15 Ralph Rugoff characterized Emin’s art as candidly outspoken ‘in the confessional register of our talkshow, docu-soap culture’, dealing with ‘teenage sex, bad relationships, self-destructive behaviour and emotional hangovers, with real life hard-luck stories to which most of us can instantly respond, if not identify with’.16 Waldemar Januszczak assessed Emin’s art historical precursors, encapsulating what has become her expressionist trajectory: ‘The art itself has a basis and a tradition. Her favourite artists are people who made searing neurotic art, like Munch and Schiele.’17 This confessional interpretation was not without risk. London critics wondered whether Tracey was telling the truth. Authenticity became a benchmark for judging the artist rather than analysing the artwork. Some questioned her authenticity: The Daily Mail asked whether Tracey’s tales were really true. Richard Dorment doubted both the sincerity of Emin’s art and its value.

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Art into Life Emin shows memorabilia amassed during the course of a life marked by promiscuity, rape, abortion, alcohol abuse and financial destitution, but also by phenomenal critical and financial success, achieved by marketing graphic descriptions of her most intimate feelings and degrading experiences as works of art. Billing herself as a modern day Expressionist, Emin brings life–in the forms of videos and things taken from the real world–into the art gallery and leaves it there, more or less unchanged, like unprocessed sewage. . . . What interests me about Emin is not her relentless self-absorption, limitless self-pity or compulsion to confess the sad details of her past life, but that all of this adds up to so little of real interest.

My Bed, he considered, was ‘supposedly her own unmade bed’ (my emphasis).18 Suspicion that Emin was a media exhibitionist trading on stereotypes of dysfunctional femininity also haunted feminist writings. Natasha Walter asserted that ‘by making a parade of her suffering’ the artist stands ‘at the end of a long tradition of female artists who’ve gained esteem through public self-flagellation’.19 Emin’s reputation in Britain was being built on familiar strategies in art history and criticism: the elision of art and life and the mythology of expressive genius. Writing in the catalogue for Emin’s exhibition I Need Art Like I Need God, published by Jay Jopling, Sarah Kent asserted ‘Emin’s subject matter is herself; her life story is the source of her pain and pride. She mines this resource relentlessly . . . ’20 In his assessment of the young British artists as ‘high art lite’ Julian Stallabrass expressed concern over the asymmetry of life and art, characterizing Emin (alongside Damien Hirst and Gary Hume) as ‘famous for being famous’, an artist whose fame is at risk of colliding with, even compromising, the expressive message of her art. Stallabrass considered that the greatest danger is that ‘Emin’s subjectivity and its expression become conceptual signs of the exercise of elite and knowing taste’. His discussion with its generous quotations from Emin’s interviews assisted his conclusion that her art was ‘confessional and selfexploratory’.21 But the stories are not only or always Tracey Emin’s. Critics and journalists have revelled in retelling a ‘rags to riches’ fairytale of a working-class girl growing up in the seaside town of Margate who became a famous artist in London; with its trials and tribulations, this limited life story makes for excellent copy for a newspaper press which thrives on sensation and enjoys a certain philistinism.22 They have tirelessly repeated that view that Emin’s is an art from the heart, wrought from and expressive of her personal experience. It comes as no surprise therefore when criticism of Emin’s art is couched as a satiety with her stories: Guardian critic Adrian Searle complained: ‘Once I was touched by your stories. Now you are only a bore’.23 It may also be the case that while Searle is wearied by the artist, there is a more widely shared impatience with the refrain that Emin’s art is no more than Tracey’s life.

Stinking Tracey Emin’s reputation as the most notorious of art’s ‘bad girls’ was fuelled by the associations of My Bed with an aesthetics of dirt and disgust.24 Edgy stuff this woman artist playing dirty, provoking over-excited descriptions of ‘urine-stained sheets’,

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‘heavily-soiled knickers’ and ‘used condoms’. Boyd Tonkin catechized ‘Tracey Emin’s notorious unmade bed, lapped with its scummy tide of soiled knickers, empty bottles, used condoms and discarded pharmaceuticals’.25 In a short paragraph of 26 lines on the Turner Prize, The Independent mentioned ‘soiled’ sheets’ (twice), ‘dirty knickers, cigarette butts and other debris’.26 Savouring a scandal in which ‘Tate warns that soiled bed may offend’, the Daily Telegraph delighted in listing ‘several pairs of heavily soiled knickers,’ ‘urine-stained sheets and pillows’, ‘smoked cigarettes, condoms, packets of contraceptive-pills, empty vodka bottles, a pregnancy testing kit, sanitary towels, nylons and three pairs of her dirty knickers’.27 Yet My Bed in all its variations is a thoughtfully composed assemblage of items arranged around a central object of a bed base. The linen is both rumpled and smoothed, white and stained; beside the soiled items are pristine objects including glistening clear glass. Encountered in daily life, all these items would exude distinctive and powerful smells: sweaty feet, stinky ashtrays, stale body fluids of semen, blood or urine. My Bed has been sanitized. It emits no strong odour. Nevertheless, a stink metaphor, already in circulation for Emin’s art, drifted around My Bed. Neal Brown had already celebrated her art as an ‘undeodorised song of poetic extremity about the human need for celebration and consolation’.28 The odoriferous metaphor returned in The Guardian’s headline, ‘Clever Tracey! That bed causing a stink in the Tate has rocketed Tracey Emin from minor celebrity to mass notoriety’.29 Discussions of dirt and evocations of disgust placed My Bed in a supplementary economy of excess which, adding to and abutting discourses on femininity, heightened sensations of transgression swirling around Emin and her art. Writings on abject art and the female grotesque alongside feminist, critical and philosophical theorizations of abjection came to the fore in the mid-1990s.30 Artistic practice and critical writings addressing bodily emissions have been highly gendered. If human shit and animal dung have been utilized in works by male artists such as Piero Manzoni, Gilbert and George, or Chris Ofili, menstrual blood became highly visible in the politics of feminist art of the 1970s. The detritus around the bed such as bloody knickers, tampons, contraceptives and pregnancy tests, and included in the smaller installations displayed in New York, make reference, at least for some viewers, to earlier feminist interventions as well as pointing to menstruation and fertility. The bloody tampon echoes Judy Chicago’s Red Flag in which she photographed herself removing a tampon or her Menstruation Bathroom (Womanhouse, 1972), filled with bloody sanitary pads, tampons, and a bloodstained floor or perhaps Carolee Schneemann’s performance Interior Scroll (1975) in which the artist withdrew a tightly rolled script from her vagina.31 Emin’s references to menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, rape, like her evocation of the explosive rage of pain or the destructiveness of guilt may have commonalities with feminist practices of an earlier generation in speaking the unspoken, breaking the silence, about domestic violence or sexual abuse. The titles of Emin’s small installations, The history of painting, point to one of the most intense debates in 1990s feminist art in the 1980s and 1990s, the possibilities of a feminist practice in relation to the traditions of the old masters.32 In 1996 Emin lived and painted in a gallery space in Stockholm for several weeks. Taken with cameras embedded in the gallery walls, photographs of her performance, Exorcism of the last painting I ever made (1996), captured scenes of active work and quiet

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domesticity in a space crowded with paintings and drawings; a neatly made single bed scattered with art works, art materials and clothing, a line of washing strung above it, quite at odds with artistic and aesthetic conventions of the female nude. Even so, Emin’s relation to feminist artists and writers, theorists and teachers has been one of ambivalence and disavowal.33 Jane Beckett considered that young women artists at art college, like Emin, were aware of previous and current feminist practice and informed about ‘the networks of power in the politics of pleasure and work, making shrewd use of a feminist politics in the strategies they adopt’. She emphasized their take-up of ‘a cult of subjectivity, the cultivation of the self ’, shared with consumerist and celebrity cultures.34 For Rosemary Betterton, although Emin’s ‘use of a domestic aesthetic, personal life story and craft techniques’ connect to earlier feminist art, Emin has little in common with her feminist predecessors and contemporaries, neither sharing nor participating in the collective politics, gender subversions and resistances of feminism in all its diversity. Emin, she underlined, happily adopts the mythology of the artist as an individual expressive genius, decisively rejected by feminist art and art writing.35

Jumping The title of My Bed suggests ownership; the use of the first personal pronoun evokes someone to whom the bed belongs.36 For many viewers and reviewers this is unequivocally the artist herself. Jacques Derrida has indicated the title of a work of art acts as a borderline, a boundary but not a conclusive limit, over which meaning can spill and proliferate in the movement of débordement. As he explains in ‘Living On: Borderlines’: ‘If we are to approach a text, it must have an edge.’37 Yet as he also indicates, the title does not work all by itself. The ‘edge’ is given by the presentational matrix of title, signature, and what he identifies as ‘the unity of the corpus’, that is, the notion that the works of a singular author are arranged to have an identifiable coherence. As Derrida explained on other occasions,38 the signature connects the author to the work, the artist to the art. It comes to stand in for the person who signed the work and in so doing acts as the guarantor that this work of art was created by this named artist. At the Turner Prize exhibition, Emin’s signature was staged within and by the installation as a whole, with the mutually referential handwritten texts, declamatory textiles and neons, memorabilia and ‘home videos’ (along with the gallery leaflet and information boards). The ensemble could, for some, encourage all too easy elisions between life and art and confusions between the two that allowed Emin’s art to be reduced to the narration of a singular self. At one point during the Turner Prize exhibition, two artists, Cai Yuan and Xi Jianjun, removed some of their clothes, rushed onto the bed, shouting and jumping, and enjoyed a pillow fight. While for the media this was a fun event, for the artists it was one of a series of witty yet serious performances generated by an artistic, social and political activism. Intervening in London galleries and exhibitions they saw themselves as ‘artistic space invaders’, their ironic and playful self-publicity designed to call attention to the presence of Chinese artists in the UK and to expose the sensationalism of contemporary British art and its press: ‘We are not trying to shock, we just want to show how spontaneous art is superior to the institutionalized art which dominates the

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Turner Prize’.39 Although the title of their performance, Two Naked Men Jump on Tracey’s Bed, still attributed ownership of the bed to Emin, possession was temporarily transferred. Their performance transformed My Bed materially – it was reinstalled by the artist – and semiotically, spilling its meanings over the borderline of confessional art and personal experience. My Bed was the perfect stage to foreground the Western art world’s restrictive desires for Chinese artists to be ‘authentic’.

Listening In Tokyo, New York and London, My Bed was surrounded by declamations figured in cool neon, the agonized cry ‘Every part of me is bleeding’ for example, and hectically patterned textiles. Psyco Slut, the blanket exhibited in New York includes statements which directly address a second person: ‘I didn’t know I had to ask to share your life’, ‘You see I’m one of the best’, ‘You know how much I love you’. More open-ended interrogations and assertions characterize the blanket piece selected for London No chance (what a year): ‘some times nothing seems to make sense and everything seems so far away’; ‘they were the ugly cunts’; ‘at the age of 13 why the hell should I trust anyone’; ‘no fucking way, I said no’. ‘The year was / seventy seven’ and the tattered union flag point to 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, when Emin at 13 was raped and dropped out of school.40 ‘No chance’ is richly ambivalent: a gesture of defiance and rebellion, a cry of despair about the lack of opportunity in a small provincial and decaying seaside town, a direct refusal of a request or demand, the title of a punk song. Not simply attributable to the artist, these outcries and appeals contribute to a cacophony of voices oscillating indeterminately from women’s to men’s, from feminine to masculine, from voices in the head to voices in the street, from past to present, on a spectrum from private pain to public recrimination, not one by one, but all at once. Listening, the bed becomes an arena for occasions and events: sexual abuse and harassment, terror and physical danger, strife and conflict, fear and oppression; it was encircled by speaking, screaming, shouting, whispering, muttering, by stories of love, abuse, sex, abortion, desertion and promiscuity. The voices are conflicting, contradictory, varied in tone and emotional resonance, addressed as much to the speaker herself as to unseen figures from the artist’s life who may or may not have been listening, directed perhaps to the audience, no longer observers but listeners, engaged and absorbed. Voices swirled around the bed, disarming the comforts of cosy slippers and cuddly toy, charging the linen and adult clothing with memories of childhood and adolescence, lightening-strike reminders that the intimate spaces of home can be dangerous places. As Emin suggested of My Bed: ‘It looks like the scene of a crime as if someone has just died or been fucked to death’.41 This multi-vocality is characteristic of Emin’s blanket pieces which stitch together intricacies of love and desire, sexual thrill and sexual terror. Garden of Horror (1998) weaves a mesmerizing spell, its broken grammar and lack of punctuation giving rise to multiple ambiguities of pleasure and pain: ‘You don’t fuck / me over / you gently lift me out of bed / lay me on the floor / and make love to me’, ‘Whats your ideal of betrayal’, ‘Welcome to my garden of horror / and you know I love you’. Using personalized forms

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such as ‘I’ and ‘my’, Emin address her audience directly through the voice, not necessarily or exclusively her own. To interpret her art as the artist speaking about herself is to reduce or even to refuse its impact, to narrow it down to the expression and experience of a single woman.

Bedding A sagging, stained mattress is propped up against a wall in Au Naturel (1994), one of Sarah Lucas’s artworks interrogating sexuality and sexual difference. Impossible to sleep or rest upon, its surface is interrupted by two groupings of objects placed on it: a bucket and two melons on one side, a cucumber and two oranges on the other. Long a stage for the performance of the female nude, upturned the mattress becomes the site for the play of fantasies and cultural representations as the artist trades with her audiences the crude sexual stereotypes in circulation in contemporary culture. My Bed offers markers of sexual difference, such as the men’s and women’s underwear. Numerous little indicators announce the passage of time: cigarette butts, empty bottles, the depletion of the candle, blister pill packs, the Polaroids. In Tokyo and New York a rope noose was suspended from the ceiling; at its first outing dollar bills were placed beside the bed and the piece installed adjacent to a wooden box. A prominent neon announced ‘My cunt is wet with fear’. With Doyen’s bondage photograph of Emin in the accompanying brochure, the ensemble including the work that would become My Bed conjured (auto)asphyxiation and auto-eroticism, BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadomasochism), sex tourism and sex work. The noose recalls a children’s game, suggests a form of execution or suicide, and augurs violent abuse and death. Emin later reminisced: ‘The whole show had a kind of feeling of bondage and being trapped.’42 While the noose returned at Lehmann Maupin, overt indicators of BDSM were eliminated in New York and London as My Bed was couched in the narratives of the aftermath of a short period of mental illness. In an era of disturbing anxieties about life and death, in the century of AIDS which has seen the return of tuberculosis and the persistence of malaria, in a period in Britain which has been characterized by chronic crises of a national health service in which access to life-saving treatment can be a lottery and a hospital visit hazardous even fatal, the bed, the mortuary slab and operating table slide into one another in the work of several contemporary artists. Rachel Whiteread’s numerous bed pieces, inviting yet denying rest, inaccessible cots by Permindar Kaur or Mona Hatoum, Richard Hamilton’s brutal Treatment Room (1984) or Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych (1992) play on/prey on oscillations between life and death. None has the comforts usually associated with the bed in consumer culture of the 1980s and 1990s with its boom in home decoration and plethora of styles from the minimalist to the ornate. Or the ordinariness of the everyday experiences and rites of passage – birth, sleeping, dreaming, having sex and dying – that take place in bed. Conspicuous signs of a surfeited consumer culture, mattresses litter urban landscapes, ejected from the domestic home to be pitched against walls, tossed into vacant lots and alleyways: fly-tipping tends to occur more in areas of social deprivation. While politicians and agencies argue over the numbers of homeless people and the

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effectiveness of various policies, one form of homelessness, rough sleeping, has become acutely critical and acutely visible. Huddled figures sleep by day and by night in doorways and alleyways, on pavements and under bridges. Few have the luxury of a mattress. It is at this moment of profound change in the configurations of social exclusion that the bed and the mattress have come to have a deepening significance. While My Bed may be the outcome of the artist’s depression, it also speaks of and points to larger social themes of transit and displacement. In the broader contemporary narratives of home and homelessness, My Bed becomes a temporary halt en route in which the discarded objects point perhaps to the transience of a zone in space as much as a moment in time. Homelessness has been a major issue in the later twentieth century, whether defined in terms of accommodation or the broader debates about migration and diaspora. Shelter, a charity particularly concerned with homelessness, defines homelessness not simply as sleeping rough, but more broadly as having access only to temporary, inadequate or unsafe accommodation. Shelter also indicate that young people, especially women also constitute a vulnerable group, at risk of homelessness and sexual predation.43 About more than access to accommodation, homelessness has become entangled in debates about migration and diaspora, the movement of peoples across national borders, and widening concerns about statelessness.44

Moving My Bed was made and exhibited during the passage of the Immigration and Asylum Act of 1999, part of a substantial raft of legislation in Britain in the 1990s designed to harmonize policies across the member states of the European Union. From the White Paper of 1998 to the bill becoming law in the following year, apocalyptic visions of waves of immigrants pouring into Britain were partnered with spectres of illegal entry and bogus welfare claims. As numbers were perceived to escalate, asylum became the flash point for the major social trend of the 1990s, the movement of peoples from outside to inside the European Union and to Britain. The Immigration and Asylum Act of 1999, which attempted to deter movement across borders, ran alongside the introduction of a harsher regime for those seeking asylum in Britain. The living conditions of refugees and asylum seekers, as numerous agencies testified, steadily worsened to the extent that they came to be recognized as a critical category in Britain’s homeless population.45 Emin’s exhibitions in Tokyo, New York and London all included two suitcases. One suitcase was reportedly used by Emin when she left home.46 Signs of travel, scuffed and worn, the suitcases carry traces of past journeys and pre-figure those that are to come. Part of a distinct installation in New York, purposefully titled Leaving Home, in London, close by the bed, they spoke of a life lived out of cases, re-casting the scattered objects as transient possessions which might be salvaged, packed and harboured in transit, abandoned when needed. Yet if the suitcases suggest movement, bound with chains and rope and tied together, they become unmovable, immobile, their contents inaccessible. The suitcases become emblematic of a profound divide in global migration between stasis and travel, forced and voluntary transit, restrictions and free movement,

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highlighted by Homi Bhabha in a statement quoted by Kwon: ‘The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers.’47 For her London showing Emin created a space that spanned the borders of Europe, from its western edges to its eastern borders, mapping a dynamic space of interaction and confrontation. The child of a Turkish Cypriot father, Emin grew up in the Hotel International in Margate (run by her mother, Patricia Cashin), having spent part of her early life in Turkey. For a show taking place in a museum that was preparing to take up a new and difficult identity as Tate Britain, Emin’s cartography encompassed her sojourns in and memories of Turkey, sea-bathing with her father Enver Emin on another shore line, name checks from ‘Thanet’ to ‘Istanbul’ and place indicators from the Turkish flag glimpsed in Tracey Emin C.V. Cunt Vernacular to the tattered British union flag in No Chance. Unlike the many parodic and stereotypical British references identified in the art of the young British artists, Emin’s markers are neither ironic nor nostalgic.48 Emin’s diasporic heritage may well have prompted this mapping. Yet it also took place within a wider context of international relations. Analysts of the New Europe of the 1990s have argued that attempts to reconcile divergencies between member states and to promote a shared European culture while allowing for distinct national identities were accompanied by intense policing of the boundaries of the European Union, some casting this as the making of ‘Fortress Europe’. Phil Marfleet emphasized increasingly exclusionary policies and legislation on asylum and immigration. Sarah Collinson indicated that the Mediterranean – from the straits of Gibraltar to the Bosporus – was defined as a key boundary and subjected to heightened surveillance.49 This reconfiguration of the edges of Europe drew a line at Turkey, enjoyed by many Europeans as a holiday destination, but then as now excluded from membership of the European Union. Emin’s exhibition space in London brought together two countries on the edge, one (then) within, one without the European Union, tracing diasporic paths and movements between the two, and mapping connections and disjunctions shaped not only by her own family but more broadly by international politics and the legacies of colonial histories. To situate My Bed within some of the concerns of the contemporary moment in which it was made and exhibited is to suggest a range of potential meanings conjured by the distinct installations in Tokyo, New York and London. This is not to say that My Bed expresses this historical conjunction, any more than it expresses the artist. It has been seductively simple to see Emin’s art as Emin and much harder to take it as an autonomous artwork about migration, diaspora and sexual difference.

Moving On In its early years My Bed appeared in company with other works by Emin, encircling it in multi-media aurality, vocality and visuality. In the past two decades My Bed has become extracted as a singular, signature work, its companions predominantly historic works of British art. As time has passed and the artist has aged, My Bed’s engagement

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with its contemporary moment has been replaced with a trans-historical valency; it is hailed as the artist’s major art output and positioned in the history of British art. My Bed’s passage through exhibitions, museum displays and auction houses, in and out of storage (the default condition for much contemporary art), alongside its appearance in print and online, constitute what may be identified as the work’s ‘social life’. In an intricate and lengthy analysis of the circulation of commodities as ‘objects of economic value’ that ‘are associated with capitalist modes of production’, Arjun Appadurai outlined what he identified as the ‘social life’ of things. His exposition offers intriguing ways to account for the histories of an individual art work and artworks as a category of luxury objects. Appadurai emphasizes the movements of objects, their ‘paths and diversions’, and their participation in ‘tournaments of value’, arguing that ‘valuables acquire very specific biographies as they move from place to place and hand to hand’. For an art work ‘tournaments of value’ may include high-value auctions and sales as well as entry into and departure from prestigious collections. For Appadurai, the cumulative acquisition of an object’s ‘social life’ is accompanied by the generation and distribution of knowledge about it; knowledge, he argues, is produced at differentiated stages in the object’s life history, as are discontinuities and lacuna in interpretation.50 My Bed’s first three appearances (discussed in ‘On the Move’ above) may be said to comprise the first chapter of its social life; although non-identical, they share an artistic coherence. The second and third chapters of My Bed’s social life may be demarked by its passage through the ‘tournaments of value’ of auction sales and high-visibility, highvalue purchases. The second chapter opened in 2000 when My Bed was purchased by Charles Saatchi, a ‘super-collector’ closely associated with young British artists, who had already acquired Everyone I have ever slept with 1963–1995, and The Hut, re-titled The last thing I said to you is don’t leave me here. My Bed was shown at Saatchi’s Boundary Road gallery in North London, at County Hall London, and reputedly in his home dining room. Its major appearance was in the artist’s acclaimed retrospective Tracey Emin: 20 Years (Edinburgh, Malaga and Bern, 2008–9), in which it was, once again, in dialogue with earlier as well as more recent artworks by Emin. Loans were comparatively rare in these years. Dispatched to Adelaide to contribute to a showcase of Saatchi’s collection, My Bed did not feature in Emin’s 2011 London retrospective, Love Is What You Want.51 In 2014 Saatchi consigned My Bed for auction at Christie’s in London, an action that opened the third chapter and shaped its future. My Bed was transferred, by way of Emin’s London dealer, to a private collection and from thence to long loan at Tate and its showings in 2015–18. The sale catalogue included an essay about My Bed, an interview with Emin, photographs of each component, and a method statement detailing its assembly. The familiar narratives were restated: ‘My Bed stands as a confessional, exposing Emin’s personal life, replete with all its indiscretions, insecurities, and imperfections’.52 After brisk bidding, My Bed was bought by Jay Jopling on behalf of his client, German industrialist and art collector Count Christian Duerckheim, the sale price realizing more than double the top estimate. In this third chapter, My Bed has been highly visible and frequently celebrated in the public domain. In 2015 My Bed returned to Tate, installed in a room adjacent to displays of recent and contemporary

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art that complete the chronological survey that constitutes a ‘Walk Through British Art’ at Tate Britain. By contrast to artists represented nearby, Emin was invited to select companion pieces from Tate’s historical collection: she chose two paintings by Francis Bacon – Study of a Dog (1952) and Reclining Woman (1961), showing a woman reclining in a pose not dissimilar to those in Emin’s monoprints or Doyen’s photograph, Portrait of the Artist Age 18 – 1983 – as well as a small selection of her own works on paper. Emin’s comment on the room revealed her artist’s eye, her careful and studied looking at Bacon’s work, and her long-standing attention to works by other artists: The paintings that I’ve chosen like these big, undulating roles of flesh and these things turning and these folds and everything, and it’s much the same as the bed; the bed is folding, the bed is turning, the bed is moving. Francis Bacon’s paintings aren’t static, they’ve got total movement and so has the bed.53

She considered that ‘there would be a really good dialogue between the intensity and anger in his work and the way the bed has this sense of collapse and seems completely forlorn’. She remarked: ‘I like the waves of the bed, the way it resembles a river. I like the blood red colour – it is so intense. It would have been too obvious for me to show one of his bed paintings.’ Of the contrast she commented: ‘With My Bed, its strength is getting the sense that someone has just got out of it. In the Bacon picture, if this figure were to get up, you’d actually see where she had been lying’.54 The display also included six drawings by her, donated by Emin to Tate, ‘because I wanted something which I’m making right now to accompany the bed’. These works, she contended enhanced the viewing of the other works: ‘there’s this chaos, there’s this body, there’s this movement. The person in those drawings could’ve just walked out of that bed and that also relates to Bacon as well.’55 The following year My Bed was shipped to Tate Liverpool as the centrepiece of a year-long In-Focus display at Tate Liverpool, after which it travelled to Turner Contemporary in Margate, the artist’s home town. In each venue associations were established with an historical British artist, William Blake in Liverpool, John Mallard William Turner in Margate, between My Bed and the selected artworks, and between the life-styles of the artists.56 These British artists were preferred to the European expressionists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele with whom Emin associates herself, claiming on occasion ‘I am Van Gogh, I am Egon Schiele, I am Edvard Munch, I am working with my emotions’.57 In the first chapter of its social life, My Bed was staged within a dynamic synergy given by the artist’s contemporaneous art works. In its later chapters it became a separate entity which travels independently as a singular work positioned within an art historical canon centred largely but not exclusively around British art. My Bed continues to be ‘tethered’ to the artist as Emin features as chief protagonist, progenitor and authoritative interpreter of her work: the concept of ‘tethering’ is borrowed from Derrida to encapsulate a restrictive binding of art to artist that constrains the work’s débordement.58 Emin’s video interview for Tate in 2015 restated the work’s originary narrative in her mental illness:

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In 1998 I had a complete, absolute breakdown, and I spent four days in bed; I was asleep and semi-unconscious. When I eventually did get out of bed, I had some water, went back, looked at the bedroom and couldn’t believe what I could see; this absolute mess and decay of my life, and then I saw the bed out of that context of this tiny, tiny, bedroom, and I saw it in just like a big, white space. I realized that I had to move the bed and everything into the gallery space.59

Later manifestations have prompted retrospection, a separation of then and now: I think now people see the bed as a very different thing. With history and time, the bed now looks incredibly sweet and there’s this enchantment to it. I think people will see it differently as they see me differently. And there are things on that bed that now have a place in history. Even forms of contraception, the fact that I don’t have periods anymore, the fact that the belt that went round my waist now only fits around my thigh. . . . I hope, 15 years later, people will finally see it as a portrait of a younger woman and how time affects all of us.60

In what Miwon Kwon identifies as ‘the intricate orchestration of literal and discursive sites’61 interviews with the artist, dealer sponsored and facilitated publications with approved partners and authors, the links between public art institutions and the commercial market, and media photographs continue to tether the art to the artist. It would seem, perhaps, that the ‘politics of value’ associated by Arjun Appadurai with the generation of knowledge lie here in the asset of an ‘art of disclosure’.62 Each time My Bed is exhibited, there are variations – in the formal presentation, in the orientation of the bed, the placing of the table and the arrangement of the objects. The suitcases move around. On a wooden base supporting a mattress are bed linen and pantyhose; cluttered alongside, mostly on a piece of blue carpet, is an assortment of items usually including a low table, bottles, slippers, underwear, a belt, cigarette pack and an ashtray of stubs, cigarette papers, a pregnancy tester, blister packs of pills, bandages and tissues, loose change, a used tampon and applicator, condoms, packs of contraceptive pills, a tube of KY jelly, condom packets, Polaroid (self)portraits and a white fluffy toy. While the conceptual platform of a bed with linen and the repertory of associated articles remains relatively consistent, there have been substitutions (the candle and its holder) and material changes as artefacts (the newspaper, condoms) have degraded. The mattress cover with broad striped fabric has been replaced with one of fine striped ticking. Liga Legzdina Olsen discovered that the first inventory was created in October 2012; it is, she argued, incomplete and provisional since My Bed is not ‘a static object’. Olsen rightly judged that the making of the inventory ‘marks a turning point in the history of My Bed’, signalling ‘a change in the perception of the work’s physical, material form’.63 The inventory makes no mention, for example, of the tangle of bandages and absorbent materials crammed into the legs of the table from Tokyo to Margate. [The 2012 inventory is given at the end of this chapter.] In 2014 the art historian Martin Kemp, noting various changes to My Bed since 1998, remarked: ‘Look at the various incarnations of My Bed and it’s clear that the

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detritus of Emin’s legendary four days in bed has been reconfigured a good deal. . . . It’s not just some things not arranged scrupulously, which is fine. They’re actually different items’. These divergences and his sense that the bed linens did not bear the impress of a human body, raised the question of authenticity. Granting My Bed a level of artistic autonomy, Emin did not refute Kemp’s comments: The bed came directly from my flat. When I say ‘My Bed’ I mean it was the idea of the artwork . . . The bed has gone through many transformations. In a way it’s a self-portrait. It’s like a ‘Descartes-ian’ theory of the soul: the candle burns, but the wax still remains in a different form . . . As I get older my face changes, my skin changes. . . . Every time I reinstall the bed it will always be different. [After my death], the people . . . will install it differently because of the nature of how I haunt the room. The bed is the physical ghost of my own existence. 64

Emin confirmed My Bed’s variation in an interview in 2014: ‘every time it’s different. Because every time I’m in a slightly different mood. But it always still looks the same, it still looks iconic’. She also noted ‘In Japan I used another mattress – I didn’t even have the money to ship the original mattress over. But the mattress you [Christie’s] have is my original mattress.’65 Later videos show Emin directing the position of the bed frame, smoothing out the sheets, lying on the bed, ruffling its linen and arranging the small objects.66 In her detailed study of installation art Claire Bishop assessed the ‘fine line between an installation of art and installation art’, both of which have ‘a desire to heighten the viewer’s awareness of how objects are positioned (installed) in a space’. Focusing on immersive and participatory forms, installation art, she argued, ‘presupposes an embodied viewer whose senses of touch, smell and sound are as heightened as their sense of vision’; this ‘insistence on the literal presence of the viewer is arguably the key characteristic of installation art’.67 Although Emin’s installations have not engaged an ‘activated’ spectator called to action or to activism, they have solicited emotional affect and corporeal reaction, attributable perhaps to the artist’s deft exploitation of the centrality of the viewer in installation art as much as her affective storytelling. My Bed may be considered an installed work. Yet with its theatricality, enclosure and curtain, Emin’s showing in Tokyo can be considered as an ensemble installation in which all elements interacted together. In Tokyo and London Emin exploited the gallery space to create multi-media installations. Each staging of My Bed has had its own dynamic, exploiting the positioning of the bed, the suitcases and the attendant art works in the space, the complex self-referentiality across several media, the colour of the walls, the availability of natural or artificial light, the light levels and directions. The melodrama of Sagacho Exhibit Space, the drama of a dark blue wall in Edinburgh, the deep red walls at Tate Liverpool, the cool presentation at Tate Britain, and the muted solemnity at Turner Contemporary, all create distinct responses. The ensemble in London beguiled visitors to read, to watch video, to immerse themselves in Tracey’s stories and objects, to come up close to inspect drawings and memorabilia, to examine the detail of stitch, a thread, a stain, a drawn line, a slew of handwritten scripts, a conjunction of variously textured fabrics, an assembly of small

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objects, to stand back to assess the spatial conjunctions between art works placed on the floor and the walls. It is these installations and ensembles that shape responses to Emin’s art. Like so many contemporary artists Emin has a distinct preference for recycling and up-cycling objects and materials, artistic strategies characteristic of installation art and the modernist deployment of found objects. Bishop highlighted the ‘associational value of found materials’ in installation art, tracing a shift from the use of objects to signify ‘everyday life’ to a ‘subversion of our ingrained responses to the dominant repertoire of cultural meanings’.68 The ‘associational values’ of the objects that comprise My Bed have been fastened to Emin’s biography; these are, it is frequently repeated, everyday objects from the everyday life of the artist. Variation and variability have been considerably debated in conservation studies to address the ways in which artists reprise, remake, reconfigure and rework installations, to deal with highly complex yet transitory art works and the challenges of volatile, fragile and ephemeral materials.69 To account for variation in installation art conservation theorist Tina Fiske has drawn on Jacques Derrida’s concept of iterability outlined in his essay ‘Signature event context’. Fiske’s concern is how to assess ‘differences that arise between incarnations of a work,’ or ‘the role played in that respect by absence or rupture’. Following Derrida, she defines iteration as ‘a particular mode of repetition that mobilizes notions of breach, absence and difference’.70 Derrida’s iterability, she proposes, is ‘a mode of repetition that, rather than “aspiring to the fulfilment of the original”, searches or reaches beyond the original itself ’, quoting Derrida’s insight that ‘The structure of iteration – and this is another of its decisive traits – implies both identity and difference’.71 If as Fiske proposes, every iteration is a reiteration, then it follows that each installation is a reinstallation, a variation that does not seek recourse to or reprise an originary first assembly. Although My Bed is not among the more challenging installations to assemble, there have been divergences in its elements and arrangements as well as curatorial narratives. Fiske’s conclusions allow the separation and analysis of each iteration, together with an acknowledgement of the breaks, rupture and divergence that characterize My Bed’s making. A serious scholarly literature on My Bed developed in the second chapter of its social life, 2000–2014. Theoretical and philosophical approaches shifted the debates in pivotal areas such as My Bed’s appeal to its audiences and its relation to the artist. In its early years My Bed sparked a wide range of reactions. What then is its allure? For Kieran Cashell Emin’s work elicits ‘emotionally expressive responses’, inciting ethical and responsible responses. My Bed and Everyone I have ever slept with 1963–1995 (1995), are, he contends, ‘cognate works, sharing a preoccupation with the privacy of sleep and the ultimate solitude of the self . . . they share a cognate anxiety that originates in the fear of abandonment.’ With its ‘indigent possessions – leavings, remains’ and the suitcases signifying ‘nomadic absence’, My Bed is characterized by a profound absence. Refuting aesthetic disinterestedness, Cashell argues in his study of transgressive art, that ‘Engaging with Emin’s work means to consent to the particular emotional challenge it sets. This challenge ultimately involves a process of empathy or “active sympathy” – the identification with the other’s subjective life that has been described as “a matter of feeling oneself into the experience of the other.” ’ He continues,‘What elicits the ethically

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significant emotional responses in Emin’s art is precisely its resistance to traditional aesthetic categories’.72 Drawing on the writings of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Cashell’s thesis is one of several new approaches characterized by theoretical and critical input. Feminist and queer theory and methodologies have substantially transformed studies of Emin’s art and writings. In one of the most sophisticated approaches to Emin, Jennifer Doyle reflected on her encounter with My Bed at Lehmann Maupin in which she experienced ‘an intense identification with the affect of the work’. She identifies what she calls ‘the effect of intimacy’ engaged by ‘Emin’s solicitation of our desire and interest’. She surmises that Emin’s art and writings are ‘intersubjective’ in their address, interpellating spectators through melodrama and sensationalism, and staging ‘a fantasy encounter’ of an intersubjective alliance ‘between her, and you, and me’. Moving away from adjudications of Emin’s veracity, she considers ‘The blurring of the boundary between Emin’s person, her work and her public persona is an important effect of the work itself, and not simply because the work is so explicitly autobiographical’. Emin’s work, she writes, ‘invites us to take it personally. . . . It is difficult to evacuate the personal, the intimate, from discussion of Emin’s work’, which in turn ‘makes it hard to defend the work’s aesthetic’.73 In these years, Emin’s art and writings were assessed within the literary strategies and visual forms of the diary, confession, gendered life-writing, women’s autobiography and what Laura Marcus calls the ‘staging of memory’.74 A wide range of feminist/queer studies of Emin’s art and writing has produced new evaluations, including a radical revision of Emin’s authenticity, a central issue in the early reception of My Bed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson perceive Emin’s autobiographical declamations as unrestrained extravagance. They emphasize Emin’s ‘insistent, excessive self-referentiality’, her ‘dramatizing and flaunting [of] auto-biographical conventions’ and her ‘extreme artistic selfreference’, though they qualify this slightly. In Emin’s work, the seemingly excessive disclosure of her personal past presented through installations, diaries, videos, and so on, could be read as both exploiting and flaunting gendered norms of female decorum. Nice girls, well-brought-up girls, simply do not rehearse their intimate lives in public, let alone display the sordid leavings of them. Emin’s public presentation of intimacy seems to mimic the stereotype that those of working-class origins are less concerned about decorum than the middle class.

This playing up/playing upon Emin’s working-class heritage was certainly evident in the first chapter of My Bed’s social life, a regular feature in yBa appeal. Smith and Watson stress Emin’s autobiographical performance in My Bed, which they aver, offers ‘Emin’s provocative use of the material of her life, rather than an interpretation of it’.75 They make much of Alison Donnell’s discussion of feminist auto/biographical strategies: The explosion of criticism surrounding autobiography, and particularly women’s autobiography, over the last twenty years, has demonstrated that as a genre autobiography can be likened to a restless and unmade bed; a site on which discursive, intellectual and political practices can be remade; a ruffled surface on which the

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traces of previous occupants can be uncovered and/or smoothed over; a place for secrets to be whispered and to be buried; a place for fun, desire and deep worry to be expressed. Many of the most influential women writers of the twentieth century have chosen to make this bed and some to lie in it too.76

Laura Lake Smith highlights the performance of authenticity in Emin’s art and writing, noting frequent variant retellings, ‘the varied formal structures she devises, the kinds of characters she creates’. In Emin’s combination of ‘intimate subject matter’ and an ‘unrefined aesthetic’, ‘seemingly autobiographical details emerge with a powerful sense of immediacy and work to establish an ostensibly authentic tone’. Promoted as ‘purportedly [displaying] her actual bed’, My Bed, Laura Lake Smith contends, ‘was taken to be divulging intimate autobiographical details, an impression that Emin was keen to bolster while doing the media rounds’.77 For Lake Smith and others Emin’s is an art of performance, deploying carefully articulated formal means that owe much to the literatures of confession, selffashioning and autobiography. These analyses build on Rosemary Betterton’s inference: ‘Through her work and performances, she brings “Tracey Emin” into being as an artistic identity whose honesty of self-exposure is her trade-mark.’78 Sharing a scepticism about Emin’s work as unchecked outpourings of her feelings and experiences, Joan Gibbons also flags the ‘wide range of approaches and strategies through which she [Emin] stages past events and experiences’. By drawing on representational methods and mediations of memory in popular culture, My Bed, she writes, ‘portrays Emin’s life in forms that are actual and familiar, and in this case, quite domestic’. She concludes, ‘Rather than meeting a need to confess, the self-absorption of Emin’s work can be seen as a means by which she copes post-traumatically with the cruelties and abuses of her life’. In shifting from art to artist, Gibbons maintains a feminist focus on the woman artist as agent and subject.79 Smith and Watson, quoted above, perceive My Bed as emblematic of Emin’s attitudes to norms of femininity and gender stereotyping. In a perceptive discussion of feminist textile practice Julia Skelly identifies Emin’s subversion of normative femininity. My Bed, she writes, is a ‘darkly ironic take on the domestic bed, that is neither matrimonial nor safe, even if “safe sex” is being practised’; the noose, when present, adds ‘suicidal overtones’. For Skelly Emin’s art acknowledges ‘that some women engage in selfdestructive behaviour despite the risks, despite the taboos related to female sexuality, female excretions, female abjectnesss, female emotions and emotionality’. Proposing that Emin advances a radical and feminist vision of sexuality, corporeality and emotionality, Skelly also shifts the ground from art work to artist: ‘Emin uses it all to make art. She does not hide in shame, She has refused to hide.’80 Sexuality, sexual encounters and their aftermath in Emin’s work have been scrutinized by queer theorists. In an acute analysis of My Bed, Mandy Merck discovers ‘a continuing theme in Emin’s work, where sex is not so much coupled with violence as equated with it’, a connection also found in feminist critiques of heterosexuality, psychoanalysis, and ‘a meta-psychology of sex as violence’.81 Jennifer Doyle examines Emin’s ‘bad-sex aesthetics’, registering their complexity and range: ‘The sex recorded in Emin’s work is aggressive, delirious and joyful, and loaded with fear, humiliation and anger’, accompanied by ‘hopelessly melodramatic’ romantic moments.82 Somewhat ironically, it was in this second chapter when it was largely sequestered within the

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Saatchi collection that a wide and varied range of serious scholarly writings emerged which have challenged the mythology of Emin as an expressive/expressionist artist and her art as one of candid self-revelation. Attention to My Bed’s artistic autonomy and to ‘looking at the formal qualities of the work’ (as Tate curator Elena Crippa puts it)83 remain structural lacunae in its literature, as are investigations of its altered states, variant installations and the débordements of meaning over time. So far, My Bed has three distinct chapters in its social life, each one with distinct characteristics, visibilities and literatures. If My Bed has lost its edginess, in its recent extraction from Emin’s oeuvre as her signature piece and its insertion as a major work of art in the narratives of British art, it has, along with the artist herself, become something of a national treasure.

2012 Inventory of My Bed84 Wooden bed base (140 x 186 x 36 cm) Mattress (140 x 186 x 18 cm) White sheet White Pillow x 4 White Pillowcase x 3 White Double duvet White double duvet cover White towel with orange trim Sheer nude-coloured tights Light blue lace knickers Black plastic Samsonite suitcase with green trim Multi-coloured suitcase Black length of chain Silver length of chain Rope (collective dimensions approx. 70 x 56 x 43 cm) Piece of blue carpet (95 cm deep/from bed frame) Small wooden table White cotton knickers x 2 Black leather belt Newspaper A4 White paper with hand-written text White soft toy dog with red bows Maraca – wood/metal/fabric trims Cigarette box x 3 Large cigarette box Box of Polaroid film Empty cardboard battery packaging White sunglasses case Polaroid photograph of Tracey Emin White candle in a light blue glass candleholder

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Cork from a bottle of champagne Small metal ashtray Cigarette butts Orange Rizla packet [cigarette papers] Coins – Stirling and other currencies Tube of KY Jelly Yellow & green toothbrush Orange plastic disposable razor Tampon, not wrapped x 2 Tampon applicator Condom, out of condom packet x 3 Empty condom packet x 5 Condom in condom wrapper, unopened Box of condoms Several tissues Paracetamol blister packet x 3 Medication packaging x 4 Pregnancy test Lipsalve Nail scissors Used sticking-plasters Hand mirror with black frame & handle Safety pin Apple core Sweet wrappers McDonalds BBQ Dip Vodka bottle x 3 Glass bottle of Orangina

Notes 1

2 3 4 5

The first part reprises ‘Tracey Emin’s My Bed, 1998/1999’, published online in SHARP, Sussex History of Art Papers, ‘On the move: My Bed, 1998–1999’ in Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin (London, 2002), pp. 134–54, and a paper given at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in 2001. The second part was written 2017–19. Warmest thanks to Alexandra Kokoli for her critical reading and support. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 47, 55, 51. Kwon, One Place, p. 51. Kobena Mercer, ‘Ethnicity and internationality: new British art and diaspora based Blackness’, Third Text, 49 (1999), pp. 53–5. Erika Lederman, ‘Tokyo art space’s final days’, New York Times, 26 December 2000 (accessed 1 July 2017). A current project on the history and archives of Sagacho Exhibit Space: sagacho.jp (accessed 20 July 2017).

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Art into Life Doyen, now a film and screenwriting professor at Queen Mary, University of London, was a student at Medway College of Art in the early 1980s when he knew and photographed Tracey Emin and Billy Childish; a selection of these photographs is posted on http://www.stuckism.com/eugene/ and some were selected in Tracey Emin: My Photo Album (London, 2013). See also https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/1372284/The-Emin-image-Tracey-does-not-want-you-to-see.html (accessed 14 July 2017). Clare Johnson, ‘Emin is screaming: empathy as affirmative engagement in Tracey Emin’s Homage to Edvard Munch and all my dead children (1998)’, Parallax, 16/3 (2010), pp. 96–104, also considers how curation impacts visitors’ encounter with the scream. Paula Smithard discusses sound in Emin’s installations in ‘It’s a tenuous line between sincerity and sensationalism’, Make, 76 (June/July 1997), p. 28. https://www.southlondongallery.org/exhibitions/tracey-emin-i-need-art-like-i-needgod/ (accessed 14 July 2017). Robert Preece, ‘Review of Tracey Emin, Lehmann Maupin, New York’, Sculpture, 18/10 (1999), p. 68. See also S. Spaid, ‘Tracey Emin Lehmann Maupin New York’, New Art Examiner, 27/1 (1999), p. 56. Christopher Bagley, ‘True confessions’, W (April 2001), p. 320. Roberta Smith, ‘Tracey Emin’, New York Times, 11 June 1999, p. 11. The New Yorker, 31 May 1999. Jan Avgikos, ‘Tracey Emin Lehmann Maupin New York’, Art Forum, 38/2 (1999), p. 139. Gordon Burn, ‘Clever Tracey!’, Guardian, 26 October 1999, pp. 2–3. The Independent, 24 October 1999. The News of the World, 31 October 1999. Stuart Wavell, ‘In bed with Tracey: at least the naughty schoolgirls liked it’, Sunday Times, 24 October 1999, p. 4. Sunday Mirror, 31 October 1999. Richard Cork, ‘Art mavericks win over the sceptics’, Times, 29 November 1999, p. 42. Ralph Rugoff, ‘Screaming for attention’, Financial Times, 20/21 November 1999, ‘Weekend’, p. vii. Waldemar Januszczak, Sunday Times, quoted in Jonathan Jones with Esther Addley, ‘Road to infamy: factors that conspired to create an icon’, Guardian, 26 October 1999. Richard Dorment, ‘Pick me I’m Tracey’, Daily Telegraph, 20 October, 1999. Natasha Walter, ‘It’s time for Emin to make her bed and move on’, Independent, 25 October 1999. Sarah Kent ‘Flying high’ in I Need Art Like I Need God (London: Jay Jopling, 1998), p. 37. Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite (London, 1997), pp. 17, 41–3. Marcia Pointon, ‘Savaged by Sewell’, paper given at the Association of Art Historians annual conference, 2001. Searle quoted in Jones with Addley, ‘Road to infamy’. The sobriquet comes from the ‘Bad Girls’ exhibitions at the ICA, London 1993 and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1994. Boyd Tonkin, ‘Profile: Confessions of a tease: Hanif Kureshi’, Independent, 23 October 1999. ‘The information on the Turner Prize exhibition’, The Independent, 27 October 1999. Nigel Reynolds, ‘Tate warns that soiled bed may offend’, Daily Telegraph, 20 October 1999. Neal Brown, ‘God, art and Tracey Emin’ in Tracey Emin. I Need Art Like I Need God (London, 1998), pp. 4–6. Gordon Burn, ‘Clever Tracey!’, pp. 2–3.

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30 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA, 1996), Mary J. Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London and New York, 1995). Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982). 31 For sustained discussion on Emin’s relation to feminist art, see Rosemary Betterton, ‘Why is my art not as good as me?’ in Merck and Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, pp. 22–39, and ‘Promising monsters: pregnant bodies, artistic subjectivity, and maternal imagination’, Hypatia, 21, pp. 80–100. 32 Feminist Arts News special issue on Women Painting Today, 2/4, 1987. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London, 1981). 33 Textile artist Janis Jefferies and art historian Juliet Steyn taught at Maidstone in the 1980s; on Emin’s amnesia see Betterton, ‘Why is my art’, p. 35. For feminism at Maidstone see John White’s chapter in this volume. In ‘Memories of Maidstone’ [in the 1980s], Alison Young acknowledges the inspiration and encouragement she found in teaching by feminist writers Juliet Steyn and Judith Williamson, Creative Update (summer 2012), p. 23. https://issuu.com/unicreativearts/docs/issue_7_alumni_ magazine. Theodora Philcox recalled that for the graduate shows: ‘Paintings by Tracey Emin were all over the walls in the coffee room, alongside the work of Billy Childish.’ p. 23. 34 Jane Beckett, ‘History (maybe)’ in History. The Mag Collection: Image-based Art in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century (Kingston upon Hull, 1997), pp. 136–9. 35 Betterton, ‘Why is my art’, pp. 34, 36–7. Betterton also highlights the ‘unprecedented growth in feminist publications and exhibitions’ in the 1980s. 36 In ‘Preposterous histories: maternal desire, loss, and control in Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll and Tracey Emin’s I’ve Got It All’ Clare Johnson also emphasizes the significance of the personal pronoun in marking subjectivity and possession. Feminist Media Studies, 10/3 (2010), p. 276. 37 Jacques Derrida, ‘Living on: border lines’ (1979), in P. Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader (London, 1991), p. 256. 38 Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature event context’ in Limited Inc (Evanston, 1988). 39 Quoted in D. Kennedy, ‘Feathers fly after Tate pillow fight’, Times, 25 October 1999. See also www.madforreal.com for discussions of this performative intervention. 40 See also Sarah Kent, ‘Bleeding art’, Time Out, 8–15 October 1999, p. 25. The Carpettes and Crazy released punk albums/tracks titled ‘No Chance’. 41 Kent, ‘Bleeding art’, p. 24. 42 Carl Freedman and Honey Luard, ‘Break through to the other side: interview with Carl Freedman’, Tracey Emin: Works, 1963–2006 (New York, 2009), p. 251. Tracking ‘the journey of My Bed’, Emin stated ‘it was part of a show there [Tokyo] called Sobasex’. ‘Originally, in the Japan show, the bed, along with the other works, forms part of a narrative’. 43 My thanks to Shelter, a British charity particularly concerned with homelessness, shelter.org.uk. Homelessness is chronic and still acute in Britain. https://www. theguardian.com/society/homelessness (accessed 19 June 2019). 44 Madan Sarup, ‘Home and identity’ in George Robertson et al. (eds), Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement (London, 1994), pp. 93–104. 45 John Carvel, ‘Immigration rise main social trend of 1990s’, Guardian, 25 January 2001, p. 12. On the living conditions of asylum seekers, see Refugee Council Asylum Briefing at www.gn.apc.org; ‘ECRE country report, 1999’, and other materials posted on the website of the European Commission on Refugees and Exiles, www.ecre.org; and Asylum Aid now https://consonant.org.uk. On art and migration in the previous

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Art into Life decade see my ‘Suitcase aesthetics: the making of memory in diaspora art in Britain in the later 1980s’, Art History, 40/4 (2017), pp. 784–807. Emin stated: ‘the chequered suitcase is the one I left home with when I was really young, when I was homeless and I had all my stuff in it’. She purchased the other case when travelling to Toronto for an exhibition: ‘So the Samsonite suitcase was like a signifier for me for change and movement and internationalism and just making everything different for myself. So by tying the two suitcases together, I joined my past and my future.’ https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/tracey-emin-b-1963-my-bed5813479-details.aspx (accessed 17 July 2017). Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Double Visions’, Artforum (1992), p. 88, quoted in Kwon, One Place, p. 166. For a considered discussion of the yBas’ traffic in stereotypes of Britishness, see Elizabeth Legge, ‘Reinventing derivation: roles, stereotypes, and “Young British Art” ’, Representations, no. 71 (Summer 2000), pp. 1–23. Phil Marfleet, ‘Europe’s civilising mission’ in Phil Cohen (ed.), New Ethnicities: Old Racisms (London, 1999), pp. 18–36; Sarah Collinson, Shore to Shore: The Politics of Migration in Euro-Maghreb Relations (London, 1996). Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction, commodities and the politics of value’ in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 3. 7, 18, 21, 41ff. Newspeak: British Art Now (Adelaide, 30 July–23 October 2011). Love Is What You Want (London, 18 May–29 August 2011). Privacy (Frankfurt, 2012–13). Christie’s, Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 1 July 2014, https://www. christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/tracey-emin-b-1963-my-bed-5813479-details.aspx (accessed 14 June 2019). ‘Tracey Emin, My Bed’, Tate shots, 20 April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ emin-my-bed-l03662/tracey-emin-my-bed (accessed 14 June 2019). Simon Baker, ‘Tracey Emin and Francis Bacon’, Tate Etc magazine, 34 (2015), https:// www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/perfect-bedfellows (accessed 28 June 2017). As note 53. See https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/tracey-emin-andwilliam-blake-focus and https://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/my-bed (accessed 20 July 2017). Is there a lingering regret in her recounting of the artist’s bohemian life-styles? Emin exhibited in Margate in 2012, She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea. Emin interview, 2012, https://www.schirn.de/en/exhibitions/2012/privacy/#videoEmin Derrida writes in ‘Signature event context’, ‘In order for the tethering to the source to occur, what must be retained is the absolute singularity of a signature-event and a signature-form: the pure reproducibility of a pure event.’ Derrida, ‘Signature event context’, p. 20. As note 53. Emin quoted in Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘Tracey Emin’s messy bed goes on display at Tate for first time in 15 years’, Guardian, 30 March 2015, https://www.theguardian. com/uk-news/2015/mar/30/tracey-emins-messy-bed-displayed-tate-britain-firsttime-in-15-years (accessed 14 June 2019). Kwon, One Place, p 51. https://whitecube.com/artists/artist/tracey_emin (accessed 14 June 2019). Liga Legzdina Olsen, ‘When the personal becomes too personal. the politics of the personal and the installation “My Bed” by Tracey Emin’, MA dissertation, University of

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Oslo, 2014, pp. 42, 48. Olsen traces the variant installations, and illuminates the references to beds in Emin’s writing. She reproduces the inventory sent to her by Tracey Emin Studio. Olsen includes an email to her from Tamsin Casswell of Tracey Emin Studio, 4 February 2014, stating ‘I do know that a few things have been stolen over the course of the years when it was exhibited, some polaroid photos for example that were on the little table, Tracey said they were stolen several years ago,’ p. 90. Olsen notes that the currency ‘varies, often depending on the place of the exhibition’, p. 44. Kemp and Emin reported in Dalya Alberge, ‘Tracey made her bed but did she lie in it?’, Sunday Times, 28 December 2014, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tracey-madeher-bed-but-did-she-lie-in-it-d92fq8bmrqd (accessed 14 June 2019). Kemp considered the Tokyo bed frame had a wood grain different to later versions. My Bed’s autonomy was also acknowledged in Emin’s reflection ‘from one second looking horrible it suddenly transformed itself into something removed from me, something outside of me, and something beautiful. I suddenly imagined it out of context, frozen, outside of my head, in another place.’ Freedman and Luard, Tracey Emin, p. 252. https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/tracey-emin-b-1963-my-bed-5813479details.aspx. Discussing her installation of My Bed in Frankfurt, Emin noted in 2013, ‘Everything is in sealed containers, and it’s all labeled, like a crime scene.’ Andrew Goldman, ‘Tracey Emin on getting older with her art’, New York Times, 25 May 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/tracey-emin-on-getting-older-withher-art.html (accessed 14 June 2019). When researching ‘On the move’ in 2001 at White Cube London I was shown photographs of items stored in closed containers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD8yjJZdEOw, 30 March 2015 (accessed 14 June 2019). Claire Bishop, Installation Art (London, 2005), pp. 6, 10. Bishop, Installation Art, p. 41. Tatja Scholte and Glenn Wharton (eds), Inside Installations: Theory and Practice in the Care of Complex Artworks (Amsterdam, 2014). Tina Fiske, ‘White walls: installations, absence, iteration and difference’ in Alison Richmond and Alison Bracker (eds), Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths (Oxford: 2009), pp. 231–2, 232, 234. My warmest thanks to Tatja Scholte for drawing Tina Fiske’s essay to my attention and to her and Hanna Hoelling for helpful and rewarding discussions. Derrida, ‘Signature event context’, p. 53, quoted in Fiske, ‘White walls’, p. 235. Kieran Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (London, 2009), pp. 140–7, author’s emphasis. Jennifer Doyle, ‘The effect of intimacy: Tracey Emin’s bad sex aesthetics’ in Merck and Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, pp. 112–7. Laura Marcus, ‘The face of autobiography’ in Julia Swindells (ed.), The Uses of Autobiography (London, 1995), p. 13. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, ‘The rumpled bed of autobiography: extravagant lives, extravagant questions’, Biography, 24/1 (2001), pp. 6, 5, 11. Jen Harvie, ‘Being her: presence, absence and performance in the art of Janet Cardiff and Tracey Emin’ provides a deeply thoughtful analysis of performativity and Emin’s unknowability, in Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (eds), Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre, and Performance (Manchester, 2004), pp. 194–216. Alison Donnell, ‘When writing the other is being true to the self: Jamaica Kincaid’s autobiography of my mother’ in Pauline Polkey (ed.), Women’s Lives into Print: The Theory, Practice and Writing of Feminist Auto/Biography (London, 1999), p. 124.

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77 Laura Lake Smith, ‘Telling stories: performing authenticity in the confessional art of Tracey Emin’, Rethinking History, 21/2 (2017), pp. 304, 296, 297. 78 Betterton, ‘Why is my art’, p. 33. 79 Joan Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London, 2019), pp. 19, 21. 80 Julia Skelly, Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (London and New York, 2017), pp. 80–1. 81 Mandy Merck, ‘Bedtime’ in Merck and Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, pp. 124–5. 82 Doyle, ‘The effect of intimacy’, p. 110. See also Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis, 2006). 83 Elena Crippa quoted in Ellis-Petersen, ‘Tracey Emin’s messy bed goes on display at Tate for first time in 15 years’. 84 This inventory is taken from the catalogue to the Privacy exhibition, quoted in Olsen, ‘When the personal becomes too personal’, pp. 42–3, listed here for easier reference.

5

The Bonfire of the Fallacies (or Is it Phalluses?) Alexandra Kokoli

On Value(s): A Methodological Introduction There is a widespread and not altogether unjustified assumption that academic research and writing should only focus on ideas, works, texts, artists and writers that are worthy. Jane Gallop, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and feminist theorist, remarks: My professional formation included internalizing the lesson that the only texts worth commentary, particularly if the commentary were critique, are texts that have power for the critic. In other words, it is not worth expending one’s ingenuity to demonstrate that a text you think is dumb is, in fact, dumb.1

Her assumption, succinctly articulated above, is of course discipline-specific: despite the seismic changes it underwent through its encounter with critical theory, postmodernism and deconstruction, Gallop’s heavily textualized branch of interdisciplinary humanities still occasionally evokes its foundation in belles lettres, for which scholarly and aesthetic value are barely distinct. Art history suffered from an even greater pressure to only concern itself with the finest in fine art until new art history and the concept of visual culture challenged and expanded art history’s remit, transforming it into a contextual field in which art is always already part of culture, and culture intrinsically embedded in the social sphere. In the course of her essay, Gallop comes to acknowledge ‘a very different sort of power, one my teaching has encouraged me to disdain’2 and undertakes the critical analysis of a text that she finds unsophisticated and flawed, in order to parse a series of influential contradictions and dangerous blind spots in sexual harassment policy at US universities. She brings her finely tuned skills of textual analysis to a manual on sexual harassment, which despite its good intentions, contributes to the obfuscation of the issues at stake rather than their resolution. In Gallop’s analysis, ‘the fight against harassment is no longer a struggle against sexism but a moral crusade against sexuality’ and therefore not merely non-feminist but anti-feminist.3 While I acknowledge that sexual harassment remains a hotly debated feminist issue,4 what interests me is Gallop’s momentary hesitation, followed by the decision to bring her critical faculties to 71

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seemingly unworthy documents. Although situated in the textual humanities, Gallop’s attitude is not unique. In her introduction to New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain 1968–1990, political theorist Anna Marie Smith describes how she originally approached her subject matter, the emergence of conservative racisms, antiimmigration politics and homophobia in Britain after the 1960s, from the perspective of an activist and a journalist, ‘expecting to find more of the same – more bigoted declarations’ worthy of no more than a short article.5 ‘Much to my surprise my academic training in post-structuralist theories of identity and difference was actually quite useful in reading the Section 28 debates.’6 A short article turned into a methodologically fascinating and historically important monograph on the racial and sexual politics of the British right and, crucially, of their intersection. Like Jane Gallop and Anna Marie Smith, in this chapter I turn to texts and artefacts which appear to be undeserving of critical attention and whose meaning seems too obvious to require analysis. Like Gallop, I examine them for the rhetorical power of their unspoken assumptions and, with Smith, I share an interest in the workings of intersecting discourses of cultural and political conservatisms. In doing so, I revisit some of my previous writing on Emin, where I considered ‘the mainstream discursive mechanisms of casual dismissal, even derision’ directed against Emin and all that she was assumed to represent, namely a certain (post?)feminist state of affairs in both the art world and social attitudes to gender and sexuality.7 Here, as previously, ‘ “Tracey Emin” is assumed to always be in quotation marks . . . not (just) a practicing artist, nor a woman, nor a British subject, but a signifier of sorts, always contextual, ambiguous, open to (re)interpretation.’8 One obvious difference between Gallop and Smith’s objects of analysis and mine is that the significance and influence of the former (a consultative manual on institutional policy in Gallop’s case and government rhetoric and policies in Smith’s) are far greater than the culturally marginal tendencies that make the focus of this chapter. Marginal though they may be, nevertheless, they have much in common with more mainstream micro- (or mega-) aggressions against the shifting signifieds of ‘Tracey Emin’, which are not limited to and sometimes do not even include the artist named Tracey Emin. As I argue, some of the signifieds under attack in the ‘Tracey Emin’ signifier have to do with what it means to be a woman, not knowing one’s place, undeserved success, ambition, misogyny and nostalgia for a return to an imaginary past free from feminism and gender politics, mass and social media, and in which art never had a conceptual turn.

‘Tracey Emin’s’ Signifieds When ‘Tracey Emin’ is attacked, who or what is the target? The artist Tracey Emin is often but rarely exclusively the focus of the criticisms thrown at ‘Tracey Emin’ as a sign. On the other hand, it matters that diverse targeted signifieds are packaged under the signifier of ‘Tracey Emin’. In my article ‘On probation: “Tracey Emin” as sign’,9 I focused on the deployments of the signifier ‘Tracey Emin’ rather than decoding its shifting signifieds. The article was written in 2008 and published in 2010, when Emin was in her mid-40s, extremely successful and part of the art establishment however that is defined

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(having represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale), and yet still very much ‘on probation’: not only was Emin’s value as an artist constantly in dispute, but even whether she was an artist at all. My article strove to respond to the description of Emin as ‘the British art world’s very own postmodern primitive’ by Julian Stallabrass in his monograph on the phenomenon of the ‘yBas’ (‘young British artists’) and its artistic and political significance.10 Aware of the troubling connotations of the term ‘primitive’, Stallabrass explains that Emin’s ‘identity as an eccentric seems more important than the ratification of the work that might emerge from her being half-Cypriot, or working-class, or female’.11 Eccentric or not, there is no denying that Emin is indeed female, of working-class provenance and not (quite) white, and it is these aspects of her identity that throw the term ‘primitive’ into unsettling relief. Furthermore, being designated as ‘primitive’ reinforced the already existing tendency to disregard her artistic work and evade construing ‘Emin’ as an artist; Emin has long been a victim of neo-primitivist discourses that wrote her off and out of the canon of (serious) contemporary art practice, by either celebrating her as ‘a natural’, dismissing her as an amateur or condemning her as a charlatan. The fact that her success was both undeniable and simultaneously considered surprising and exceptional, due precisely to her gender and socio-economic background, makes her suspect to those who benefit from the white, male, middle-class privilege of the art world. And not only those. ‘Emin’ has often been construed as conveniently and superficially subversive, in a way that reassured art institutions and audiences of their own liberalism. Some of Stallabrass’s criticisms, not only of ‘Emin’ but of many of the ‘young British artists’, had to do with their function as safe safety valves for the establishment. In the same vein, Michael Bracewell revisited Tom Wolfe’s essay ‘Radical Chic’ (1970),12 a bitter satire of the strategic rapprochement between the (white) social elite of urban America and (black) young radicals, to find resonance in ‘a broader gentrification of the avant-garde’, and more specifically in ‘the glittering trajectory of [yBa] success’.13 But can ‘primitive’ ever become an anodyne critical term, outside polemics and, crucially, free from racism? David Theo Goldberg, drawing on anthropologist Adam Kuper, traces the history of the idea and term ‘primitive’ in nineteenth-century legal anthropology, in which it was developed ‘in binary differentiation from a civilised order: nomadic rather than settled; sexually promiscuous’ and having a looser attitude towards property; ‘illogical in mentality and practicing magic rather than rational and scientific’.14 Strikingly, the myths of primitivism appeared to intersect with the myths of ‘Emin’. Focusing on Emin’s nomadism in particular, I traced evocations of migration and diaspora in her practice (e.g. International Woman Suitcase, in collaboration with Longchamp, 2004) and public appearances (e.g. in The Kumars at No.  42, BBC, 2005). Matthew Frye Jacobson’s formulation of ‘probationary whiteness’ to describe the conditional enfranchisement of south and southeastern European and Jewish immigrants into the category of ‘whiteness’ in the USA served as a pertinent critical framework, despite its geopolitical and historical specificity, for two reasons.15 First, Jacobson comes up with the intriguing suggestion that the precarious and fluctuating distinction between whiteness ‘proper’ and probationary whitenesses overlaps with the opposition between purity and impurity: the classification of whiteness is thus emptied of any content, consisting of little more than the act of policing and protecting the boundaries of that category. Similarly, ‘Emin’

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straddles disparate categories; she hovers over an array of blurry divisions, and not simply in terms of race. Some are too messy and uncomfortable to tolerate: is she an artist, a media personality, a celebrity? Is this fiction or confession? Art or life? Secondly, the term ‘probationary’ applies to ‘Emin’ in more ways than one. Her designation as ‘a natural’ – and, occasionally, a ‘primitive’ – places her value as an artist on shaky ground. So long as ‘Emin’ is a natural, she is naturally in danger of losing her touch. Admittedly, Emin’s success has been further consolidated since the late 2000s with a Professorship in Drawing at the Royal College of Art and her position as an establishment figure has been sealed in her embracement of the Conservative Party,16 her coming out as a ‘strong royalist’17 evidenced in her commitment to capturing key moments in the life of the royal family in her drawing, including the wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee in 2012. In light of these developments, ‘On probation’ could be revised to account for Emin’s consolidation of power, although this is not always reflected in discourses around ‘Emin’ as the artist continues to be casually dismissed in some quarters. My question about what would happen to ‘Emin’ when she ceased to serve as a teenage symbol of British seaside seediness as she grows older and more established is in part answered by the collection of essays in which this text finds itself.18 And while ‘Emin’ attracts seemingly less attention from outside the art world as she loses her ability to scandalize, her continuing currency as a sign is repeatedly confirmed in the British media vernacular as well as the fringes of the political right. In the sixth series of The Great British Bake Off (2015), a hugely popular amateur baking competition whose success coincides with the rise of new domesticity and the recent electoral victories of the right and centre-right, an edible bread sculpture of Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) resulted in its maker’s elimination. More interesting than the merits of the baked ‘showstopper’ itself in the last challenge of the episode are the comments by celebrity baker judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood on contestant Dorret Conway’s disappointing effort: The creation – which was deemed raw by Berry – was eclipsed by outstanding showstoppers . . . Mary Berry warned: ‘To choose something that’s untidy to start with doesn’t give a good impression when we first look at it.’ Hollywood added: ‘Is that five hours’ work? No, it’s not.’ The judges were not sympathetic as the accountant from Preston – who was criticized for using frog cutters in week two and whose black forest gateau collapsed in week one – confessed to not having attempted her showstopper piece prior to the challenge.19

Raw, untidy and ultimately displaying little evidence of skill or forethought: the criticism of Conway’s bread sculpture slips into a dismissal of the most iconic of Emin’s works, which also acts as shorthand for a post-medium, ideas-based practice whose value remains perpetually under suspicion for the uninitiated. Furthermore, the censure directed at the contestant and, through her, to Emin herself, is noticeably gendered: untidiness may smack of the deskilling that allegedly plagues contemporary art, but is more specifically a feminine failing in domestic maintenance labour and respectable embodiment. If the battle has already been lost in the visual arts, (British)

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baking will be the bastion of traditional values, including gender propriety and hard work that is neatly evidenced in modestly pitched ‘showstoppers’. Far removed from the conservative mainstream, leader of the British political party ‘Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them)’ Mike Buchanan devotes one of 57 short chapters to Tracey Emin in his self-published book Feminism: The Ugly Truth. Titled ‘Are some feminists (e.g. Tracey Emin) a pain in the arts?’, the chapter is both insubstantial (as is most of Buchanan’s book) and almost entirely derivative, consisting mostly of a long quotation on My Bed from Wikipedia. The chapter offers the usual tirade of insults and dismissals of women artists in general (there aren’t any good ones) and Emin in particular (she can’t draw; she’s not a real artist). Buchanan’s work is only worth mentioning in so far as Emin is the only woman namechecked in the table of contents apart from Harriet Harman, Labour MP since 1982 and prominent politician who held numerous cabinet and shadow cabinet positions as well as the deputy leadership and acting leadership of the Labour Party.20 For Buchanan, Harman and Emin represent the infiltration of the worlds of politics and culture respectively by the ‘radical feminist agenda’. His gambit consists of two movements. First, he collapses feminism in all its internal variations with the signs of ‘Tracey Emin’ and ‘Harriet Harman’, each of which stands for a sea of poorly defined social and cultural ills, from narcissism to liberalism, and identity politics to social justice. And secondly, he perpetuates a comically exaggerated overestimation of the power that ‘Tracey Emin’, ‘Harriet Harman’ and feminism yield in the public sphere. In Buchanan’s books, literally and metaphorically, feminism and the left have already won and are responsible for their author’s own marginalization, the upside of which is imagining himself as an underdog and a revolutionary. By abdicating the privileges he enjoys thanks to his ethnicity, gender and geopolitical positioning, Buchanan claims a different kind of power, that of the disenfranchised who have come to the end of their tolerance and are compelled to speak out in protest. The next section explores a similar gambit in greater detail.

Treason of the Scholars by Peter Goodfellow and Friends ‘Treason of the Scholars’ is the title of an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by freelance illustrator and landscape painter Peter Goodfellow (21 October to 6 November 2015) at central London commercial gallery Panter & Hall, established in 2000. The exhibition is accompanied by two publications: a free exhibition catalogue, also available as an e-catalogue online;21 and a hardback collection of essays by Peter Goodfellow, historian and broadcaster David Starkey CBE, playwright and director Duncan Macmillan and Sir Roger Scruton, a philosopher who specializes in aesthetics and conservative commentator on the New Left and continental philosophy.22 Treason of the Scholars was something of a departure for both the artist and the gallery, and represented their shared frustration with what they saw as the art establishment, dominated by deskilling, celebrities and public relations, art institutions such as Tate and art fairs and biennials such as the Venice Biennale. The exhibition was not a great success even by its own standards. It generated some publicity but did not result in significant sales, perhaps because, as a gallery assistant suggested to me, those who

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visited it would not want a painting (let alone a sculptural work) in the style of the art that they, like Goodfellow, despise. When I visited the exhibition a few days before it closed, only Venetian Fragment (cat. no. 45) had sold, one of the smallest and more modestly priced paintings. Alongside works satirizing the Venice Biennale and the sort of contemporary post-media art practices that it is perceived as promoting, Goodfellow included in the exhibition only a couple of conventional landscape paintings of the city of Venice, which appealed to his usual consumer base. There is more than a little irony in defying the art ‘establishment’ without challenging the channels through which art is produced and disseminated: relying on sales to private collectors used to a fare of eyepleasing landscapes of beautiful places, Goodfellow fell flat. In continuing the analysis of the signifieds of ‘Tracey Emin’ as sign, the present investigation also contributes to a virtual lexicon of contemporary misogynies mixed with and inflected by a marginalized cultural elitism, indignant at its own marginalization. The cultural register of Treason of the Scholars places it outside (or possibly at the outskirts of) the brand of anti-intellectual toxic masculinity that Mike Buchanan represents, and it is also not as straightforwardly positioned on the political spectrum, although most of its supporters and contributors to the essay collection accompanying the exhibition would self-identify as conservative, with a lower case ‘c’ at least. Goodfellow himself and much more so some of the supportive contributors to the volume of essays, such as David Starkey and Roger Scruton, are not in the least disadvantaged or marginalized and enjoy extremely successful careers in their chosen fields. In a move similar to Mike Buchanan, they add abuse of power to the wrongdoings of which they accuse their enemies and imagine themselves as virtuous underdogs. Since their politics is imbued with a mistrust of (if not contempt for) the multitude, their perceived own lack of popularity matches their snobbery and reassures them of their superiority. Conversely, popularity and media exposure are in themselves indicators of corruption and moral (as well as aesthetic) failings. The title of Goodfellow’s exhibition Treason of the Scholars is a reference to Julien Benda’s treatise La Trahison des clercs (1927), originally translated into English by Richard Aldington as The Great Betrayal the following year.23 Benda (1867–1956), author, philosopher and leader of the anti-Romantic movement in France, describes and condemns what he sees as the selling out of his contemporary intellectuals to the forces of the market and politics and specifically their co-optation by nationalism, bigotry and a populist irrationalism: ‘the modern thinker . . . is today descending ever more frequently into the market-place to preach the very doctrines of nationalism and class hatred he should be the first to oppose.’24 Benda’s critique of his contemporary populism is arguably profoundly elitist, founded on a definition of the scholar as removed from and above the common people with their everyday problems and preoccupations.25 This betrayal does not represent a philosophical failing but an act of treason against the (French) Nation, and a secession to the German influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘intuitionism’, the desire for a more holistic apprehension of history and culture, and an openness to mysticism and ways of understanding the world that are not reducible to logical and systematic analysis.26 Although the contextual specificity and content of Benda’s intervention should be appreciated, it is also important to acknowledge that the catchy title of his text

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combined with the attractive sentiment of frustration at the cultural establishment that it expresses have been widely influential, sometimes without taking the whole of his argument into account. In recent years, Benda’s text has been evoked from both the left and the right in the English-speaking world. For example, in a short article titled ‘La Nouvelle Trahison des Clercs’, British environmental journalist George Monbiot writes of the co-optation of scientists by oil corporations in the context of climate change,27 while, from the conservative point of view, editor and publisher of The New Criterion Roger Kimball reviews Benda’s text alongside a 1988 book by philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut, which constituted an attack on what Kimball terms ‘antiEnlightenment phantasmagoria’ and, more specifically, multiculturalism.28 In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, co-founder and co-owner of the gallery Panter & Hall, Matthew Hall, describes the accompanying collection of essays as ‘a call to arms’ and the exhibition as aiming to do no less than ‘change the world as we know it’. Although Hall is too jaded and worldly to believe that hype, he ends his text on a positive note, comforted ‘by the knowledge that there is one bluff northerner with a great deal of talent who will not lie down and take it anymore. Isn’t that after all what being British is all about?’29 This attack on the formerly young British artists and all that they are assumed to represent comes from a distinctly and self-avowedly British perspective. Hall writes about the ‘alienation’ of British tax payers coerced into funding ‘the relentless stream of public art commissions and exhibitions from which they feel so alienated’,30 failing to acknowledge the steadily declining public funding for the arts in the UK, the entrepreneurial streak of the yBas and their reliance on the patron/ collector model, in support of which Emin has spoken.31 Indeed, Peter Goodfellow and Tracey Emin have more in common than the former and his supporters would care to acknowledge. Emin, like the rest of the so-called yBas owe much to the early patronage and support of Charles Saatchi, millionaire businessman and co-founder of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, while Goodfellow remains a freelance illustrator and co-owner with his wife Jean of The Lost Gallery, Strathdon, Aberdeenshire. Both Goodfellow and Emin are firm believers in an entrepreneurial model for the arts, with Emin having co-founded and co-run with Sarah Lucas The Shop in Bethnal Green, East London, a studio-cum-sales suite as well as fashionable hangout. Emin currently sells both limited editions of artwork as well as branded housewares, clothing and accessories through her own online Emin International Shop.32 Even though the publicity of Goodfellow’s exhibition namechecked Emin as a rule and was often illustrated by his painting The Gaze of Narcissus, a double portrait of Emin seemingly gazing at her black and white mirror image over a small narcissus bloom, the direct mentions of Emin are not as numerous as one would expect.33 The black and white side of The Gaze of Narcissus is magnified to a full-page illustration and juxtaposed with a glossary of ‘treason’, which runs through the essay collection accompanying the exhibition; Emin is paired up with the following list of words, all beginning with ‘c’: cabal carrion casuist

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Art into Life charade charlatan claptrap clique coerce collusion complicit condone connive corruption coterie credulous cronyism curator [in red]34

Emin’s portrait in The Gaze of Narcissus, seemingly based on a photograph that catches the artist mid-speech with her mouth slightly open and gazing intensely sideways (at a discussant, one assumes, as opposed to her own reflection), is used in other paintings too, including one with the awkwardly literal title The Decline and Fall of Western Civilisation. Here Minnie and Mickey Mouse are depicted as excited culture vultures in a picturesque Venetian street during the Venice Biennale, surrounded by posters advertising art exhibitions and events. On one poster, Andy Warhol’s white wig renders him instantly recognizable despite a censorship tab across his eyes (suggesting, perhaps, the impossibility of anonymity for the artist-celebrity), while Emin’s portrait is repeated three times, in increasing close-up, on a vertically oblong poster for her exhibition at the British Pavilion in 2007. The poster bears the inscription ‘Trovatelli e Uccellletti’, namely ‘Foundlings and Fledglings’, after a neon that Emin showed in her exhibition Borrowed Light at the Venice Biennale and which was originally developed as a piece of public art near the Foundling Museum, London. In jarring contrast to the inscription and its evocation of smallness, vulnerability and empathy, ‘Me’ is printed three times on Emin’s cheek, in patriotic red, white and blue. In his contribution to the collection of essays Treason of the Scholars, titled ‘The Thought Police’, playwright and director Duncan Macmillan casts Emin as ‘a leading light’ in the rise of ‘Brit Art’. Misspelling her first name throughout his catalogue essay as ‘Tracy’, he also describes her appointment as Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy as a ‘trivial event’ in itself but indicative of ‘how the long history of drawing is now forgotten, or wilfully misunderstood’.35 Mentions of women artists in general are extremely limited, with the notable exception of Cathy Wilkes, whose work is brought up as an example of mediocre art propped up by the over-wrought critical discourse it inspires. The ‘rubbish assemblies of Turner Prize nominee Cathy Wilkes’36 is a deliberately equivocal phrase – it could either mean assemblies of ‘rubbish’, namely detritus and recycled materials used precisely for their potential to suggest other places and stories, or more likely, it constitutes a damning assessment of both the artist’s work and the accolades it has received, including a Turner Prize nomination and representing Britain in the 2019 Venice Biennale. More abstractly, evocations of femininity are not necessarily bound to the discussion of female

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representations or artists. Citing Jeff Koons’ statement that he finds ‘beauty in the acceptance of cultural history’, Macmillan rhetorically wonders what ‘cultural history’ might involve, confident in his contempt for culture that is not safely entrenched in the canons of art’s histories: ‘cup cakes and Barbie dolls, perhaps?’, he offers, to then conclude: ‘When we have sunk that low, how far have we betrayed the empirical vision of the Enlightenment philosophers and the imaginative adventures of the artists who followed them?’37 Macmillan unwittingly confirms the view of feminist theorists and historians who have examined the intricate associations between women and low culture as both a symptom and an instrument of the subjugation of both women as social actors and femininity as a concept.38 Childhood, play, femininity and the lowly creativity of baking are bundled together to be derided as the diametrical opposite of high culture and high art, whose value on the other hand is too self-evident to defend. Macmillan’s use of the first person plural demonstrates his certainty of a consensus between himself and his readership, and he is not alone in this preference. Roger Scruton also relies on an assumed consensus without which he would not be able to afford himself the universalizing privilege of haughty platitudes, proclamations and admonishments: ‘We look to art for the proof that life in this world is meaningful’ (p. 140); ‘we must ignore the factors that distort our judgement’ (p. 138); ‘In art . . . we create a realm of the imagination, in which each beginning finds its end, and each fragment is part of a meaningful whole’ (p. 140).39 Goodfellow’s paintings are teeming with dolls and teddies, while oversized cupcakes displayed on plinths also form something of a motif – a visual shorthand of derision at perceived frivolity, both implicitly and explicitly gendered. Paintings of solo Barbie dolls become ‘Madonnas’, implying an emergent false and corrupt artistic tradition in mimicry of the old masters, such as Madonna of the Tweet, in which the doll has an unidentifiable white bird perched on her stiff little hand. The Barbie and the cupcake come together in Madonna of the Cup Cake [sic], in which a summery doll in a onepiece swimming suit and sunglasses resting on her forehead is shown straddling an oversize cupcake that reaches above her knees. In the large-scale painting Turner Prize Greatest Hits (oil on linen; 120 × 240 cm, priced at £96,000), no fewer than four Barbies of different hair colour and ethnicities crowd the stage under dazzling lights reading ‘Tate Presents’, ‘Turner Prize’ and ‘Greatest Hits’, alongside 14 cupcakes on plinths of varying heights. Wherever cupcakes become the sole focus of a painting they are all given female names: Montserrat, Olga, Fatima, Tracey, Yoko, Assunção, Jamilla and Juanita. Some of the names suggest contemporary women artists (Yoko Ono, perhaps, although she is not directly referenced elsewhere, and Tracey Emin, who is), while it is noticeable that none of the names is of Anglo-Saxon or Gaelic provenance with the exception of ‘Tracey’. It is not entirely clear what the meaning behind the foreignness of the selected names is, other than a dislike and mistrust, perhaps, of the internationalization of the art world. In the painting Top Dog, whose frame consists of a comically elaborate gold and black portico, the tallest of the three white plinths bears the inscription ‘TOP DOG’ in black, with DOG crossed out in red crayon and ‘Doll’ written underneath, then expanded into ‘Dollar’ with the addition of the two last letters in pencil. On the top plinth, the number one spot if one were to approach this as a podium, a golden version of Jeff Koons’ famous steel balloon dog appears to have triumphed over a stuffed toy shark, a facile allusion to Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind

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of Someone Living (1991). In second place (middle plinth) is a soft doll wearing a short black dress with an inscription ‘Selfie’ inside a heart, in succulent pink lines resembling both neon tubing and icing; and in third place is a knackered old teddy bear, a lost or discarded transitional object such as those used in Mike Kelley’s Craft Morphology Flow Chart (1991), or more likely, a reference to Emin’s bronzed teddies for her exhibition Baby Things at the Foundling Museum (2008). Top Dog condemns art as (big) business, but does so through a visual vocabulary of derision against the cultures of women, children and care. Barbie dolls have become so unquestioningly synonymous with female subjugation, sexual (self-) objectification and the inculcation of impossible and damaging ideals of physical perfection that Germaine Greer contemplated illustrating the cover of her book The Whole Woman with a photograph of herself biting off a Barbie doll’s head.40 Contiguously, Goodfellow attempts to launch the cupcake as a stock symbol of feminine frivolity and frivolous femininity, attractive but vacuous, desirable but worthless, a contemporary and gendered version of vanitas. In the ideologies of new domesticity that have emerged over the past few years, the cupcake more than any other single manifestation of domestic care stands for an espousal of revitalized ideals of bourgeois house-pride, but also a celebration of a womanly everyday sociability. As a result, the cupcake’s meaning remains ambiguous, superficially anti-feminist but possibly also standing for a reclamation of common female pleasures from conceited disparagement.41 More ambiguously, older femininity is also once evoked in (vaguely) positive terms, to describe the perceived outdatedness and resulting marginalization of beauty in the visual arts: ‘For many artists and critics beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine, sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.’42 ‘Granny’ finds herself on the side of saccharine cheesiness (interestingly mixing food metaphors) and pastoral kitsch. Even when seemingly reclaimed, femininity intersecting with old age is reserved as a sign for what has been rightly or (in this case) wrongly cast aside. Doubly invisible and irreversibly forsaken, the fate of aesthetic beauty gets undeservedly tied up with Granny’s rightful destiny. After playing with Barbie dolls and past the phase when she can aspire to be one, Granny is what lies beyond the cupcake stage of life, her enduring frivolity no longer compensated for by cuteness. What makes such glibness worthy of commentary is that it is not limited to the margins of the art world. I have previously parsed Julian Stallabrass’s problematic dismissal of Emin as a postmodern primitive, but this pales in comparison to John A. Walker’s treatment of her in his academic monograph Art and Celebrity, originally published in 2003. In one typical passage, Walker comments on Emin’s appearance on the satirical current affairs programme Have I Got News for You in 2001, noting that she was the only female guest on that episode and describing her ‘dress with a plunging neckline in order to show off her swelling breasts’.43 He claims that her practice has been described as ‘confessional’, ‘angry vagina’ and ‘victim art’ providing no specific references, and adds that it could also be called ‘me, me, me, art’ and ‘misery art’.44 Walker’s take on Emin, superficial though it may be, can be divided into three telling strands: her diluted, if not impure, Britishness; her sexual allure and self-exploitation; and less explicitly but linked to the previous strand, her questionable value. ‘Like Hirst, Emin paid no heed to

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the traditional stereotype of the English’, Walker notes, but unlike Hirst, in her case this is because she is ‘only half English’ [sic];45 nevertheless, she is also compared to Princess Diana in the popularity of their shared confessionalism and evocation of a contemporary kind of martyrdom.46 According to Walker, Emin’s looks have been sensationally described as ‘feral’ and ‘wanton gypsy’ (again, providing no references) and resembling Frida Kahlo. Her sexuality is not only obvious but marketable and marketed: ‘There is no doubt that part of her appeal has been her sexually alluring body that she has been as willing to flaunt as any model working for erotic magazines’.47 Her installation and performance Exorcism of the last painting I ever made (1996) is not only dismissed as derivate for referencing Yves Klein’s Anthropometries (1960), but ‘appealed to voyeurs and was not that different from sex industry peep shows’.48 Her success is attributed to Carl Freedman, ‘one of Emin’s lovers’ whose curatorial practice helped her, while she is also said to have ‘benefited immensely’ from the patronage of Charles Saatchi.49 And yet despite the canny exploitation of her sex/celebrity appeal, Walker speculates that Emin’s nomination for the Turner Prize was ‘a loss leader’ for the prize, since she did not win it, but attracted the greatest number of visitors and most press.50 Emin the ‘media whore’51 simultaneously embodies and churns out saleable commodities, but her worthlessness is ultimately reinforced when evaluated against any valid (to Walker) aesthetic criteria.

‘The True Exhibit Is Always the Phallus’ In Goodfellow’s Treason of the Scholars, ‘Emin’ is over- as well as ab-used as a lazily chosen target for a politically contiguous but otherwise incoherent assortment of complaints from the privileged margins of the British world of art and culture. It is notable that she, above other representatives of the yBa phenomenon, becomes an undeserving icon for its real and imagined failings.52 The illustration of yBa-ness with the sign of ‘Tracey Emin’ in middle age, as in The Gaze of Narcissus, may be explained as the result of the ageism and sexism of Goodfellow and the contributors to his project, but also relies on the art critical casting of the artist’s confessionalism as a sign of its times, and of the artist herself as a compatible contemporary of reality television and possibly even a precursor of social media.53 To put it simply, Goodfellow’s deployment of ‘Tracey Emin’ as sign amounts to little more than a reactionary historicist caricature. Mitigating against the vacuity of ‘Tracey Emin’ as sign, her tendency to vanish in spite of and within an over-mediated presence, is no easy feat. I disagree with Julian Stallabrass on his dismissal of the essay collection The Art of Tracey Emin, edited by Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend, as poor quality scholarship and, worse, a PR exercise to defend the artist’s reputation to an academic readership. Nevertheless, Stallabrass also convincingly argues (as does the essay collection in which this one is published) that focusing on Emin’s art instead of her persona cannot adequately address, let alone rectify, the critical fates of her work so far.54 Conversely, Stallabrass views the persona(e) and art of Tracey Emin as two sides of the same coin, albeit in a mutually exclusive sense, with only one or the other being in view at any one time. The artwork vanishes in the thick shadow that her persona casts, against any possibility of autobiographical art practice and interpretation:

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Art into Life Only in Emin’s case is the work of art in any sense an expression of the artist’s self, and only then at the price of the work virtually disappearing as Emin herself, and any statement she makes, any act she performs (such as misbehaving drunkenly on television), becomes art.55

In Stallabrass, the dismissal of ‘Emin’ is neither moralistic nor predicated on a reactionary anxiety around deskilling in the visual arts, as it is in Goodfellow’s case, although Stallabrass too betrays certain limitations in acknowledging the porosity between the personae of the artist and her practice. For Stallabrass, Emin’s art gets eclipsed by Emin herself. In Goodfellow’s project, any distinction between Emin and her work has already vanished, with ‘Emin’ becoming a stand-in for the falsification of good art and its sacrifice at the altar of personal ambition and greed, not just by Tracey Emin herself, but her generation, the former yBas, as well as by the art establishment represented as a man in a bubble wrap suit with his head in a plastic branded bag from the Tate shops, in Goodfellow’s painting The Curator. I am revisiting Stallabrass’s idea of Emin’s evanescence to take it much further: the wider the signifier ‘Emin’ circulates, as it does in The Treason of the Scholars, the more its signifieds disperse and slip away. The perpetual deferral of the meaning of ‘Emin’ becomes crowded and blurred with replacement concerns and complaints. For all its evocations of narcissism, the contributors to the exhibition publications display little awareness or understanding of its analyses. To fill this gap, I turn to Laura Mulvey’s interpretation of another set of dolls, Allen Jones’ contorted BDSM mannequins that make up his series Women as Furniture (1969): The message of fetishism concerns not woman, but the narcissistic wound she represents for man. Women are constantly confronted with their own image in one form or another, but what they see bears little relevance to their own unconscious fantasies, their own hidden fears and desires. They are being turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men. Yet, in a real sense, women are not there at all. The parade has nothing to do with woman, everything to do with man. The true exhibit is always the phallus. Women are simply the scenery onto which men project their narcissistic fantasies.56

The potency of attacks on Emin may be limited by the imprecision of the deployment of ‘Emin’ as sign. To evoke Jane Gallop again, perhaps the true exhibit of The Treason of the Scholars is not the phallus, but some pricks.57 Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytically informed feminist approach to the casual misogyny of art and visual culture sheds light on a different interpretation of Emin’s absence from ‘Emin’, not in terms of disappearance but as a deliberate withdrawal of labour. In an incident from 1997 which refuses to be forgotten and informs the sign ‘Emin’ more than any other single event, the artist turned up to a live television debate for The Southbank Show on the Turner Prize, intoxicated and in a defiant mood. Having had her introjections politely ignored by most discussants, which included Roger Scruton, contributor to Goodfellow’s The Treason of the Scholars, established art critics Waldemar Januszczak, Richard Cork and David Sylvester, and Norman Rosenthal, who

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was at the time head of exhibitions at the Royal Academy, Emin eventually got up and left the studio: Finally Emin, sounding as if she had a mouth full of broken china, finally [sic] declared that the group had ‘lost her’. ‘I want to leave. I’ve got to go somewhere. I’m going to leave now. Don’t you understand? I want to be free. Get this f***ing mike off.’ She then walked noisily out of the studio, her loud goodbyes greeted with relieved laughter.58

The incident has been oft related and much discussed since,59 not only in reference to Emin’s ‘bad girl’ image, but also as a symptom of a ‘sad bohemianism’, in which ‘making a spectacle of yourself on national TV’, and shedding the baggage of the professional artist in exchange for ‘media anointment and “profile sexiness”’ are the new normative behaviours.60 Making a spectacle of oneself is always gender-specific, and ‘sexiness’ plays out differently, less metaphorically, in the case of women artists, whether they divest themselves of the baggage of professionalism and its limitations or not. Sue Atkinson was among the few to recognize the performative intent (or at least outcome) of Emin’s disruption of and departure from the broadcast discussion, which she placed in the tradition of activism informed by feminism, while Terry Atkinson described Emin’s actions as a withdrawal of labour ‘in a space dominated by particular men transmitting the mechanics of aristocratic culture’.61 Goodfellow’s sloppily historicist deployment of ‘Tracey Emin’ as shorthand for an array of cultural and societal pathologies may be traced back to this moment and its subsequent (mis)interpretations. The title of my chapter references the bonfire of the vanities, a zealot attempt by the followers of Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola to purify the city of Florence of the lax morality and extravagance associated with the recently expelled Medici family. Savonarola’s supporters collected a variety of ‘vanities’ from the citizens of Florence and threw them into a large wooden pyramid that they set on fire. The ‘vanities’ stood for the futility and frivolity of earthly existence: ‘trinkets, obscene books . . ., dice, games of chance, harps, mirrors, masks, cosmetics and portraits of beautiful women, and other objects of luxury’.62 A powerful image and sometimes an allegory for both an accumulation of ‘vanities’ in their contemporary manifestations and their ritual destruction, The Bonfire of the Vanities is also the title of Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel charting the rise and fall of a white upper-class bond trader against the background of the city of New York in a state of social and moral collapse, riddled with greed, social divisions and violence. Concomitantly, Peter Goodfellow’s exhibition brings together the tropes and symbols of what he and his intellectual circle view as responsible for the trivialization of high culture through greed, self-interest and vanity, not to burn them but to exorcize them through satire and derision. Savonarola’s political influence ended abruptly with his execution and the return of the Medici family to power, although the cultural austerity for which he stood had arguably a more long-lasting impact, whereas Goodfellow’s aspirations for a cultural overhaul never amounted to much despite some press attention, owed not least to his use of Emin’s image. Unlike Savonarola, Goodfellow seemed to be preaching to the converted, his established audience of like-minded cultural conservatives, a group which, however, seems to be growing in power and influence.63 What concerns me here and in

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the context of a collection of writing on Tracey Emin is the coding of Goodfellow’s vanities which intersects so heavily with the signifieds of Tracey Emin as sign. Vanity, superficiality, frivolity and narcissism, all already coded feminine, are packaged into the ‘Emin’ sign and then bolstered and amplified by further signifiers of frivolous femininity, such as cupcakes and Barbie dolls. Whether on the side of the phallus or just a prick, ‘Peter Goodfellow’ as sign (which is also – worryingly – a sign of the times), signposts the fundamental role of misogyny in the (re)constitution of right-wing forces. It/he stands for a wilful overestimation of the impact of feminism and contemporary art after modernism, their misrepresentation as having already won and a throbbing resentment for their modest gains.

Notes 1 2 3

Jane Gallop, Anecdotal Theory (Durham, NC, 2002), p. 36. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 50. The accuracy or usefulness of Gallop’s analysis of now outdated policies and attitudes cannot be addressed here. 4 At the time of making the final revisions to this chapter (February 2018), extremely serious allegations of sexual harassment and exploitation in the American film industry are still unfolding (see e.g. Bitch HQ, ‘Predatory men like Harvey Weinstein are Running Hollywood’, Bitch Media, 6 October 2017, available at https://www. bitchmedia.org/article/on-our-radar/harvey-weinstein-is-a-creep (accessed 7 February 2018)). Coco Fusco, among others, pointed out that the art world and art education have long been affected by these issues: ‘How the art world, and art schools, are ripe for sexual abuse’, Hyperallergic, 14 November 2017, available at https:// hyperallergic.com/411343/how-the-art-world-and-art-schools-are-ripe-for-sexualabuse/ (accessed 7 February 2018). 5 Anna Marie Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain 1968–1990 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 17. 6 Smith, New Right Discourse, p. 18. Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 was a ‘controversial amendment to the UK’s Local Government Act 1986’, enacted in 1988 and repealed in 2000 in Scotland, and three years later in the rest of the UK. The amendment prohibited the promotion of homosexuality, or of ‘the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. . . . Some people believed that Section 28 prohibited local councils from distributing any material, whether plays, leaflets, books, etc., that portrayed gay relationships as anything other than abnormal. Teachers and educational staff in some cases were afraid of discussing gay issues with students for fear of losing state funding’, available at http://lgbthistorymonth.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/1384014531 S28Background.pdf (2014) (accessed 13 September 2016). 7 Alexandra M. Kokoli, ‘On probation: “Tracey Emin” as sign’, Wasafiri, 25/1 (March 2010), pp. 33–40 (p. 33). For the full article see http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ abs/10.1080/02690050903425342. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite, 2nd edn (London, 2006), p. 39. 11 Ibid.

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12 Tom Wolfe, ‘Radical chic’ in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York, 1971), pp. 3–113. 13 Michael Bracewell, ‘Molotov cocktails’, Frieze, 87 (Nov/Dec 2004), available at https:// frieze.com/article/molotov-cocktails (accessed 18 August 2017). 14 David Theo Goldberg, ‘Racial knowledge’ (1993), in Les Back and John Solomos (eds), Theories of Race and Racism (London, 2000), pp. 154–80 (p. 160). 15 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Colour: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (London, 1998). 16 Mark Brown, ‘Tracey Emin: “Tories are only hope for the arts” ’, The Guardian, 16 May 2011, available at https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture-cuts-blog/2011/ may/16/art-emin (accessed 13 September 2016). 17 Tracey Emin, ‘Tracey Emin draws the Queen’, The Financial Times, 19 May 2012, available at https://www.ft.com/content/04ee8bb0-9eef-11e1-a767-00144feabdc0 (accessed 13 September 2016). 18 Since the publication of my article ‘On probation: “Tracey Emin” as sign’, it is not just Emin who has changed, but so has her seaside hometown of Margate. See, for example, Thanet District Council, ‘Regeneration in Margate’, available at https://www.thanet.gov. uk/the-thanet-magazine/campaigns/live-margate/regeneration/ (accessed 9 February 2018). Crucially, the visual arts have played a key role in Margate’s regeneration, as they had done in the regeneration of East London over the 1990s. Margate is one of the cities that is casually compared to Shoreditch, a London district whose gentrification was to some degree triggered by its occupation by the yBas since the late 1980s. See Daisy Stenham, ‘Margate is well on the road to becoming London 2.0’, Time Out London, 12 July 2016, available at https://www.timeout.com/london/blog/ margate-is-well-on-the-road-to-becoming-london-2-0-says-daisy-stenham-071216 (accessed 9 February 2018). 19 Emma Powell, ‘Great British Bake Off: Dorret sent home after Tracey Emin bread sculpture fails to impress’, Evening Standard, 19 August 2015, available at http://www. standard.co.uk/stayingin/great-british-bake-off-dorret-sent-home-after-tracey-eminbread-sculpture-fails-to-impress-a2917266.html (accessed 13 September 2016). 20 ‘Are some feminists (e.g. Tracey Emin) a pain in the arts?’, pp. 131–2; ‘Does Harriet Harman suffer from Mad Cow Disease?’, pp. 133–6, both in Mike Buchanan, Feminism: The Ugly Truth (LPS Publishing, 2016). Among the appendices is an open letter from 2012 addressed to Theresa May, at the time Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality, but only Emin and Harman are mentioned in the chapter headings of the main part of the book. 21 Panter & Hall, Treason of the Scholars: Peter Goodfellow, exh. cat. (London, 2015), available at http://www.panterandhall.com/ebooks/peter-goodfellow/treason-of-thescholars/ (accessed 7 February 2018). 22 Peter Goodfellow, David Starkey, Roger Scruton and Duncan Macmillan, Treason of the Scholars (London, 2015). 23 Robert J. Niess, ‘Evolution of an idea: Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs’, The French Review, 20/5 (March 1947), p. 383. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 388. 26 Ibid., p. 389. 27 George Monbiot, ‘La Nouvelle Trahison des Clercs’, The Guardian, 14 May 2013, also available at http://www.monbiot.com/2013/05/14/la-nouvelle-trahison-des-clercs/ (accessed 2 November 2016).

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28 Roger Kimball, ‘The treason of the intellectuals and “The Undoing of Thought” ’, The New Criterion (December 1992), available at http://www.newcriterion.com/articles. cfm/The-treason-of-the-intellectuals----ldquo-The-Undoing-of-Thought-rdquo--4648 (accessed 2 November 2016). Finkielkraut’s more recent views on French culture and society are not merely sceptical of multiculturalism but straight-forwardly Islamophobic; see ‘There is a clash of civilisations: Alain Finkielkraut interviewed by Mathieu von Rohr and Romain Leick’, Spiegel Online, 6 December 2013, available at http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-french-philosopher-finkielkrauton-muslims-and-integration-a-937404.html (accessed 18 August 2017). 29 Matthew Hall, ‘Introduction’, Panter & Hall, Treason of the Scholars: Peter Goodfellow, exh. cat. (London, 2015). 30 Ibid. 31 Brown, ‘Tracey Emin: “Tories are only hope for the arts” ’. 32 Emin International Shop, available at http://emininternational.myshopify.com/ (accessed 13 September 2016). 33 See, for example, Dalya Alberge, ‘Artist uses own paintings to savage “virtual vandalism” of Emin and Hirst’, The Sunday Times, 18 October 2015, p. 15. Although the Panter & Hall catalogue lists prices for most of Goodfellow’s work on show, none of it is dated. 34 Goodfellow et al., Treason of the Scholars, p. 30. 35 Duncan Macmillan, ‘The thought police’ in Goodfellow et al., Treason of the Scholars, p. 36. 36 Ibid., p. 40. 37 Ibid., p. 39. 38 See, for example, Penny Sparke, As Long As It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste, 2nd edn (Halifax, NS, 2010); and Joanne Hollows, Feminism, Femininity, and Popular Culture (Manchester, 2000). 39 Roger Scruton, ‘The real thing’, in Goodfellow et al., Treason of the Scholars, pp. 138– 41, emphasis added. 40 Kaite Welsh, ‘Germaine Greer is a dinosaur – powerless against a new feminist movement’, The Telegraph, 26 October 2015, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ women/womens-life/11955371/Germaine-Greer-is-a-dinosaur-powerless-against-thenew-feminism.html (accessed 13 September 2016). As Kaite Welsh suggests, feminist attitudes towards Barbie have changed, or at the very least diversified over the past few years: see also Shoshana Devora, ‘A feminist Barbie?’, The F-Word, 25 October 2015, available at https://www.thefword.org.uk/2015/10/a-feminist-barbie/ (accessed 13 September 2016). Photographs of Greer biting off Barbie doll heads are no longer easy to find, but I have traced one on a Russian website: http://ec-dejavu.ru/b-2/barbie-4. html (accessed 13 September 2016). 41 See, for example, the blog Feminist Cupcake, https://feministcupcake.wordpress.com/; Anna Brones, ‘Cupcake feminism: Is what we bake a matter of gender?’, 17 May 2015, available at http://www.thekitchn.com/cupcakes-and-feminism-is-what-we-make-amatter-of-gender-219424; and Viv Groskop, ‘Do good feminists bake cupcakes?’, The Guardian, 22 August 2008, available at https://www.theguardian.com/ lifeandstyle/2008/aug/22/women (all accessed 7 February 2018). 42 Scruton, ‘The real thing’, p. 138. 43 John A. Walker, Art and Celebrity (London, 2003), p. 193. 44 Ibid., p. 248. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., p. 254.

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54 55 56

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Ibid., p. 250. Ibid., p. 253. Ibid., pp. 250–1. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 253. Rosemary Betterton argues that Tracey Emin’s embeddedness in the yBa group has been exaggerated in ‘Undutiful daughters: avant-gardism and gendered consumption in recent British art’, Visual Culture in Britain, 1/1 (2000), pp. 13–30. Richard Dorment, ‘The Big Brother effect’, The Daily Telegraph, 20 September 2000; and Waldemar Januszczak, ‘We’ve seen her drunk and shouting the odds. But Tracey Emin’s new work is the biggest shock of all: it shows vision’, The Sunday Times Culture Magazine, 6 May 2001, pp. 10–11. It is also on this very assumption that this collection is predicated. Stallabrass, High Art Lite, p. 49. For Stallabrass’s dismissal of Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin (London, 2002) see High Art Lite, p. 282. Laura Mulvey, ‘Fears, fantasies and the male unconscious or “you don’t know what is happening, do you, Mr Jones?” ’ (1973), in Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 13. Jane Gallop refers to Jacques Lacan as a ‘cunt-prick’, a close translation of the French expletive ‘con’ in Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London, 1982), p. 31. For another feminist critique of Lacan that results in a passionate telling off rather than an outright dismissal, see Paul Allen Miller, ‘Lacan le con: Luce tells Jacques off ’, Intertexts, 9/2 (2005), pp. 139–51. Clare Longrigg, ‘Sixty minutes, noise: by art’s bad girl’, The Guardian, 4 December 1997, available at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/1997/ dec/04/20yearsoftheturnerprize.turnerprize1 (accessed 7 February 2018). Note that the stylistically awkward repetition of ‘finally’ in the first sentence suggests a degree of exasperation at Emin, followed by relief at her departure, not only on the part of the discussants in the television studio, but the writer too. The one-minute clip of Emin’s departure from the Southbank Show was posted on YouTube in 2008 and has had over 141,000 views to date (6 February 2018), while posts of that episode in larger excerpts or its entire duration have accumulated many more tens of thousands of views. ‘Discussion: Session 1’ in David Burrows (ed.), Who’s Afraid of Red White and Blue? Attitudes to Popular and Mass Culture, Celebrity, Alternative and Critical Practice and Identity Politics in Recent British Art (Birmingham, 1998), pp. 52–4. Ibid., p. 54. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church (New York, 1910), 5/2, p. 699. See also Corey McEleney, ‘Bonfire of the vanities: pleasure, theory, Shakespeare’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 24/1, pp. 137–68. At the time of writing (February 2018), social conservatism as well as political positions on immigration, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, which are normally associated with the extreme right and white supremacy, have made significant headways in mainstream political terms, with the electoral victory of Donald Trump at the US presidential elections of 2016 and the referendum result in favour of leaving the EU in Britain on 23 June 2016. Activist and academic discourses on the ‘manosphere’ have since theorized the strategic mobilization of victimhood tropes in hegemonic, anti-feminist masculinities; see e.g. Debbie Ging, ‘Alphas, betas, and incels: theorizing the masculinities of the Manosphere’, Men and Masculinities (2017).

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Early Emin John White

Carl Freedman ‘Which person do you think has had the greatest influence on your life?’ Tracey Emin ‘Uhmm . . . It’s not a person really. It was more a time, going to Maidstone College of Art, hanging around with Billy Childish, living by the River Medway.’1 Who who who are you – The Who2 It is with hesitancy that I write about this subject, firstly because I wonder if such a step may not convey the full import of such singular times, and even when thought that it is told with veracity this might not always coincide with the intense subjectivity of the works that are so inseparable from the subject. Secondly, privacy is a precious thing: not only this subject’s own respected and deeply held privacy, but that of friends and other connections. Also, misunderstanding the difference between how a person would like to be known with those things which they want to remain entirely private can be misleading, and this may lead to shedding no real light on the matter.

Contradictions, Identity and (Dyslexia?) At these places and times: at the Rochester and Maidstone Colleges of Art in the early to late 1980s, Tracey spelt her name as Tracie or sometimes Traci, as on the card for her Maidstone degree show card in 1986. Her time as a student at these colleges (1980 and 1986) saw the origin of a pathway to her later work and lifestyle (both inseparable), and later influences on the forthcoming changes in the British art scene.3 This writer taught on Emin’s printmaking class at Maidstone in the 1980s and later invited her to produce a series of lithographs and monoprints at the Curwen Studio, London. At that time, I thought her peculiar talent was being formed by the prevalent and almost generic climate of contradiction and change. In addition, there appeared to be more than one Emin persona, and these characteristics combined together formed the basic material of what is Emin. Now I consider whether there was enough material built in her early development to provide a sustainable artistic truth. Clearly, yes, there was. Nearly ten difficult years at art schools provided the substance; Emin’s hard-wired 89

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audacity and the so far unpredictable talent provide the rest. Also, there is a view that any consequential art of a time and place, when it is looked at from a point in the future, should make an unavoidable statement in relation to the time when it was created. Does this work with Emin? I think that her earlier work does, as it helped to define much of the period of art and feminism from when she left art college to her major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 2011. But what is the sum and worth of her activity from, say, ten years ago? Has the hardnosed commercialism now so prevalent in art, and adopted by Emin, diminished or enhanced her product? British artist and potter Grayson Perry has views on commercial gain and fame versus pure aesthetics. He commented that when he left art college in 1982: art felt like a messy amateur business of . . . awkward bohemians doing inexplicable things. . . . Some artists have often taken the self-designated high ground. . . . Art for them exists on some inhuman, ethereal plane with no need for an audience, or money. I am not one of them.4

Hmmm? Let’s see. The ‘inexplicable things’ by ‘awkward bohemians’, mentioned by Perry, were things made frequently with integrity, experimentation and with an eye for art as itself rather than made with lazy repetition and a need to be feted as a celebrity. In other words they were art students producing original art: that is what they do, however unpalatable. Following on from Perry’s statement it is interesting to reflect on Emin’s amendments to work by the French artist Louise Bourgeois shown at Hauser & Wirth in London in 2011.5 There were queues herded behind velvet ropes for the private view and a huge media presence. The exhibition included Emin prints inkjetted straightforwardly and lethargically onto expensive silk. Then in 2015 there were the digital reproductions of her neon work printed on glossy paper in large signed editions of 500. These works lack the uncompromising dynamism, bite, curiosity and perhaps the humility of her previous monoprints and etchings. And it seems that her paintings were not as dynamic as those produced 20 years earlier. Accordingly it could be thought that Emin’s business sensibilities were too far ahead of her artistic expansion, and that perhaps the countless interviews, the rhetoric and hype that too often surround her have been concealing, and preventing, the real, still abiding and untarnished virtuosity. Her self-imposed break from publicity indicated a shrewd willingness to understand this situation – her reason perhaps for having time out, standing at the crossroads moment, trying to find out who, where and how? Her show at White Cube, Bermondsey in 2019, after a long period of self-reflection, showed a return to a more considered and self-motivated painting sensibility. Emin’s work has been rightly thought of as being a ruthlessly honest representation and self-examination of herself, but of which self? During her early years there appeared to be several personas and consequential contradictions, so perhaps it is of interest to understand which self(s) were the basis for forming what is sometimes considered the personality cult as the art form that is Emin. In the 1980s, the many fluctuations in society and art education were having an impact on Emin’s singularly private life, an existence that was in combat and fought in

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isolation between dualities, an example being her partiality for, on one hand, embracing the conventional and temperate and a respect for traditional working methods, and on the other hand presenting the opposite with radical so-called misdeeds, a reputation for experimentation and a feted dislike of ‘stuck, stuck, stuck’ tradition.6 Yet multi-personas were usual at Rochester and Maidstone colleges, because at art schools the Nietzschean maxim abides: that anything at a given time is the only reality, and contexts and interpretations are more powerful than an apparent truth. At Medway, Emin was on the way towards an ambiguously conceived yet potentially remarkable autobiographical body of work, so who was concerned then if any verbal or practical declarations did not imitate actuality? Except there were hard realities to be dealt with. During the early Maidstone years Emin was being drawn towards an intellectual expression of feminism while struggling to find a visual narrative that had to be separated from what she knew were too many deceptive masculine-dominated motifs. During Emin’s time at Maidstone, the Liberal Studies Department was emphasizing the thoughts contained in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own (first published London, 1929), the constituent being the importance of women’s artistic independence within a male-dominated arena. But when Emin entered the liberal studies and history of art classes the usual gleam of intelligence was extinguished; this reappeared when she returned to her studio and picked up ink and paper. Nevertheless, Emin acquired a substantial knowledge of art history and this was connected to a powerful memory. She could elucidate persuasively, as for instance on the underlying romanticism and the technical power of Eugene Delacroix’s The unmade bed (Le lit defait, 1828, Musée National Eugène Delacroix, Paris). This empathetic understanding later fed the Delacroix reference into the starting point for her installation piece, My Bed (1998). However, it was feminism, much promoted at Maidstone, that set the conditions of her early work. In addition, there was Emin’s use of the freedom inherent in the technique of monoprinting and her inventions within the medium; these foundations were providing a pathway towards independence. There is a school of thought that maintains dyslexia and its symptoms were important to Emin’s work, yet the common manifestations of dyslexia, insecurity and subsequent fear of rejection, could not be applied exceptionally. These symptoms were as common among students and lecturers at Maidstone College as they are within all academic environments. Thus, it is difficult to accept that any (supposed) dyslexic symptom has been a strong influential factor on Emin’s work, except her tendency to write letters backwards, although I think this visual deceit was made cleverly – to relate a visual poignancy through a motivating compositional balance. Tracey was fun, clever, loyal, generous, principled and private; there was a streak of intolerance that was counteracted by a fragile adherence to the principle of total acceptance that came with the time and place. She and her group faced life with a humorous fatalism. With an impressively swept-up mound of dark chestnut hair and an elastic mouth, Emin looked like a wayward starlet from an early Antonioni film shot in grainy off-balance monochrome. Her retro-fashion panache contrasted anachronistically with the cult of grunge that prevailed in the Medway towns, her style adorned by a trademark white trench coat that she wore alongside the one worn identically by her lover, the poet, artist and musician, Billy Childish.

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She became increasingly reflective. This turning inward was being revealed in her written work. The liberal studies department was concerned about Emin’s essays. They were perceived to be over-subjective, without standard punctuation, spelling or syntax. They were considered unable to make a grade. Again, dyslexia was cited. The art department took a contrary view: that Emin was demonstrating satisfactory cognitive processes and research through an explicit narrative (visual, written and crossreferenced). These chronicles complemented the abundant drawings made in sketchbooks and on loose papers. They were to become a foundation for her later work. At this time, I knew Emin through work, colleagues and mutual friends. Then she brought her insuppressibly chatty dad, Enver, along to the Curwen Studio in London. We talked over pints of Guinness and glasses of pastis in the pubs of Tottenham Court Road and Soho. Later, at the final degree show at the Royal College of Art I chatted with Tracey’s mum and with Rose (the Maidstone College dinner lady, a shrewd and good friend of Tracey). The pieces of identity were falling into place, or were they? Before then I wondered moderately if she was really Tracie or Traci? Or was she Costanza Arnolfini possibly depicted in Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434, National Gallery, London), a painting of abundant complexity and much identified with by Emin. Did she know who she was, or had she forgotten? No one really knew or cared, why should they? Any truth was beyond notice. Emin was enough. There are events in every tale that are accurate; yet there are also embellishments and distractions that are used to provide an additional charisma. But any failure of exactitude was not Emin being mendacious in order to misinform; instead this was intended to create Wildean distortions in order to perform her art/life in public, on its own terms and for its own sake. Many who knew her at Medway observed this was art in action: we could see the specific or non-specific deception and sleight of hand at work, prompting inventions to gain closeness to a perceived truth. Its relevance here was to launch her on a disconcerting record of a life that would soon, although after incredible personal difficulties, offer her as a totemic Everywoman whose actions and meaning violated class, accepted truths, ideas of aesthetics and the meaning of power.

Influences, Vengeance, Ecstatic Possession and Fluxus The incorporation of influences into Emin’s early body of work was very important. These were not only pictorial but also the deeply felt stimuli that she felt for certain artists’ dispositions. At Maidstone she discussed with curiosity how Picasso viewed Cézanne, how he considered that Cézanne’s pictures would be of diminished interest without the outstanding personality attached to Cézanne. This observation, captured in the following statement by Picasso, was integral to Emin’s development: It is not what the artist does that counts, it is what he is. Cézanne wouldn’t be of the slightest interest to me if he had lived and thought like Jacques-Emil Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What is interest to us is Cézanne’s inquietude, that is Cézanne’s lesson . . . that is to say, the drama of the man. THE REST IS FALSE.7

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In addition, I think two artists – Jan Van Eyck (1390–1441) and Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656) – were of particular interest to Emin in her student years and their influences still resonate in her work. While Delacroix would have been a peripheral influence for My Bed, Van Eyck and Gentileschi supplied the real ammunition, especially for My Bed, the installation that Emin has claimed to be her most formative and central work (and which contains possibly the most varied inspirational sources, including Fluxus). Emin self-identified with the riddle within The Arnolfini Portrait: she identified equally with the wife (but which wife: a seemingly heavily pregnant Costanza or another woman?), the unborn baby (if it was really there?) and the husband, Giovanni.8 Emin adored this painting and she was erudite (sometimes monotonously so) when providing interpretation of its complex symbolism (Costanza died before the painting was completed, and there is no record that she and Giovanni had children). Emin’s problems with birth and abortion have been frequently documented. Her highly empathetic identification with the characters, the event and her esteem for the beauty of Van Eyck’s depiction was so intense that she proclaimed that this painting belonged to her. Just and only to her. The strength of the influence of The Arnolfini Portrait on My Bed can be readily assessed when looking at the feeling contained in her installation, at the despair, loss and the almost desperate search for an identity contained in the spoiled sheets; then compare these with Van Eyck’s depiction of pregnancy, latent grief, the who is who?, the heavy curtains, the half-hidden bed and the sense of erotic expectancy that is counteracted by hints of a dubious fulfilment. Emin also admired the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, whose rape and subsequent refusal to become a victim as a woman struck chords of understanding. At Medway Emin hoarded insults and influences in equal measure: both psychological and pictorial. So the act of beheading in Gentileschi’s Judith slaying Holofernes (1620– 21, Uffizi Gallery, Florence) is in accordance with Emin’s own unforgiving side. Emin states that an awful bout of depression caused the structure of My Bed. It did, but with Gentileschi and her other earlier influences holding her hand assuredly, and perhaps subconsciously, towards its inception and completion. The piece contains too much artistic integrity, beauty and sorrow to be anything other than great art, although many critics dismissed this work as only trite or self-serving when it was first exhibited at Tate in 1999. The images in Gentileschi’s painting that portray female strength, determination and vengeance – such as the reversed gender identity of the sword, the bits of chopped beard and the rivulets of blood soaking the rumpled bed as Holofernes is emasculated by beheading by a vengeful Judith – have become in Emin’s My Bed the sperm stains, pubic hair, more blood, razor, booze and other Fluxus/Joseph Beuys-inspired bits of matter that are scattered and soaked over the similarly shocking sheets. In her humorous put-down video, Why I never became a dancer (1995), Emin, far gentler than Judith, mocks the Margate boys who publicly insulted her at least ten years previously. She ridicules them while dancing away to freedom at the end of the video: ‘Shane, Eddy, Tony, Doug, Richard. This one’s for you.’ Emin, like the Mafia, and maybe Judith, preferred vengeance served cold. There is a curious link between Judith slaying Holofernes and The Arnolfini Portrait. The painter Francis Bacon (1909–92) had a possessiveness for Judith slaying Holofernes

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that was similar to Emin’s claim to The Arnolfini Portrait. Bacon’s biographer, Daniel Farson, once remarked that Bacon entered the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and had to be restrained from removing Gentileschi’s painting from its place on the gallery walls (he had been out to lunch). During separate conversations that I had with Bacon and Emin during the 1980s they claimed parallel almost ecstatic feelings, a mystic possessiveness for certain works of other artists that led to an almost transcendental ownership (although sometimes later denied by Bacon). A similar emotion of singular possessiveness is found in the letters of Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh (1853–90) and in the writings of the British mystic Thomas Traherne (1637–74): The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.9

The thread has remained: in 2016, My Bed and six Emin drawings were exhibited at Tate Britain accompanied by two of Bacon’s paintings chosen by Emin.10 These associations seemed to deliver an elated shared awareness despite a superficial gloomy aspect. Emin also admired Gentileschi’s Danaë (1612, St Louis Art Museum). The painter’s trick of conveying light from gold together with her intense erotic symbolism again struck chords of recognition. Gentileschi’s picture, showing the reclining naked daughter of Zeus being showered with coins, was remembered and evoked in Emin’s I’ve got it all (2000), in which she is gathering masses of bank notes and coins between her legs. A photographic flash replaces the painter’s dexterity with oil paint. Perhaps the most sustained influence of Gentileschi’s legacy became apparent in a work made not long after Emin left Kent for London. She took a studio in an abandoned Victorian school close to the Elephant and Castle in south London and this was where her early conceptual work was made. At this time, she was undergoing a particularly upsetting period. Perhaps as a response to her situation she produced a series of impressively awkward, needful and cringe-making love letters written on sheets of paper and pegged on strings draped across the studio area. The flow and style of her writing, the content and the underlying idea of unreturned acknowledgement to her devotions are reminiscent of Gentileschi’s letters to her lover Francesco Maria di Niccolò Maringhi. It can be said that the sensibilities within these hanging letters became the influential factors that would drive Emin’s later work. She realized that she could not, or did not want to, paint in the style of Artemisia, but she could embrace her passions and style of writing.

Medway The germination grounds for Emin and her circle were the Medway towns: Maidstone, Rochester, Chatham and Strood. Medway in the 1980s presented many things that would both depress and inspire. There was a bleak ugliness that was confined not only to the retail sectors, car parks and

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garages; the blight spread to the unfortunate modern housing developments that climbed from the watersides. But the skeletal docks and shipyards and their singular workers and inhabitants had a compulsive attraction that was full of possibilities for Emin and her group. Wads of frozen winter mists rolled in from the estuary and clung to the cranes and gasometers, leaving clear crystalline light underneath. In summer there was often a remarkable carmine-tinted oblique light that crept in from the flat Kent and Essex marshes, a landscape reminiscent of the low-lying shorelines of the European mainland situated not far to the northeast: the coast that inspired artists of the Dutch and German Expressionist schools of the nineteenth century and who later returned their inspirations to the Medway students. Emin caught the scene in her first published print, the lithograph: Sixty a day woman (1986).11 By the mid-1980s, the Medway towns possessed a peculiar sense of disengagement. Unemployment was high and manufacturing industries were closing down. This was in stark contrast to nearby London. The capital city was enjoying wealth, employment and a new artistic identity. Maidstone students were aware of the contrast when taking the short train journey to look at exhibitions or to meet friends at the colleges and studios; unsurprisingly the nearby affluence offered hope to many of them, including Emin. When Emin began her degree at Maidstone College of Art she found a purposebuilt art school situated within a campus at Oakleigh Park that offered Foundation and BA courses. She was to graduate in 1986 with a first class degree in Printmaking. The atmosphere at the college was one of mild socialist and strong feminist values; there was a quiet insistence on excellence and classes were open to anyone who proved to have the required talent (or the gift to talk their way in). Most students were eligible for a grant that paid for tuition and a modest living allowance. The teaching budget could afford to employ artists, designers, writers and craftspeople to visit on a regular or temporary basis. All this was integral to the higher education system of post-war Britain that enabled two gifted generations of artists and designers to make British art and design one of the consistently high annual earners and a magnet for international esteem and investment. Today the landscape has changed drastically. The recent policy that has withdrawn grants and introduced tuition fees now ensures that an Emin of 1980 would have difficulty in getting through the doors of a present-day art college. This leads to another Emin contradiction: her well-publicized vote for a recent government that reinforced these cuts and their related social exclusions comes after she previously championed the right to free and non-exclusive education. Again, a conundrum of contradictions, but does it matter? Let us look at another example. In the time between Maidstone and her later studies at the Royal College of Art after seeing a gallery show in London, Emin and a group went to see the American band Talking Heads in Jonathan Demme’s film Stop making sense (1984). When singer David Byrne started up on ‘Once in a Lifetime’ (1981), perhaps one of the most indispensable songs about the weirdness of time, place and identity, Emin more or less fell out of her seat with the eccentric jittery beats. But more, she identified with what Byrne was pointing out in the lyrics: put simply, that Truth was beyond notice, Art is the only reality. And music was always with Emin. It provided a steadfast constancy and a freedom dwelling inside the rejections, uncertainties and inconsistencies. There was an exuberance that came with that feeling, and the sense of

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future with its crossroads moments and where decisions have to be made. As the lyrics of ‘Crossroads Blues’ put it: I went down to the crossroads Tried to flag a ride Nobody seemed to know me Everybody passed me by.12

When Emin was at Maidstone her education was free. The college was typical of most good regional art schools. Lecturers who taught at the London colleges visited frequently, the standards were high and there was a more than average ratio of graduate acceptance for continuing study on MA courses. The main departments were Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking. Emin was selected for the Printmaking faculty after dropping out of a Fashion course at Rochester. Printmaking was well resourced with facilities for etching, wood and linocuts, lithography and silkscreen. Emin excelled with precociousness mixed with hard inquiry. Hers was not a freely bestowed aptitude, but one that was acquired by a painstaking practical and theoretical understanding advanced by acute experimentation. A precious knack was with her, of making a meticulously accomplished image appear as being very simply done. Yet she was suspicious of this ability. She knew that printmaking media were not vehicles for verisimilitudes; they were there to provide unexpected events, letting faults run their course and then understanding how these could be exploited. Most importantly she knew about restraint, often rejecting an image with too much technical perfection. She was taking her images to places where only she could dictate the direction of chance that was hinted at by the medium. Expressionist images by Edvard Munch (1863–1944), Ernst Kirchner (1880–1938) and Emil Nolde (1867–1956) were influential. And then, counterintuitively, she acknowledged the peculiarities contained in the work of a previous generation of British graphic artists including Edward Bawden (1903–89), Edward Ardizzone (1900– 79) and Michael Rothenstein (1908–93). Rothenstein, an influential print-maker and writer, was later to meet and encourage Emin when she visited the Curwen Studio. In the 1980s it was the discovery of the peculiar art of monoprinting, a direct yet complex medium, that offered Emin the key potential to find a voice to help her escape from difficult personal circumstances. Emin was looking for a method to get away from the expressionistic wood and linocuts that she was producing in collaboration with Billy Childish and his circle. The woodcut lines gave her only limited chances for expressing a particular fragility. She was seeking an alternative technique, one that would give her a direct and swift statement as well as subtlety, maybe to divorce her from the authority and influence of Childish (and later from his presence). She achieved this by a form of linear monoprinting, a medium that she later used to convey the sensitivity of her drawings, the quiet lines that Germaine Greer described in her talk for Emin’s exhibition, Love Is What You Want (8 June 2011, Hayward Gallery, London) as ‘giving articulation to something waiting to happen’. At the same time Emin showed an interest in drypoint and soft ground etching, media capable of giving a similar sensitive and fugitive line. By the end of the 1980s she had changed her drawing style.

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She continued to use dynamic and autonomous sketches, but in addition she produced a more considered methodology towards line and subject. Yet the monoprinting remained and was adapted to accommodate the new style. In art schools it was often thought that any student who imagines they can make a career is a victim of either fashion or circumstance. Consequently, it was a demanding time for Emin and her group with the usual self-doubts, the worrying explorations of difficult techniques, the questions about how to discover an appropriate aesthetic and most of all how to discover that elusive and distinguishing touch that gives the ‘individual voice’ – the singular expression that could be the key to providing a living by selling work, teaching, or even recognition and fame. Any suggestion to Tracey about a conceptual approach (there was an expectancy in that direction) was met with putting two fingers down her throat and crossing her eyes with a pitying smile. Later (after the difficult period at the Royal College of Art) conceptualism became another matter. But at Maidstone she was a non-conceptual dance queen. She adored disco dancing and Donna Summer (both deeply unfashionable with most art students at this time). The dance floor at the college was not a safe place when Emin took off: she was a good and dangerous dancer. Emin was living in part of an attractive and shabby Georgian terrace close to Rochester Castle, sometimes with Billy Childish. Billy’s band, Thee Milkshakes, showcased his lyrics and anarchistic lifestyle. His Hangman Books venture published raw poetry, prose and images by merging linocuts with cheap photocopies. Inspiration and contributions came assuredly from Emin. The circle had forged an aesthetic that was its own, yet it sprung from the Fluxus movement and other anti-strictures, often by way of the tutors at Maidstone. These came from the Fluxus panache: Jeff Nuttall’s anarchistic mix of word, poetry and jazz; John McHale and the Independent Movement artists; the Bonzo Dogs; Ivor Cutler; Genesis P. Orridge and the Leeds and Hornsey art school activities of the 1960s, later from Talking Heads and the cut-up lyrics and style of David Bowie. There was a value bestowed by Emin that came from experiences brought back from her travels to art squats in the Netherlands. It was a time of mutual inventiveness and a lively cross-referencing of ideas and solutions, with no question of Emin taking a backseat, however badly she was treated by the prevalent chauvinism of the time and place. Later claims that certain of these works and inspirations were not by Emin, but by Childish and others, were untrue. The pubs and clubs that Emin frequented around the industrial and dock areas of Medway were rough, poor and fairly dangerous. The atmosphere was enlivened by the presence of soldiers from Maidstone barracks and their rivalry with travelling people from nearby Shepwell. There were no notable cultural, exhibition or performance centres. Pub bands were still playing the hard estuary blues fashioned ten years previously across the Thames in Essex. Emin’s use of pencil and ink was addictive and spontaneous. She hung out with and drew people in the pubs and docks, often selling the results for very little or giving them away. She played darts and was no mean hand at pool. The poster for her degree show at Maidstone (1986) was a raw woodcut titled Jaw Wrestling depicting fighters, or maybe lovers, at that time a distinction between the two was not obvious. Symbolism and the Neue Sachlichkeit movements had their say. Childish had a poem by Kurt Schwitters tattooed on his torso; Emin a rose tattoo on her bottom.

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George Grosz’s wonderful painting Lovesick (1918, Kunstsammlung NordheinWestfalen, Dusseldorf) was emblematic and much admired, with its sharp suited character, visible heart, gun, lost love, booze, tattoo, dubiousness and a fish bone. Emin would draw a fish bone to depict a sailing ship, the head the hull, the backbone a mast, the tail fins either flags or sails. Weimar had come to the Medway then disappeared along with Tracey when she left for London to stay in a flat off Edgware Road, and then to Elephant and Castle, then to Lambeth, near to where the printer and artist William Blake lived and where he saw his angels.

London Town Welcomes Desperate Women In the summer of 1986, I invited Emin to work on an experimental print scheme at the Curwen Studio. The studio was well known for producing artists’ original limited edition lithographs. It was a small space and among the large printing presses several artists at a time worked, drawing on zinc plates or stones that were propped on improvised and sometimes awkwardly accessed surfaces. Henry Moore, David Hockney, Elisabeth Frink and John Piper had recently occupied or were occupying these spaces. Emin showed no uneasiness. It was here that she met Edward Bawden and Michael Rothenstein. Over a short period she made five outstanding monoprints and a lithograph. One day she arrived at the studio from the National Gallery after having seen Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (1781); she described this work with a quick exaggerated sketch on wrapping paper, a demon sitting on a recumbent female. Scattered about the studio were contact sheets and bits from other images; we made a collage to include these pieces. The loose hatching contained in the work shows the first soft monoprinted lines that Emin drew experimentally, which became the foundation for the lines in the later graphic work (see my Appendix on ‘Monoprinting and Emin’ at the end of this chapter.) At this time, Emin and Rothenstein contributed to a mixed print show at the Angela Flowers Gallery. I think this was the first time her work was shown in London: she exhibited a lithograph, White bridge at Leiden. Another lithograph that Emin had just produced at Curwen, and which was regarded as special by Rothenstein, was Sixty a day woman (1986), a complex image depicting a tall ships race on the Medway estuary, its title alluding to a chain-smoking woman and a poem by Billy Childish. Emin began work on illustrations for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’; ‘and still my body drank’ was considered a poignant phrase. These were left unfinished.13 It was outside the old Royal College of Art painting school in Exhibition Road, Kensington where the well-known rubbish skips were situated. From these skips scavengers took the discarded works of students. It is said that jettisoned paintings by Hockney, Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton were found there. It is unknown whether any of Emin’s paintings made their way to the skips, but she destroyed many. Soon after starting her MA painting degree in 1987 Emin mentioned that she was not being taught the techniques of painting. What she did not know was the college expected students to have previous painting abilities. Sadly, the reason for a lack of previous

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tuition was the absence of interaction between art college departments teaching at BA level at Maidstone. So, there was not much chance for a printmaking student to receive tuition in painting and sculpture and vice versa, apart from what could be gained outside the college. Subsequently several tutors at Maidstone had advised Emin against her application to the Royal College of Art painting school as there was a danger of being accepted without practical knowledge. Yet Tracey was successful in her application, possibly because of her intensive portfolio and enigmatic charisma, as well as an intuition by the selection panel that she would make an impact (she did of course, but not while at the college). Fortunately, the painter Ken Kiff (1935–2001) a visiting tutor at Maidstone and the Royal College of Art, provided her with extra tuition, advice and support. Typically, the ever practical Emin, finding painting a problem, decided to bridge the gap between printmaking (which she knew lots about) and painting (which she did not) by using silk screen printing ink as a vehicle to paint on canvas. Tracey later repaid the debt to Ken, whose work she admired. She turned up at a Kiff memorial exhibition at Marlborough Gallery and bought several paintings, delighting his family. The paintings Emin made at the Royal College of Art were varied: excitement and romance were not wanting. Three or four of the possibly destroyed paintings could have been hung without discredit in a retrospective exhibition. One was called Me and my Nan. These were worked in free impasto, depicting monumental figures worked over with intuitively applied thin dribbles of paint that gave a kind of subconscious luminosity. These paintings were displayed for a while on the landing at the entrance to the painting school. Ken Kiff and I (probably mistakenly) decided to persuade the manager of a London gallery to look at Emin’s paintings and prints, hoping that she would take on Emin as a gallery artist. The gallery manager, respecting Kiff ’s eminence as a painter at this time, turned up and had a look at the work; she gave a talk to a (thankfully) impassive Emin on how to improve her painting and drawing, offered an opinion that Emin would not make much progress in the art world, then took a taxi back to Mayfair, then as now the centre of London’s international commercial art world. The point here is not how the gallery manager was badly mistaken, but how this attitude was part of the general superciliousness towards students and young artists who were seeking exposure. This was, of course, a reason why students at Goldsmiths and elsewhere began to find their own exhibition spaces and started to sell directly though exhibitions such as Freeze (Surrey Docks, London, 1988). They began to sidestep the commercial galleries and to turn the long-established art market onto what was widely recognized as its pompous head. Emin began to pick up these ideas only slowly. Strange as this might seem, selfmarketing never came naturally to her. There was shyness and reticence, also a struggle to recognize the commercial aspect of her own art and to cultivate its potential. But eventually Emin joined in. In 1992, four years after Freeze, she and Sarah Lucas (who had trained at Goldsmiths) opened a shop in Bethnal Green in east London and Emin initiated the Tracey Emin Museum on Waterloo Road in 1995 where she hit on the idea of a mailing list of friends and acquaintances, requesting them to become subscribers to the person/persona of Tracey Emin. She proposed that subscribers could periodically donate an amount of money and in return they would be sent words and pictures in a letter. These were among the finest exhibits at Love Is What You Want (2011).

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There is a story I was told about this time that might be hearsay, though I expect it is true. I was teaching at the old Chelsea Art College in Manresa Road in Kensington, west London. I walked in the printmaking department: Student ‘Hey, Tracey came in last week to give us a talk, she was very late.’ John White ‘What was the talk about?’ Student ‘Well she more or less showed us a film called The Rebel with Tony Hancock and she said if we didn’t find it funny we should give up.’14

Enquiring readers are encouraged to recall or search for this film so as to have an impression of what she was signifying. Perhaps the most important lesson that the Royal College of Art taught Emin was how to assess her commercial value and how to take advantage accordingly. Because of the strategies of the then Rector, Jocelyn Stevens, the college was embracing an increased business and commercial profile that was chipping away at a traditional aesthetic base considered shabby and not cost-effective. Stevens (a former newspaper editor) visited the painting studios and became very cross if he saw a loose piece of canvas flapping from the back of its stretcher. The students, under Paul Huxley, were encouraged to market their personalities along with their paintings and present these as a joint package. But useful connections were being introduced. There was an increased corporate and business identity and students would exploit this to their advantage. The students at this time were stirred into being, whether they liked it or not, a part of an art branch of the prevailing ‘Thatcherkinder’ movement, a manifestation of Margaret Thatcher’s governing policy of ‘sell yourself and look after number one’. This was helped along, sometimes unknowingly, by the art schools because following the influence of Marcel Duchamp art became amorphous; then with Andy Warhol art morphed into money; after which art and money combined together to become power. These lessons were not immediately beneficial to Emin as she was going through miserable financial and emotional times after leaving the Royal College of Art in 1989, but despite these personal crises, she was making a quiet impact. There were the usual financial problems. She took a course followed by a job aiding and teaching young people with learning and physical difficulties. Slowly she entered into the crux of the art processing machinery including small shared shows in spaces at a converted shop in Walcott Square, Lambeth and, perhaps appropriately, in the crypt of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s puzzling St George’s Church in Bloomsbury. Much later, Emin moved to houses and studios in the shadow of the same architect’s Christ Church Spitalfields. Larger exhibitions happened, mentored by the curator Carl Freedman. The crucial period was between Minky Manky (curated by Carl Freedman, South London Gallery, 1995) and Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection (Royal Academy of Arts London, 1997). By the time of Sensation, Emin had become both established and, according to popular myth, infamous. Since the completion of the final drafts of this piece Emin has announced that she and Carl Freedman may acquire the site of a newspaper-printing factory to develop a print gallery, museum and a fine art printmaking and publishing set-up. This means the traditional printmaking skills and faculties, where Emin cut her teeth, may be given

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increased recognition, rather than being in the present state of demise, especially at art schools.15

Appendix: Monoprinting and Emin Monoprinted images can be similar, but editioning is not possible. The true appeal of the monoprint lies in the unique translucency that creates a quality of light and line very different from a painting or drawing on paper or a print, and the beauty of this media is in its spontaneity and its combination of printmaking, painting and drawing mediums. A monoprint, when made and printed well, should exploit the ability of paper to hold an image, either to attack the surface to ingrain the image or to let it float. There are three principal methods of making a monotype or monoprint. The additive or light field method where the image is painted or drawn by adding or building pigment on a suitably prepared flat clean surface, paper put over the image and then pressure applied. The subtractive or dark field method where the surface is covered with a thin layer of pigment, which the artist removes by means of oily rags and sharp points, the impression is made in the same way as the additive method. Then there is combination of the two methods. However, there are always variants and developments and Emin’s monoprints utilize a later method: a linear drawing, made by either a pencil or something suitable, through the back of a sheet of paper onto a pigment ground. This gives a distinctive line not unlike that of a soft ground etching; it is very simple, sensitive and direct. Emin uses this method to give a snapshot of her life and emotions, and she often combines text with an image to make possible a representation of an aesthetic and emotional response to her situation. The utter straightforwardness of monoprinting supports Emin’s chosen means of expression. She said in an interview – ‘It’s not cute affectation. If I could spell, then I would spell correctly, but I never bothered to learn. So, rather than be inhibited and say I can’t write because I can’t spell, I just write and get on with it.’16 Thus the quickness and directness of the medium suits her value of immediacy and intensity over too much technicality, as she often seems in a hurry to move on to the next picture.

Notes 1

2

Carl Freedman interview with Tracey Emin, exhibition catalogue, Minky Manky (London, 1995). Editors’ note: Emin enrolled on the Diploma in Fashion at Medway College of Design in Rochester (1980–2), the Foundation course at St John Cass, London (1982); BA Printmaking, Maidstone College of Art (1983–6 graduating with first class degree); MA in Painting, Royal College of Art, London (1987–9). Love Is What You Want (London, 2011), pp. 246–7. ‘Who Are You’ (1977, lyrics by Pete Townshend) from the Who Are You album and released as a single the same year. See http://www.thewho.com/album/who-are-you/ (accessed 28 June 2017).

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13 14 15

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Art into Life Events that happened in the years before 1980 were also highly influential. They are not examined here as they were not entirely related to her art practice, although they dovetailed into the period. Grayson Perry, ‘Popular is not a dirty word’, The Guardian, 27 May 2017, p. 14. Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin: Do Not Abandon Me, a collaboration between the two artists (Hauser & Wirth, London, 2011). Editors’ note: When Billy Childish, a figurative painter, mocked Emin’s interests in conceptual art, she reputedly retorted ‘Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! – Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!’ The taunt gave rise to the term Stuckism. See: http://www.art.newhall. cam.ac.uk/the-collection/by/artist/id/341/name/Tracey+Emin+CBE+RA/artwork/528 (accessed 29 June 2017). Author’s capitals. Christian Zervos, Conversations avec Picasso (Paris, 1998). Editors’ note: According to the National Gallery website, this double portrait does not portray a marriage and ‘Arnolfini’s wife is not pregnant’. See: https://www. nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jan-van-eyck-the-arnolfini-portrait (accessed 29 June 2017). Margaret L. Koster accepts Lorne Campbell’s identification of the sitters as Giovanni di Nicolai Arnolfini and Costanza Trenta, married in 1426. Pointing out that Costanza died in 1433, the year before the painting was made, she argues persuasively that the portrait provides a posthumous representation of Costanza. Koster also notes that whether the sitter was pregnant or not, the bunching of her dress follows a contemporary fashion for accentuating the womb that signalled a woman’s reproductive potential. ‘The Arnolfini double portrait: a simple solution’, Apollo, 158/499 (September 2003), pp. 3–14. Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations 1908 edition, p. 79. Available at: http:// www.ccel.org/ccel/traherne/centuries.html (accessed 29 June 2017). Editors’ note: Bacon’s Reclining Woman, 1961 and Study of A Dog, 1952 (Tate). A print of Sixty a day woman together with the unfinished proof is in the collection of New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge. Editors’ note: Eric Clapton’s 1966 lyrics quoted here reprise ‘Cross Road Blues’ by Robert Johnson, 1936/37. ‘Standin’ at the crossroad/I tried to flag a ride/Didn’t nobody seem to know me/everybody pass me by.’ ‘And still my body drank’ (1986), an artist’s book by Tracey Emin was donated to New Hall College by John White in 2014. Editors’ note: In The Rebel (Robert Day, 1961) British comedian Tony Hancock plays an office worker who gives up his job to become an artist. Jarvis Cocker, musician and a self-admitting beneficiary of a degree from St Martin’s School of Art (now Central St Martins) (1991), talking about his forthcoming book about creativity This Book is A Song, regrets what he sees as the present lack of interdisciplinarity in and admission difficulties at art schools today. ‘Artistic creation is a shared part of human heritage, everybody can do it, but it’s basically disappeared from the school curriculum, so then it becomes pretty much impossible to go to [art] college if you’re from a certain social sector.’ Interview with Sophie Heaward, https:// www.theguardian.com/music/2019/may/19/jarvis-cocker-i-have-lived-in-my-headfor-most-of-my-life (accessed 19 May 2019). Lynn Barber, ‘Tracey Emin. Just be yourself - and wear a new top’, Parkett, 63 (2001), p.27.

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‘I Do Not Expect to Be a Mother’: Non-Reproduction and Ageing in the Work of Tracey Emin Joanne Heath

In 2002, Tracey Emin produced an appliqué blanket onto which is sewn the bleak statement, ‘I do not expect to be a mother but I do expect to die alone’. This textile piece registers a growing concern within Emin’s art practice over the past decade or so with issues of (non-)maternity and ageing, a concern that finds explicit expression in the artist’s statement introducing her exhibition of recent works The Last Great Adventure Is You at White Cube in October 2014: ‘The work is about rites of passage, of time and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone.’1 I do not expect was included in Emin’s mid-career survey show at the Hayward Gallery in 2011, where it was dismissed by art critic Laura Cumming for its ‘mawkish self-pity.’2 Like many newspaper reviewers of the Hayward show, Cumming appeared to feel that Emin should by now be old enough to know better. Pointing out that the artist was approaching 50 years of age, Cumming suggested that, ‘as the agonies of youth are passing, her work does not seem to pass accordingly from intensity to profundity.’3 In their attempts to accommodate Emin and her practice, reviewers have, therefore, to deal with a certain paradox: although she may have first come to popular attention as part of the yBa phenomenon of the 1990s, Tracey Emin is now no longer a ‘young British artist’ but a decidedly ‘middle-aged’ one, who has come to enjoy, if not unambiguous critical acclaim then certainly considerable commercial success. While Emin’s reputation as the ‘bad girl’4 of the yBa grouping may have originally been sealed by a drunken exit from a live discussion on the demise of painting in contemporary art practice on late-night television in 1997 and her nomination for the 1999 Turner Prize for her exhibitions Every Part of Me’s Bleeding, Lehmann Maupin, New York, and Sobasex (My Cunt is Wet with Fear), Sagacho Exhibition Space, Tokyo, the persistence with which that label, with its connotations of youthful rebelliousness, continues to attach itself to the artist is indicated by the 2013 survey book The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, which identifies Emin as one of a number of contemporary ‘bad girl’ artists who ‘exploit “politically incorrect” and sexually explicit material to challenge the patriarchal image system’.5 Yet, even as she remains (in) famous for her recurrent interrogation of aspects of her personal, in particular her 103

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sexual, history in the body of work she produced in the 1990s, so too has Tracey Emin come to seem an increasingly establishment figure: elected a Royal Academician in painting in 2007, serving as Eranda Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy from 2011 to 2013 and awarded a CBE in 2013, she has also been feted by such institutional bastions of Middle England as the Conservative Party and Marks & Spencer.6 Cultural commentators have been much struck by Emin’s seemingly relentless ‘march from “Mad Tracey from Margate” towards respectability’.7 While the artist’s journey from rundown seaside town to multi-million pound Spitalfields studio complex could potentially have been made to signify as a neoliberal success story (‘the working-class girl made good’), journalists have instead professed themselves exasperated by her apparent inability to leave the past behind her. ‘She is rich and famous. And yet still she seems discontented. She sits at the centre of our culture parading her wounded psyche like some contemporary martyr, displaying her vagina like St James displayed his cockle shell. Can’t she just pull herself together and move on?’ asks Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times.8 What appears to irk commentators about Emin is thus not only her repeated return to and reworking of past events, but also her continuing use (and seemingly flagrant display) of her own – avowedly sexual yet emphatically non-reproductive – body. In this chapter, I explore the difficulties that Tracey Emin, as a now post-reproductive woman artist who has carried on making work that deals explicitly with the female body and sexuality, poses to a culture which continues to figure femininity through the twin tropes of youthfulness and maternity. I examine how these difficulties are embedded in art journalistic responses to recent exhibitions by Emin, and set those responses against a consideration of Emin’s art practice in which, I argue, questions of non-reproduction, ageing and (loss of) desire are explored in an altogether more complex manner. In both her practice and her persona, Tracey Emin has consistently challenged the central role played by reproduction in culturally dominant constructions of femininity, and in the discursive production and regulation of the female body and sexuality. Over the past 20 years, she has made a succession of works dealing with the issue of abortion and its legacies which complicate what is often oversimplified as a straightforward choice between wanting versus not wanting a child.9 In Feeling Pregnant (2000), a number of handmade and embellished items including a baby blanket, clothes and shoes are carefully folded and displayed in an open drawer unit. On the wall behind, a panel of five framed, handwritten texts describe a recurrent ‘mini freak out’, wherein Emin lies awake at night worrying that she may be pregnant. She runs through a cycle of thoughts that may well be familiar to any woman who has ever anxiously awaited the arrival of a late period: frantic counting of days, followed by the conjuring of physical symptoms and strange food cravings, succeeded by emphatic denial (‘Chill out Trace YOU CAN’T be pregnant’). For the artist, to feel ‘pregnant’ is to feel both physiologically and emotionally destabilized by a dawning awareness of something that is as yet unknown: the text reiterates several times that she feels ‘very strange’ and ‘Not my usual self.’ Abortion appears to provide a means of extricating herself from this indeterminate bodily and psychic state: she makes a list of practical steps to be taken to terminate this as yet unconfirmed pregnancy – ‘£350 quid Good clinic/Insist on having it done straight away’ – before the prose text slips into an hallucinatory vision of ‘Something

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beautiful and tiny – peaceful – wrapped up in a pink shrimp cloth – curled up. A small dead ball’, which in turn dissolves into another scene in which Emin is relaxing on a beach with a small girl lying beside her ‘like a little seal, under the shade of the parasol – I call her mushroom – or tiny, I’ve never called her by her real name.’ In Feeling Pregnant Emin thus moves between outright refusal and a tentative embrace of her own procreative capacities, with both the prose text and the accompanying items of clothing serving at once to commemorate past pregnancies that did not come to fruition and to acknowledge a future reproductive potentiality. Emin’s somewhat idealized fantasy of family life on the beach comes to an abrupt end, however, when she takes a pregnancy test that, to her stated relief, turns out to be negative. She is no longer a mother-(not)-to-be, but instead ‘just a 36 year old/woman with a Fucking/Good Imagination.’ The question of potential motherhood seems to press heavily on this and other works made when the artist was in her mid- to late 30s, as Emin recognizes that the decision as to whether or not to have a child is not one that can be delayed indefinitely. In The Interview (1999), Emin rehearses aspects of her own internal dialogue on the topic before a video camera – ‘is it being altruistic or is it being really fucking selfish, having children?’ she muses. In this videotaped conversation, Emin acknowledges that she is thinking about this question ‘a lot because I’m 35 years old. I have reason to think about it.’ She confronts the fact that her fertility may already be in decline. ‘You’re drying up’, she tells a doubled version of herself, to which that other self retorts: ‘I am not drying up. My womb is drying up. There is a very big difference there. If my womb suddenly leaves me, I will not stop thinking, I will not stop breathing, I will not stop being a human being. I may feel less of a woman in certain ways but it won’t stop me from being a human being.’

As Tracey Emin thus acknowledges, female identity is at once closely bound up with, yet at a certain point in a woman’s life also comes to exceed, the reproductive capabilities of the female body. While works such as Feeling Pregnant figured pregnancy and motherhood as both a lost possibility and a future potentiality, the artist is now in her 50s and has spoken in a series of recent interviews about the definitive ending of her fertility, following an operation to treat severe endometriosis that precipitated her abruptly into the menopause. She has stated that this surgery was the point at which she came definitively to recognize that she would never conform to socially prescribed ideals of femininity, which posit marriage and motherhood as inevitable and sequential stages in a woman’s life: ‘It’s when I started to realise that, whatever it is that 99 per cent of the population do in terms of marriage, children and grandchildren, I was going in a completely different direction. I always was, but it really hit me then.’10 Confronting and defying the still pervasive cultural expectation of women that they should become (or at the very least aspire to become) mothers, Tracey Emin thus compels a consideration of mature female identity and desire beyond maternity. Her comments regarding the ‘different direction’ she has taken in mid-life are, however, reframed by interviewer Louise France as a shift in lifestyle away from the apparently destructive patterns of behaviour that characterized her youth towards a new and more abstemious existence: ‘She no longer smokes, she rarely gets drunk – she stays in – oh, and she

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never looks in the mirror any more. Tracey Emin the exhibitionist has left her mad days behind.’11 Yet questions of the artist’s past – in particular, her sexual past – and its relationship to her present resurface insistently in newspaper reviews of recent exhibitions by Emin, despite journalists’ best efforts to emphasize her apparent metamorphosis from ‘enfant terrible’ to ‘calm grande dame.’12

‘She’s Talking About Sex Again’13 Many reviewers of Love Is What You Want, the retrospective of Emin’s work staged by the Hayward Gallery in 2011, appear to have shared the opinion that either Emin’s art practice, or indeed the artist herself, remained stuck in ‘arrested development’.14 ‘She has not left childish things behind, but dragged them into adulthood, along with her mistakes, her sexuality, her sentiments, her family relations, her abortions,’ suggested Adrian Searle.15 Implicit within many of these reviews was the idea that there was something quite unseemly about a 50-year-old woman who was ‘still banging on about traumas and tragedies that feel worked to death’.16 It was high time, art journalists appeared to feel, that Emin put the past behind her and moved on. The Hayward retrospective also, however, provided those same critics with an opportunity to reassess their previously held opinions of Emin and her art. While she may have ‘arrived a sceptic’, Rachel Campbell-Johnston ‘left a convert’, seemingly gripped in spite of herself by the‘universal plea for understanding’ and ‘profound craving for freedom’ she now discerned in Emin’s art practice.17 Adrian Searle similarly found himself ‘touched’ and ‘surprised’ to discover in the body of work presented at the Hayward ‘a far greater range of tempos and registers of feeling than we might expect’. Although doubts persisted over the conceptual complexity and technical execution of some of the individual works on display, there was nonetheless general agreement among reviewers that the ‘cumulative effect’ of the show was, as Searle put it, ‘extremely powerful’.18 A ‘reluctantly admiring’ Richard Dorment noted in the Daily Telegraph, ‘the triumph of the Hayward exhibition is to show that with Emin’s work the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.’19 Yet it was the very qualities that reviewers now came to recognize (and even to admire) in Emin’s work that also led them to insist that it could not be assessed according to established categories of aesthetic judgement. ‘You can’t judge it using formal criteria such as design or composition, and you can’t speak of her stylistic development, because there isn’t any. All you can do is to see each individual painting, film or object as a fragment of a multimedia biography-inprogress’, suggested Dorment.20 Although Rachel Campbell-Johnston may have discerned in Emin’s work a number of broader philosophical concerns, she too ultimately binds that work back onto key events in the artist’s childhood and adolescence. ‘Emin is not an artist who makes a pronounced chronological progression’, she concluded. ‘Her work remains rooted in the emotions of her upbringing.’21 The broadly chronological hang of the show encouraged others, however, to draw a distinction between the works installed on the ground floor of the gallery space, which included a number of those that have come to register in the art critical and popular imaginary as trademark ‘Emins’: the appliqué blankets, videos and mixed media pieces dealing with the sexual violence the artist suffered as a teenager in Margate and the

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botched abortions she underwent in her 20s, alongside Emin’s more recent works. To Waldemar Januszczak it seemed that, the entire top floor of the Hayward has been given over to a seemingly endless inspection of the Emin pudenda and the torturous consideration of her need to masturbate. The autobiographical element of her art that had previously triggered such exciting angers and dark thirsts for vengeance is now channelled into a pale and creamy narcissism.22

While Emin’s repeated return to and refiguring of her previous sexual experiences in her work from the 1990s could be tolerated (up to a point) as the transparently literal ‘confessions’ of a young woman struggling unsuccessfully to transcend a troubled past, her continued exploration of her sexuality did not resonate in the same way. What could be accommodated as the apparently unmediated outpourings of an (albeit excessive and chaotic) youthful, working-class femininity, seemed in the hands of an older, established woman artist merely self-indulgent and solipsistic. Two subsequent solo exhibitions by Emin, She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea (Turner Contemporary, Margate, 2012) and The Last Great Adventure Is You (White Cube, Bermondsey, London, 2014), have further focused journalistic attention upon the artist’s most recent work. With these two shows, it seemed to critics, Emin was finally able to do what she had not been able to do in the works on display at the Hayward: namely, ‘to make a definitive break with her dysfunctional Margate past’.23 She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea was presented by reviewers as both a triumphant return to Emin’s home town of Margate, and a departure from a previous modus operandi. ‘Gone is the anger. Gone is the man-bashing. In their place, an air of wistful nostalgia seems to have seeped into her art’, declared Waldemar Januszczak.24 The works on display at Turner Contemporary, predominantly gouache drawings, monoprints and embroidered images of the reclining nude figure, were seen by many critics as a marker of Emin’s increasing conservatism as an artist. According to Jonathan Jones, ‘The artist we see in this boring exhibition is not the girl from Margate but Professor Emin, who seems to have sunk into the complacency typical of Royal Academicians.’25 Where critics had previously insisted that the autobiographical nature of Emin’s project meant that it had to be judged purely on its own, idiosyncratic terms, the shift they now discerned in her practice away from the raw materials of her childhood and adolescence towards ‘old-fashioned mark-making’ enabled them to locate her work within an artistic genealogy that encompassed Turner, Rodin, Schiele, Munch, Picasso and Matisse.26 The volte-face in critical opinion on Emin is, however, perhaps most clearly indicated by Jonathan Jones’s response to The Last Great Adventure Is You. Having dismissed the work on display at Turner Contemporary as ‘pretentious and second-rate drawing, lazy in its refusal to really get to grips with form’,27 Jones declared the White Cube exhibition ‘a masterclass in how to use traditional skills in the 21st century.’28 According to Jones, her skill in handling gouache and bronze was such that Emin was now ‘the most important British artist of her generation’, and her depictions of the human figure to be regarded as comparable to those of Michelangelo and Titian, Matisse and Picasso.29 On the surface, it might thus appear that it is Tracey

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Emin’s turn in her most recent work to traditional (if historically freighted) techniques such as life drawing and bronze casting that has led to her increasing acceptance by reviewers as a serious artist rather than a charlatan celebrity. Yet the perceived change in direction in Emin’s practice away from the anger of her earlier and more visceral pieces towards a gentler and more aesthetically pleasurable mode of production also appeared to be linked in the critical imaginary to the fact that the artist had recently entered into the menopause. While critics have on the one hand thus heralded the emergence of what appears to be a new phase in both Tracey Emin’s life and art, in which the artist is seen to have matured sufficiently in order to set aside the difficulties and excesses of her past in order to produce a body of art historically significant work, they have paradoxically also continued to rely upon the artist’s seemingly forthright disclosure of intimate details of her personal life as a means of explaining that work.

‘People Don’t Talk About It’30 In promoting both the Margate and Bermondsey shows, Emin gave a series of interviews in which she spoke with characteristically disarming frankness about her difficulties in managing menopausal symptoms including loss of libido and weight gain. In an interview with Mark Brown of The Guardian, she shifts between describing her own personal experiences of menopause, and addressing the cultural taboos that continue to surround the condition, as well as the challenges it presents to female identity more generally: I am going through the menopause and I have been for ages. It is a nightmare, an absolute nightmare. It’s horrible. And I don’t look like that kind of person; you don’t put menopause on top of my head, it doesn’t associate with me. . . . People don’t talk about it, but the menopause, for me, makes you feel slightly dead, so you have to start using the other things – using your mind more, read more, you have to be more enlightened, you have to take on new things, think of new ideas, discover new things, start looking at the stars, understand astronomy. For women, it is the beginning of dying. It is a sign. I’ve got to start using my brain more – I’ve got to be more ethereal and more enlightened.31

Emin’s pronouncements led critics, including Brown, to propose that the works on display at Turner Contemporary constituted ‘a farewell to the old Emin – the wild child, the one that got drunk all the time, the sex, the bed, the tent. Her “animal” lust has gone. Now there is the new Emin.’32 Like many journalists, Brown sets out to rebrand Emin according to popular stereotypes surrounding the single, childfree woman in ‘middle age’ – as an increasingly staid figure who now eschews wild nights out on the town in favour of quiet evenings in with her beloved cat Docket. ‘Mad Tracey, a spinster with cats? Why not?’ exclaimed another critic in mock disbelief.33 For several reviewers, the distance between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Emins could be most clearly measured in the contrast between My Bed (1998) and the sculpture Dead Sea (2012), which consisted of a cast bronze branch placed on top of a double mattress. In response to Brown’s somewhat prurient questioning as to the source of the stains on

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that mattress, Emin is quoted as saying ‘Believe me, it was all naturally made. It wasn’t all on my own, I can assure you. It goes back to that thing of being over.’ (And here, Brown helpfully glosses that, ‘She’s talking about sex again.’) Emin continues, ‘It’s over. This explains it very well. It was there, but it’s gone.’34 Functioning in implicit contrast to My Bed, which, in the mess of underwear stained with menstrual blood, tampons, packets of oral contraceptives and used condoms that litters the floor beside the bed itself, makes overt reference to an active (and, indeed, potentially reproductive) female sexuality, Dead Sea is positioned by both artist and critics as a work that attempts to come to terms with the waning of sexual desire following the onset of menopause. Emin’s description of the menopause as a key transitional phase in a woman’s life, during which a new sense of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment comes to compensate for a loss in sexual energy, resonates with the work of popular feminist writers such as Germaine Greer. In her 1992 book The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause, Greer sets out to reclaim the menopause from a male-dominated medical profession, by whom even today it continues to be viewed primarily as a physiological condition requiring management and regulation through hormonal replacement therapy.35 For Greer, menopause is instead to be understood as a ‘journey inwards towards wisdom and serenity’.36 Having learnt ‘to shift the focus of her attention away from her body ego towards her soul’, a woman in her 50s has the potential, she suggests, to be ‘reborn into a different kind of life’.37 As Lynne Segal has, however, noted, this view of the menopause as a potential release from the exigencies of bodily arousal is reliant upon the assumption that, ‘“sex” reduces to some particular physical action or engagement that is no longer performed’.38 This rather narrow idea is, however, complicated by the psychoanalytic model, which acknowledges sexuality to be not only a pivotal and persistent influence on the human psyche, but also infinitely variable in its aims, activities and objects: as Segal notes, from this perspective, ‘it would never be straightforward to declare sex “safely” over.’39 Tracey Emin’s repeated declaration that the onset of menopause has put paid not only to her reproductive potentiality, but also her libidinal sexuality, thus cannot necessarily be taken at its literal word; rather, it demands more analytical consideration. It is to this end that this chapter places her observations on ageing and desire in dialogue with another major artistic exploration of the psychosocial dilemmas confronting the older, post-reproductive woman. In her large-scale installation Interim (1984–9), Mary Kelly examined how women’s subjectivity is produced and regulated in relation to four key discourses: the body, money, history and power. Part I of Interim, ‘Corpus’, focuses on the body and interrogates ‘how it is shaped socially and psychically by the interim moment of ageing’.40 In ‘Corpus’, 30 Plexiglas panels pairing handwritten, first-person narratives with folded items of clothing are arranged in five sections. While the scale and format of these Plexiglas panels echoes that of advertising hoardings, the titles of the five sections explicitly reference the visual iconography of the hysterical female body produced under the auspices of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Where Charcot’s emphasis lay upon the observation and classification of the visible symptoms of hysteria, Kelly argues that the movement of the discourse on hysteria from the public lecture theatres of the Salpêtrière to what would become the analytic scenario entailed a crucial shift from looking to

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listening. It is her contention that, with the invention of psychoanalysis, ‘the body was dispersed, made invisible’, only to return ‘in the spectacle of contemporary advertising where women’s bodies, posed in an infinite variety of passionate attitudes, are all pervasive.’41 The photographic representations of folded, twisted and knotted garments that form part of ‘Corpus’ thus not only stand in for the exaggerated gestures and contorted poses of the women patients represented in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (1876–80), but also simultaneously mimic the conventions of contemporary advertising and retail display: silk-screened onto glossy sheets of Plexiglas, these blown-up images are presented as objects of desire and for consumption. Each posed garment is displayed alongside another panel that features a handwritten, first-person narrative based on the artist’s own informal conversations with other women on the topic of ageing. These paired panels explore how women’s experiences of their own corporeality are mediated by the discourses of fashion, romantic fiction and medicine. Of the stories included in that section of ‘Corpus’ subtitled ‘Menacé’, one concerns a woman who has made the decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Her narrative flags up the disjuncture between the clinical conceptualization of the female reproductive system and women’s lived experiences of their own bodies: the woman is examined by a male doctor who, like Charcot, is ‘preoccupied with looking’ (and the accompanying image is of a leather jacket unzipped to reveal its interior lining in a gesture that parallels the gynaecological examination the woman undergoes). The unnamed narrator, on the other hand, observes that, ‘No one will talk about it. About what? Pregnancy? No. Menstruation? No, not exactly. Something less specific, secret places, secretions, odd swellings, strange smells, odors, lack of order, disorder, being older.’ While this is, on one level, a story of reproductive refusal, it thus also draws attention to those aspects of an ageing yet still potentially reproductive body with its sensations and secretions, rhythms and cycles that resist or exceed not only medical management and regulation, but also cultural inscription (‘No one will talk about it.’). In holding in play these tensions around reproduction/non-reproduction, embodiment and ageing, ‘Corpus’ shares certain affinities with the recent work of Tracey Emin. The representational strategies that the two artists deploy in order to explore these issues are, however, very different, some might even argue, diametrically opposed. Although ‘Corpus’ is centrally concerned with the body, it steadfastly avoids any direct representation of women or their bodies. It thus contributes to a set of complex and intersecting debates that had been initiated during the preceding decade within feminist theory, art practice and activism regarding representation, embodiment and spectatorship.42 During the 1970s, the Women’s Movement had drawn attention to the proliferation within both high art and popular culture of images of women displayed for the enjoyment of men. While some artists and theorists, including Mary Kelly, turned to psychoanalysis as a means to critically interrogate the psychic structures and social formations through which women are positioned as objects of male heterosexual desire, others, whom Kelly somewhat dismissively dubs the ‘positive images brigade’,43 sought to subvert existing representations of women and their bodies, either by making work that valorized women’s lived experiences or provided less exploitative images of their bodies, or else by asserting that much art made by women was readily identifiable in its use of recurrent abstract forms that, whether consciously or unconsciously,

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invoked female biology. In avoiding any literal figuration of the female form, ‘Corpus’ refuses the positioning of woman as fetishized object within patriarchal culture. Although it actively solicits ‘the look of the spectator in the position of the woman’,44 it does not do so by offering a range of positive images of women’s embodied experiences with which that spectator can identify. The multiple visual and narrative panels that comprise ‘Corpus’ do not point to any fixed female identity, but rather call attention to the social and psychic processes through which femininity is constituted. As Kelly herself writes, ‘Interim proposes not one body but many bodies, shaped within a lot of different discourses. It doesn’t refer to an anatomical fact or to a perceptual entity, but to the dispersed body of desire.’45 The work of Tracey Emin is, by contrast, often taken to be centrally concerned with one body – the artist’s own. Although Emin herself is reticent on the topic, her use of autobiographical material and her own body image in her artworks, as well as her adoption of craft techniques, clearly aligns her work with those strands of art informed by feminism that have sought to reclaim women’s bodily experiences as a valid subject for art.46 While Emin’s practice is, on one level, implicitly enabled by the work of those whom Kelly labels the ‘positive images brigade’, it has also been described as a ‘proletarianphilistine reaction against 80s feminist propriety.’47 Rather than seeking to uphold this perceived aesthetic and generational divide between the politically engaged, theoretically informed and conceptually oriented critique of representation undertaken by artists including Mary Kelly in the 1970s and 1980s, and the often graphic display of the female body and sexuality in the work of a younger cohort of so-called ‘bad girls’ such as Tracey Emin in the 1990s, it now seems necessary to begin to trace different genealogies in art made by women.48 To set the work of Tracey Emin in conversation with that of Mary Kelly is to loosen the ties that have so consistently bound Emin’s practice to notions of the ‘personal’ or ‘confessional’ and to address instead the particular means by which she negotiates what Kelly identifies as the dilemma of the older woman who ‘can neither look forward, as the young girl does, to being a woman, that is, having the fantasized body of maturity, nor can she return to the ideal moment of maternity.’49

‘There’s a Big Difference between Being 35 and 50’50 The nude female figure has emerged as a recurrent motif in Tracey Emin’s recent work. The shows at Turner Contemporary in 2012 and at White Cube, Bermondsey in 2014 each included a significant number of small-scale gouache drawings featuring a faceless woman in a variety of poses. Little attention is given to the mise en scène, save for the merest suggestion of the bed on which the model lies; the figures are rather set against the emphatic whiteness of the page, the outline of their bodies confidently articulated in fluid line of the inkiest blue-black. While Emin’s mark-making has an expressive and spontaneous quality – the drawings appear, like the artist’s monotype prints, to have been effected in a single sitting, rather than revised and reworked over successive sessions – certain poses are repeated and reversed, magnified onto calico and then painstakingly embroidered in order to produce works that, in scale at least, appear to mimic the grandeur of traditional oil painting. The titles in some instances read as

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descriptive notes on the various poses assumed by the model – Hands Open, Fist Clasped, Head far back, Up Straight. While these gouaches might accordingly be taken as technical exercises in depicting the life model in a variety of poses, often derived from the classical history of art, others are given titles more clearly evocative of some interior state – In my mind, Think of you too much. Although the model’s face is frequently left blank or else emphatically scrubbed out by energetic strokes of gouache, the title of one work defiantly asserts that Im actually here. Tracey Emin’s nude studies thus insist upon the subjective presence of both sitter and viewer, often making direct appeal to an unknown other/lover: scrawled across one drawing in block capitals that dwarf a diminutive figure standing before a pool of the palest blue are the words ‘I did not say I can not love you. I said I could never love.’ The viewer thus comes to feel increasingly implicated by these images: standing in for this absent other, we find ourselves insistently addressed and even on occasion bluntly accused – I wanted you so much, I am telling you it hurt. Although art critical discourse frequently asserts that the body depicted in Emin’s renditions of the female nude is the artist’s own, the artist herself has challenged the assumption that they are to be considered self-portraits. The 2009 exhibition Those who Suffer Love (White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London) featured a 24-second animation of the same name in which over 150 drawings of a woman masturbating were shown in a jerky loop – ‘I say, a woman, because I didn’t necessarily mean it to be myself.’51 Emin reiterates this point in a subsequent interview: Many people have said to me, ‘Oh is that you masturbating?’ And I say, ‘I wish it was.’ I’m nearly fifty, and my life isn’t like that any more. With that piece, I was realising that a lot of the fecundity of life was actually over for me. It sounds a bit silly, but I was sort of trying to re-create or reinvent some kind of female sexuality and to revitalise it. The idea behind that animation also relates to drawing, because drawing’s a solitary act. You do it yourself, using your own line, your own rhythm, your own blood flow, your own vision.52

While this statement may appear on first reading simply to reiterate Emin’s oft-repeated remarks regarding her definitive loss of both fertility and sexual desire following the onset of menopause, it also speaks to an attempt to find some new way of imagining and figuring female sexuality through the embodied practice of drawing. Emin’s erotically charged textile and gouache drawings stand in complex relationship to a range of other artworks that have offered a similarly frank exploration of women’s sexuality. At Turner Contemporary in 2012, they were shown alongside a smaller number of sexually explicit works by J. M. W. Turner and Auguste Rodin. These sketches of women asleep in the enveloping softness of a heavily curtained bed, or else lying on their backs with their legs splayed so as better to display their genitals, and of female couples actively embracing, appear to afford the viewer a privileged glimpse into a private, feminine realm of autonomous sexual pleasure and intimacy. They are, however, inflected not only by the concrete social and economic transactions that were effected between the men who drew the pictures and the women who posed for them, but also by the particular configurations of class, gender and sexuality that mark their

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historical moment of production. Unlike the private sketchbooks of Rodin and Turner, or indeed Gustave Courbet’s notorious painting L’Origine du Monde (1866, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), in which women’s sexuality is presented as an object of and for masculine heterosexual viewing pleasure, Tracey Emin’s drawings and monotype prints of women with their legs spread apart are not reliant upon voyeurism as their mode of address. These images of women often quite literally taking their sexuality into their own hands are instead positioned by the artist herself as a riposte to a culture that denies women and girls any means of accessing or even acknowledging their own bodily and sexual specificity: As women, we’re told to sit with our legs crossed. When you’re little, you might talk about your fanny or whatever, but you never talk about your hole. Little girls never say, ‘I’ve got a hole.’ You’re not allowed to. There’s no room for that hole. It doesn’t exist until it’s being used, basically.53

In confronting and challenging the idea that the vagina can register only as lack or absence, wound or ‘hole’ to be penetrated, Tracey Emin’s art practice recalls a complex tradition of work by artists including Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, Tee Corinne and Suzanne Santoro, who have sought, in various ways, to reclaim the vagina as an active and powerful symbol of female identity and experience. Yet what differentiates Emin’s project from these earlier attempts to demystify and celebrate feminine sexuality is that, at the same time as she affirms the capacities of the female body for autonomous erotic pleasure, Emin also explores that body as a site of trauma. In her drawing practice, Emin has repeatedly returned to key scenes from her past, revising and reworking the memory traces of scenes of sexual violence and termination: When I re-create things again and again, it’s not because I want to make the same drawing: it’s because I want to work with the same memory. When you’re twenty, you look back at things that happened to you when you were ten. But then you have a very different attitude looking back at them when you’re nearly fifty.54

The figures represented in these drawings seem not self-contained but profoundly vulnerable: as the words embroidered across an appliqué blanket from 2002 reiterate, ‘something’s wrong – terably wrong’ (Somethings Wrong, 2002). Underneath this reversed message, a flood of metallic discs gushes out from between the legs of a painfully contorted woman, in an inversion of the ironically titled photograph I’ve got it all (2000), in which the artist scoops an overflowing pile of paper money and coins up into her lower abdomen and crotch. In her figuring of the female body as at once actively and autonomously sexual yet also bleeding and vulnerable, Tracey Emin thus cuts across an existing array of representations of female sexuality – from the artistic to the pornographic, from the celebratory to the denigratory – in order to speak to the complex and contradictory ways in which women may experience their own bodies. Emin’s ongoing project of intimate self-regard has, moreover, shifted and evolved over time. According to the artist herself, her most recent drawings of the female nude

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serve as an attempt to come to terms with the physical and psychological changes associated with ageing: There’s a big difference between being 35 and 50. Massive. And that’s what I’m trying to understand. Where does that girl go? Where does that youth go? That thing that’s lost, where has it gone? I’m looking for it in the pictures; I’m looking for it in the paintbrush. . . . I’m talking about a kind of . . . breathlessness. I’m talking about the truth. I’m dealing with that, and no matter how petty or unimportant it may seem to some people, being a woman, alone, 51, going into the third phase of my life, I need to know why it’s like this.55

In these images, Emin thus negotiates the alterity of a body that is at once familiar yet radically strange – a body that has morphed and changed over time to the point that it appears almost unrecognizable. While this body is often reduced to its barest outline, it is nonetheless presented in its specificity. In Good Fat, the paintbrush emphasizes the thickening around the waistline that gives the drawing its title (‘I’ve gone from being a really thin girl – even when I was 40, I was thin – to being matronly and womanly’, comments Emin).56 Whether flickering in and out of visibility in the animation Those who suffer love, or viewed as a series on the walls of the gallery space, Tracey Emin’s drawings of the female nude do not coalesce into a singular or fixed image of Woman, but rather constitute an ongoing interrogation not only of the processes of life drawing, but also of femininity as it is constituted in and through time. At times bleeding uncontrollably, at times blissfully orgasmic, at times ‘matronly’ and ‘womanly’, the body that is dispersed across these images subtly reconfigures from within existing representational conventions. As Anne Wagner has noted, ‘the late-[twentieth-]century rediscovery of the artist as possibly female has only re-energized the project of giving her a public face, making her up and over for contemporary use.’57 While popular interest in artists who are women continues to grow, fuelled in part by a series of high-profile monographic exhibitions hosted by major cultural institutions, sustained consideration of their artistic practice tends to be eclipsed by an ongoing fascination with the manner of their living and dying.58 The public face that has been constructed for the ‘woman artist’ is all too often that of the suffering beauty whose life was tragically cut short (Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse, Francesca Woodman), or else the elderly recluse now ripe for rediscovery (Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin).59 Between these tropes of doomed youth and resilient old age there is, however, a void: representations of the mid-career, mid-life artist who is a woman remain few and far between. As a woman artist now in her 50s who is also a popular cultural phenomenon, Tracey Emin works in and against this void. She is, it seems, rarely absent from the pages of tabloid newspapers and lifestyle magazines, whether being pilloried in the pages of the Daily Mail for stumbling drunk from the latest celebrity party, or inviting the photographers of Hello! magazine on an exclusive tour of her home and studio. Through both her repeated acts of selfpresentation in interviews and artworks, and through her art practice, Tracey Emin challenges the taboos that continue to attach themselves to the bodily processes of women’s ageing, compelling us to consider mature feminine subjectivity, sexuality and corporeality beyond the culturally privileged moment of reproduction.

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Notes 1 2

3 4

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7 8

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11 12 13 14

Tracey Emin, July 2014, quoted in exhibition leaflet to accompany The Last Great Adventure Is You (White Cube, Bermondsey, London, 8 October–16 November 2014). Laura Cumming, ‘The melodrama of being Tracey, bigger than ever: the expressionist self-exposure and scratchy style of Tracey Emin’s art are shown to great effect in this huge, theatrical retrospective. But will she ever grow up?: Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want’, Observer, 22 May 2011, p. 34. This and other newspaper reviews cited in this chapter are available at Infotrac Custom Newspaper Database at http://go. galegroup.com (accessed 29 June 2017). Ibid. The ‘bad girl’ has been a key critical and curatorial category in classifying the work of contemporary women artists over the past 20 years. It initially surfaced in the early 1990s in three independently organized shows: Bad Girls curated by Kate Bush and Emma Dexter (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1993); Bad Girls curated by Marcia Tucker (New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1994); and Bad Girls West curated by Marcia Tanner (University of California Los Angeles, Wight Art Gallery, 1994). It has recently been revived in group shows including Bad Girls of 2012 (Interstate Projects, New York, 2012) and Daughters of Bad Girls (Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, 2014). Emin’s work was not included in any of these shows. Eleanor Hearney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princethal and Sue Scott, The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium (Munich, London and New York: Prestel, 2013), p. 8. Shortly after he came to power in 2010, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron invited Emin to create a work specifically for 10 Downing Street. She subsequently donated the neon More Passion to the Government Art Collection. She was also one of 12 ‘Britain’s Leading Ladies’ selected to serve as the faces of Marks & Spencer’s 2013–14 Autumn–Winter advertising campaign. ‘Emin goes back to school and lays bare her homework’, Telegraph, 7 October 2014, p. 5. ‘I arrived a sceptic and left a convert; Rachel Campbell-Johnston has been a passionate nonbeliever in the cult of Tracey Emin, until this tremendous retrospective made her see the light’, The Times, 17 May 2011. For a sustained exploration of how Emin’s negotiation of abortion in her artworks transcends the representation of the experience within popular culture, see Vanessa Corby, ‘Something to show for it? Notes on creativity and termination in the work of Tracey Emin’ in Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey Sauron (eds), The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference (London and New York, 2007), pp. 213– 29. ‘She no longer smokes, she rarely gets drunk, she stays in – oh, and she never looks in the mirror any more. Tracey Emin the exhibitionist has left her mad days behind. In the build-up to her major new show in Margate, the artist talks love and life with Louise France’, The Times, 5 May 2012. Ibid. Rachel Campbell-Johnston, ‘Margate’s wild child returns as a calm grande dame’, Times, 25 May 2012. ‘The Saturday interview: Tracey’s coming home’, The Guardian, 26 May 2012. Cumming, ‘The melodrama of being Tracey’.

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15 Adrian Searle, ‘Excess all areas: in-your-face banners, dirty neon signs, tales of use and abuse’, The Guardian, 17 May 2011, p. 19. 16 Richard Dorment, ‘Tracey Emin, this is your life; Emin has become the star of her own soap opera’, Daily Telegraph, 17 May 2011, p. 23. 17 Campbell-Johnston, ‘I arrived a sceptic and left a convert’. 18 Searle, ‘Excess all areas’. 19 Richard Dorment, ‘Tracey Emin, this is your life’. 20 Ibid. 21 Campbell-Johnston, ‘I arrived a sceptic and left a convert’. 22 ‘Tracey Emin deserves her big show at the Hayward – pubic hair and all – but success has made her recent work fluffy not feisty, says Waldemar Januszczak’, Sunday Times, 22 May 2011, p. 8. 23 ‘Tracey Emin’s new major exhibition at the Turner Contemporary in Margate treads a fine line between being poignant and irritating, writes Mark Hudson’, The Telegraph, 25 May 2012. 24 Waldemar Januszczak, ‘When I was last in love; Tracey Emin comes home to Margate with an exquisitely naked show that exposes her old-fashioned soul’, Sunday Times, 27 May 2012, p. 12. 25 ‘Dirty drawings won’t rock Margate’, The Guardian, 26 May 2012, p. 17. 26 ‘When I was last in love’, Sunday Times, 27 May 2012. 27 ‘Dirty drawings won’t rock Margate’, The Guardian, 26 May 2012. 28 ‘An expressionist masterclass in communicating passion’, The Guardian, 7 October 2014, p. 5. 29 Ibid. 30 ‘The Saturday interview: Tracey’s coming home: Tracey Emin opens one of the most important shows of her career today – and yes, there’s a dirty bed in it. But a lot has changed. She talks about swapping sex for stargazing, her search for platonic love, and her urge to create art that makes people feel better, not worse’, The Guardian, 26 May 2012, p. 45. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 ‘The King of Brit art is dead. Long live the Queen! The sharks are circling Damien while Tracey displays a quiet maturity in the latest work’, Independent on Sunday, 27 May 2012. 34 Ibid. 35 Germaine Greer, The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (Harmondsworth, 1992). For a more nuanced critique of the biomedical understanding of menopause, see also the essays collated in Paul A. Komesaroff, Philipa Rothfield and Jeanne Daly (eds), Reinterpreting Menopause: Cultural and Philosophical Issues (New York and London, 1997). 36 Greer, The Change, p. 13. 37 Ibid., pp. 12–3. 38 Lynne Segal, Out of Time: The Pleasures & Perils of Ageing (London and New York, 2014), p. 95. 39 Ibid., p. 96. 40 Mary Kelly, ‘Re-Presenting the body’, originally published in James C. Donald (ed.), Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory (London and Basingstoke, 1991), pp. 59–67; reprinted in Mary Kelly, Imaging Desire (Cambridge, MA and London, 1998), pp. 132–41, p. 131. 41 Ibid., p. 135.

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42 For further discussion of the contribution made by Interim to feminist visual art theory and practice of the 1980s, see ‘The “dispersed body of desire” in Mary Kelly’s practice: Amelia Jones in dialogue with Mary Kelly about the body in feminist art’ in Mary Kelly: Projects 1973–2010 (Manchester: Whitworth Art Gallery, 2011), pp. 101–9. 43 Mary Kelly, ‘The “dispersed body of desire” in Mary Kelly’s practice’, p. 104. 44 Ibid., p. 105. 45 Mary Kelly, ‘That obscure subject of desire: an interview with Mary Kelly by Hal Foster’, originally published in Mary Kelly, Interim (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), pp. 53–62; reprinted in Kelly, Imaging Desire, pp. 165–79, p. 169. 46 For further discussion of Emin’s complicated relationship to the earlier generation of artists informed by feminism, see Rosemary Betterton, ‘ “Why is my art not as good as me?” Femininity, feminism and “life-drawing” in Tracey Emin’s art’ in Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin (London, 2002). 47 John Roberts, ‘Mad for it! Philistinism, the everyday and the new British art’, Third Text, 35 (Summer 1996), pp. 29–42, p. 38. 48 In this, I take my cue from those feminist scholars and curators who have sought, in varied ways, to move beyond conventional, chronologically ordered, art historical models in order to draw out previously occluded affinities in art made by women at different moments in time and in distinct geopolitical contexts; see Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth-Century Art in, of and from the Feminine (Cambridge, MA and London, 1996); Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (New York and London, 2007) and Marsha Meskimmon, ‘Chronology through cartography: mapping 1970s art globally,’ in Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (eds), WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Cambridge, MA and London, 2007), pp. 322–35. 49 Kelly, ‘Re-Presenting the body’, p. 137. 50 ‘Where does that girl go? Where does that youth go?: at 51, and on the eve of a major new exhibition, Tracey Emin talks to Rachel Cooke about mortality, motherhood and why she is so driven’, Observer, 28 September 2014. 51 Tracey Emin, Those who Suffer Love (White Cube Mason’s Yard, 29 May–4 July 2009), available at http://whitecube.com/exhibitions/tracey_emin_those_who_suffer_love_ masons_yard_2009 (accessed 29 June 2017). 52 Tracey Emin cited in Ralph Rugoff, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’ in Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want (London, 2011), pp. 160–7, p. 163. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Rachel Cooke, ‘Where does that girl go?’. 56 Ibid. 57 Anne Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (Berkeley, 1996), p. 3. 58 See in particular art journalistic responses to the retrospective surveys of modernist artists who are women including Agnes Martin, Sonia Delaunay and Yayoi Kusama hosted by Tate Modern in recent years. 59 The persistence of this latter trope is indexed by a recent article in the New York Times, which provides ‘a very small sampling of the female artists now in their 70s, 80s and 90s we should have known about decades ago.’ See Phoebe Hoban, ‘Works in progress’, New York Times, 15 May 2015.

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Dream and Diaspora: Tracey Emin’s Turkish Cypriot Legacy Alev Adil

On the cover of the catalogue that accompanied Emin’s major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 2011, a slim, shapely naked woman is running down a narrow, cobbled street, a Union Jack flutters from her outstretched upheld arms, obscuring her head.1 She is literally flying the flag. Her skin tones are golden, the light is soft, the image slightly blurred. There is a celebratory joyfulness implicit in the juxtaposition of the symbolic, the flag, and the imaginary, the naked body, visceral, libidinal, transgressing the sumptuary codes explicit in the setting: it is a street, she should be dressed; flaunting a flag, a symbol of ‘official’ national identity, as well as of its re-appropriations through Punk, Brit Pop, the young British artists, the New Labour Cool Britannia moment, fashion (Galliano’s Past, Present and Couture collection of 2002 comes to mind) to the bunting and branding of the Cameron era royal wedding in 2011, which Emin commemorated with a sketch for the front page of The Independent. The figure is both an extension of the flag – a British body, and an opposition to it – the imaginary to its symbolic. The image offers a series of enigmas: who is she? And is she running for joy or fleeing from something? The back cover answers these questions. The naked woman in flight is the artist, cropped at the mouth. We cannot see her eyes. She does not offer us her gaze. This time she is facing us on a flat roof, draped in the flag, sucking voraciously on a cigarette, with long French-manicured nails. She looks model thin. There is an echo of Corrine Day’s fashion and documentary photography, another female artist whose life constituted the material for her work, and whose work straddled the worlds of art and fashion. The cover of Emin’s retrospective catalogue tells us in no uncertain terms that Tracey is a British artist. Red, white and fucking blue as her 2002 neon work tells us. Fucking, the libidinal, the body, intrudes on the official, collective, but the phrase ‘fucking blue’ also brings the emotional realm into play. Tracey is British and/but there is an excess, of body, of emotion, of the feminine. Emin’s many honours and awards indicate she is both accepted and lauded as a very British artist by the political and media establishment. ‘Brit Art’s bad girl’, Emin is now becoming ‘an old mistress, even a national treasure, enshrined at the Tate, pushing into the pantheon with the great (male) artists of the past’.2 She represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and she has been promoted by the British Council. Tracey Emin has 119

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been enthusiastic about both her patriotism and her Tory leanings, telling David Usborne of The Independent : ‘I am really patriotic, I really love Britain, I work really hard at representing Britain and the Britishness of things’ and ‘I get much better answers from the Conservatives in terms of art and culture’.3 She has spoken warmly of her relationship with the previous Prime Minister David Cameron, who acquired one of her neons, More passion (2010), for Downing Street.4 Emin was awarded a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2012, included in BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour’s ‘Power list’ of the 100 most influential women in Britain today in 2013 and chosen for the Autumn 2013 Marks & Spencer ‘leading ladies’ campaign.5 ‘People say I have become part of the establishment. But I’ve always been part of the establishment, it is just that it is beginning to catch up with me’, Emin told the Financial Times in 2013.6 Tracey Emin’s work and persona have been evaluated in relation to feminist art,7 as art that reflects her class,8 as autobiographical art,9 and as art playing with and commenting on celebrity.10 The tabloid press often present her as a comic figure, ‘an ancienne terrible’.11 The Daily Mail in particular, is schizophrenic, reporting on her birthday celebrations every year, frequently dismissing her as a ‘foul-mouthed sex-obsessed artist’,12 and sometimes fawningly discerning authenticity rather than castigating her vulgarity. ‘She has endured as a conceptual, autobiographical artist . . . where other artists have failed because she is “emotionally honest” ’, lifestyle journalist Liz Jones assures us.13 Conversely, Jonathan Jones in The Guardian dismisses her as ‘a conservative artist with nothing to say’ and ‘a stale music hall act’.14 His is a damning indictment, which centres around her status as an establishment artist. ‘There is a certain kind of British creative figure who turns, by the age of 45, into a walking caricature of the “artistic” individual’, he tells us. He dismisses her work because of her celebrity: ‘any sense of real subversion or originality Emin ever conveyed has long since been packaged, copyrighted, and reproduced as kitsch self-caricature’.15 In the flurry of British references and accolades, Emin’s Turkish Cypriot heritage and its presence in her art and writing have largely remained unspoken and unexamined. Those familiar with Emin’s art will also be familiar with her autobiography, since her life is the primary material she works with. Her art is viscerally autobiographical, insistently confessional. The offspring of an affair between a married Turkish Cypriot man and a young English woman, Tracey and her twin brother Paul grew up in Margate, initially in rather gothic grandeur, then, following her father’s bankruptcy, in increasing poverty and squalor. Enver Emin had another family and never lived with Tracey, Paul and their mother Pat Cashin in the Hotel International, which he bought for them in Margate, and where he subsequently abandoned them. Emin’s art fictionalizes as much as it reveals, employing intimacy, hyperbole and abjection in her installations, textiles and films, and weaving a palimpsest of dream, fantasy, alienation and innocence in her writing. Emin’s understanding of and approach to her Turkish Cypriot identity can be read as an extension of her troubled but tender relationship with her father. The unspoken political upheavals and forgotten timelines that mark her personal history and leave their mark on her work (the twins were born in 1963, a few months before intercommunal conflict broke out in newly independent Cyprus), raise wider questions around post-colonial and diasporic identities and Turkish Cypriot diasporic identity in England in particular.

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There has been Cypriot immigration to Britain, to London in the main, since 1944. The majority of Turkish Cypriot immigrants arrived immediately following the formation of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960–1.16 Cyprus, which achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1960, is a troubled and atypical case study of independent statehood and post-colonial identity. EOKA (Εθνική Οργάνωσις Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών, the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters), the militarized organization which fought the British, did not do so for independence, but for unification with Greece. The Turkish-speaking minority (approximately 18 per cent) of Cypriots rejected union with Greece. A paramilitary organization TMT (Türk Mukavemet Teşkilatı, the Turkish Resistance Organisation) committed atrocities in turn, fighting for partition of the island and union with Turkey. The constitution brokered for the newly independent Republic of Cyprus in 1960 was one that contained guarantees and representation for the Turkish-speaking minority and appointed Britain, Greece and Turkey as guarantors of this balance of power.17 This balance of power was soon to break down and intercommunal violence broke out in December 1963, resulting in Turkish Cypriots retreating into enclaves and being forced to abandon their homes, and the ethnic cleansing of many villages.18 The early years of the Republic of Cyprus were marked by intercommunal conflict and terrorism from EOKA B, funded and encouraged by the military dictatorship in Greece (1967–74). Events came to a head when the junta overthrew President Makarios on 15 July 1974 to unite Cyprus with Greece, and Turkey invaded in response on 20 July 1974. While this led to a significant wave of emigration from Cyprus to the UK, mainly by Greek Cypriots dispossessed by the invasion, the majority of Cypriots arrived prior to the intercommunal fighting in 1963–4 and 1974.19 Diasporic Cypriot identity is multiple and mutable. Official organizations, often funded by the government bodies of northern Cyprus, maintain and promote a Turkish Cypriot identity that recognizes and celebrates the internationally unrecognized breakaway state of the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’. Turkish Cypriot diasporic identities are predicated on ethnic and political affiliations, but have also been transformed in diverse neighbourhoods and a multicultural London environment. As the sociologist Nergis Canefe observes, for Turkish Cypriots the relationship to the homeland: entails an unusual degree of complexity due to the ambiguity of how to define the ‘Turkish Cypriot homeland’. There are those who remember or embrace a pre-1963 or a pre-1974 united Cyprus. There are others whose perceptions of Cyprus and Cypriotness are bounded by the parameters of a post-1974 divided country. There is also a significant group who cannot think of a Cyprus that is separate from ‘motherland’ Turkey. Finally, there are others for whom the Cyprus they belong to is yet to come into existence and whose lives are shaped around self-enforced or involuntary exile. In other words, simply relating to the homeland of ‘Cyprus’ in fact constitutes a significant variable for the identity formation process among Cypriots.20

Tracey Emin grew up in Margate, far from the centres of the Cypriot diaspora (mainly in North London) and Turkish Cypriot institutions, such as Sunday schools and community centres and events. Emin has explored her Turkish Cypriot heritage in her

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work through representations that cohere around the family romance and her relationship with her father, rather than any community affiliation, or sense of individual identity. Such explorations are therefore most in evidence during her father’s lifetime. Since Enver Emin’s death in 2010, to date, any shadow of that heritage has disappeared from her work. Emin’s art presents a glimpse into how (or perhaps how little) mixed parentage influences her identification as British. That ‘other’ heritage is personified within the figure of her frequently absent father and maps the lineaments of absence and unknowability rather than any habitable conceptual territory. Her Turkish Cypriot heritage is indirectly and obliquely explored in her writing, notably in her autobiography Strangeland (2005), in several appliquéd blankets, a number of films and her installation Knowing my enemy (2002). Emin’s blankets provide a rich setting for her writing and as an arena in which she explores her identity. At the fore are her fractured and contradictory references to a sense of national identity as British. On the page, outside the gallery, for instance in Strangeland, her language is stripped to its broken and limited lexical core, which brings the violence and destitution of her work to the fore. Within the space of the blankets, many other languages are at play from the visual liveliness that her composition and colour choices bestow to the rich tactile and haptic cosiness that the use of blankets and fabrics, often sourced from the artist’s own life, provides. The blankets present text in a form of concrete poetry and they also serve as maps: the size and compositional relationship between texts invite the viewer/reader to construct their own journey around the words. When the colour and cosiness of the textiles are stripped away and the texts are presented as a poem, their spikey psychosis is stark. No Chance (what a year) (1999) is emblazoned: Sometimes everything makes no sense and everything seems so far away. The year was no chance seventy seven. Fuck school why go somewhere Everyday to be told you’re late. And it (dosent) feels better They were the ugly cunts I held the pole in my hand Pissing pure cider until it rains At the age of 13 why the hell should I trust anyone. I don’t think so. No Fucking way. No I said No. The end of Trinity Square. Welcome to the world. No you listen – I’m not late – you’re lucky.

The blanket is an assemblage of voices, the effect is pathologically schizophrenic: auditory hallucinations and flashbacks, paranoia, disorganized thinking and communication. Far from literary, this is writing in the sense outlined by Jacques Derrida. The difficulty of language is made literal, through the effort of stitching, the sous rature of crossings out and traces of correction.21 She begins to write ‘it feels better’ but thinks better of it; it does

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not feel better. These fragmentary phrases do not come easy, yet the prettiness of the artefact, the faded, fraying Union flag, the floral appliquéd additions, the colours and composition work against the darkness and difficulty of the words that signify nostalgically of 1977, the mythical year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and of Punk, the iconoclasm and twinning of both now domesticated and recommodified. Although the work is deeply personal it offers strong collective as well as individual memory making. Labour’s Cool Britannia project had already re-appropriated and commodified punk, hegemonizing and aestheticizing its dissonance and dissent by the time Emin made No Chance in 1999. The work makes a statement about modern heritage, about what the imagined community might be – at the time of its own making. The visceral and personal power of Emin’s broken, excluded language is a counterpoint to the historical dates she references. At the intersection of national history, affect and politics, Hate and power can be a terrible thing (2004) makes a yet more explicit statement on nationalism with its reference to the Falklands War of 1982. The blanket features the Royal Navy White or St George’s Ensign, which is flown on Royal Navy ships. The work is dominated by the words, ‘PERMISSION TO FIRE/ ENZINE’ in large black capitals. Two small sections of plain white fabric contain texts in the artist’s signature handwriting, in pink biro. One poetically describes ‘800 men and boys/their bodies floating/like flotsam and/jetsam on the surf/ice cold black/waters, an eary grave,/of which you invented’[sic]. The other accuses an unidentified but perhaps easily identifiable woman of ‘Crimes against Humanity’, addressing her as ‘you, supposed mother – A mother who Reiked of Power CRAZY Hate and Fear, of all the terrible things that you did, in the name of political conquest’[sic]. The text elaborates: ‘In 1982, A year so many conscripts did not got home – Because you, you killed them all [sic]’. The New Black (2002) is a rich colourful patchwork exploration of Emin’s racial identity as well as her ethnic identity.22 The blanket is headed by the title in large black block capitals on a red background, while smaller red, white and blue letters spell out ‘oh what lovely little mulatto babies’ above the lower edge. The blanket presents two moments in time. Pat Cashin’s pregnancy is recalled as ‘Walking around the streets/the year was 1963/London/very English/my mum was eight months pregnant/they shouted nigger lover/but this is England darling/very blond/how would you feel?’ The next moment presented is taken from Emin’s childhood. ‘We were six/The roses were in bloom/ Mummy we asked whats a wog/She said Western Oriental Gentleman/like magic somehow so exotic’. Emin’s multicultural British identity is what is at stake here. The conversation takes place a year after the Race Relations Act of 1968, which made it illegal to refuse housing, employment and public services on the grounds of race or ethnic origin. The Act met with active resistance, infamously by the MP Enoch Powell, in his ‘rivers of blood’ speech to the Birmingham Conservative Association in April 1968, where he warned that if immigration was not halted, ‘In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’.23 Skin colour made a great deal of difference to the journey to assimilation for the immigrant of the 1960s. Cypriots, being of mixed Levantine and Ottoman genetic routes, vary in skin colour. The vast majority identify themselves as European.24 Emin’s father was a Turkish Cypriot of Sudanese origin.25 Emin does not differentiate between her father’s skin tone and his

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Cypriotness, or rather Turkishness, for she seems to conflate all three, whereas in fact to be black is a minoritarian position within the minoritarian Turkish Cypriot community. For Tracey, all difference is absence rather than complicating presence. Strangeland is divided into three sections; ‘Motherland’, ‘Fatherland’ and ‘Traceyland’. The first, maternal, section covers her childhood in Margate and the final section her adulthood. The middle ‘Fatherland’ section is the most swathed in mysticism and mystery. Strangeland measures the distance from the known world of Englishness, marked by exclusion, to the unknown, to an orientalized Other identity. Emin explores the Cypriot aspect of her identity through her love for her father. Her absent father is the sole bearer of Turkish Cypriotness; there is no wider social network to connect her to the island. For Tracey, Enver Emin is not a part of Turkish Cyprus; Turkish Cyprus is a part of her father. The imagined paternal realm, the fatherland, is a ‘strangeland’. Her most sustained representations of her diasporic identity occur in the ‘Fatherland’ section of Strangeland, which recycles many of the texts used in her exhibitions, where Emin frequently represents Turkishness and Turkish Cypriotness as an outside, a mysterious realm. She begins with a fortune-teller in Rochester market in 1978, identifying her as inheritor of ‘an intelligence thousands of years old’ and ‘descended of a race of giants’, ‘primitive by nature’ but with ‘strange intelligence’.26 Her fantasy of her ethnic identity is impossible to disentangle from her fantasy of her father. ‘Fatherland’ ends with a fragment called ‘Dreamhouse’ about the little utopic construction she makes for an imaginary daughter. The little cardboard box house was ‘so fragile that I was afraid it would get squashed. Mistreated’.27 One disadvantage of the book format of Strangeland is that the words lose much of their urgency, potential irony and power, as the difficulty of writing, the materiality of the medium – the visual and tactile richness of quilting, needlework, brightness of neon lighting, the messiness of the monoprint, or the intimacy of handwritten notes in biro or pencil – are lost in typeface, when most of the misspellings are corrected, the punctuation put in place. Much intensity and opacity is lost in removing the ill-literacy, the dis-eased, uneasy aspects of her language, the sous rature of cancellations, the lack of punctuation which is often key to Emin’s work. The voice becomes flattened. With all its misspellings, Enver’s letter ‘Knowing my Enemy’, which was exhibited alongside the 2002 installation of the same name, is more powerful than the corrected transcript.28 The objects that anchor the text in the exhibition Love Is What You Want (Hayward, 2011), for instance the gold lighter owned by Ismail Hos, her father’s chauffeur and her mother’s lover, and the piece of writing Cleopatra’s Gate ‘after Hemmingway’ [sic] make the distance in writing style between Emin and Hemingway reflect the distance between Tracey and the place she is experiencing: on the page the distance becomes bathetic rather than reflecting on the pathos of the piece transformed by the poetics of the archive.29 Art, the journey from the tactile object to representation, and the moves between media provide a rich language for Emin’s work, whereas her written communication reminds us of the cost and discomfort of linguistic communication, the limits and margins to which her mother language itself has exiled Emin. Deleuze and Guattari explain this distance and its transformative potential well. How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are

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forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language?30

While Tracey Emin’s artworks explore how to become a nomad, immigrant and gypsy in language through artistic strategies and Enver Emin’s letter reveals his immigrant English, the book flattens both. Stories are perhaps our most invaluable heritage; the family stories about us, where we come from, where we belong, tell us who we are. The diasporic identity that emerges through her father’s myth-making is naïve and orientalist in the extreme. Enver Emin’s reminiscences, as presented by Tracey Emin, are heavily eroticized and it is hard to tell to what extent there is any irony in either the paternal delivery or the daughter’s reception of his memories/fantasies of seduction by a string of beautiful women in the hammam from the age of 12. Mr Emin’s interpretation of history is similarly lurid. He tells Tracey that the Ottomans gave Cyprus to Queen Victoria because ‘she spent one night in Istanbul at the Sultan’s palace’. Emin senior marries a 16-year-old in his 70s, talks about his grandfather’s four wives and why he did not marry her mother. All the Turkish men that Tracey Emin portrays are sexualized displacements of the father figure, from Ismail Hos, to Abdullah, Tracey’s fisherman lover who is ‘old enough to be her father’, to the men who sexually harass her in the bar on the ferry from Turkey to Cyprus. In Emin’s Strangeland, Turkish men are predatory and domineering. She deploys crude orientalist stereotypes. Her fisherman lover makes his wife leave the house so he can make love to Tracey. The peasant women are old and ugly, ‘big and fat, covered from head to foot’; the villagers are ‘hardy, strong and basic’.31 When her father comes to find her during her affair with Abdullah, she fears (hopes?) he will be angry with her while he fears she will be jealous of her six-year-old half-sister by his latest wife.32 Turkish Cypriotness is a fatherland, a lost childhood, a father who is always leaving; it is an outside, a strange land and a language that she does not speak. Homi Bhabha quotes Martin Heidegger at the beginning of The Location of Culture: ‘A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing’.33 This serves as a useful reminder that the outside that is also within constitutes an unheimlich (unhomely) element of Emin’s Britishness: while Turkishness is ‘outside’, that paternal unknowability (and unattainability) is also an unheimlich home, it is also a familiar unknown that is within. Hotel International (1993), Emin’s first quilt appliquéd on her childhood comfort blanket, can be read as a map rather than a flag where London, Cyprus, Margate and Istanbul are all in the same territory, as are Las Vegas, 3d Castle Hill, Holy Trinity and Riverway. Names, streets, specific addresses, cities and emotions are all contained within Hotel International, ‘the perfect place to grow’. The blanket as autobiographical territory, as map, creates what Homi Bhabha calls an ‘interrogatory, interstitial space’,34 highlighting the fragmentary nature of identity, ‘cultural liminality within the nation’,35 presenting us with a series of border situations and thresholds as the sites where

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identities are performed and contested. Emin’s birth date, 3-7-1963, is appliquéd on the top right-hand corner of her comfort blanket. The date 1963 is repeated in many of her works and in their titles, including, for example, Everyone I have ever slept with 1963– 1995 (1995). As well as being the artist’s birth year, 1963 is a significant date in Turkish Cypriot collective memory as the year that culminated in ‘Kanli Noel’ or Bloody Christmas, marked by intercommunal conflict and the withdrawal of the Turkish Cypriots into enclaves not recognized or served by the Republic of Cyprus. While Emin makes explicit reference to the 1982 British war in the Falklands, the 1963 and 1974 wars in Cyprus do not resonate in her work at all. This is not to imply that these ought to be present, but to highlight the fact that the specificity of a diasporic identity is not a given, that it is a collectively produced identity, not an essential or fixed inheritance. As Canefe indicates: ‘diasporic identity requires specific kinds of sociallyinduced nourishing, the sources of which lie both within the community itself and the society at large’.36 Canefe defines diasporic Turkish Cypriot identity as emerging through a flux, a negotiated process of ‘incorporating the history of the diaspora community as a central motif in their own life histories’, ‘a general attitude – which could be critical or affirmative – that establishes regular connections between personal and communal history’.37 Both Tracey and I were born to English mothers and Turkish Cypriot fathers in the 1960s. I am being autobiographical, as much as analytical, when I make the observation that the story of every family constituted by parents from different cultures is a civilization of its own, with its own unique creoles and bricolage of inherited, adopted and adapted customs, rituals and festivals. The less the mixed couple avail themselves of minority community events, identities and structures, the more intensely intimate, erotically charged and psychological the imagined culture arising out of that union will be for the children of that union. Degrees of assimilation and ties to a wider community will determine the degree to which diasporic identity, which is never fixed, is a presence, a cultural conversation, or an absence, an unknown story. Issues around the degree to which one is primarily Turkish Cypriot, or a Turkish Cypriot, which are key to that diasporic identity, are not visible in Emin’s story. Her fatherland knows no border between Cyprus and Turkey. Canefe observes, Turkish Cypriots: could be classified simply as Turks, a designation with which most of them feel uncomfortable; as Cypriots, a classification which most associate with Greek Cypriots only and which therefore also makes them uneasy; or, simply as yet another British ethnic minority, a categorisation that would erase their differences from other minorities . . . Therefore, for many members of the community it makes more sense to hold on to an Anglo-Cypriot identity with Turkishness and Islam as added components while living in England, and to emphasise Cypriotness while living in Turkey or Northern Cyprus.38

Emin’s is a diasporic identity as absence that knows no such negotiations; it is an identity that is fashioned out of the scraps of stories her father tells her, without what Canefe calls ‘socially-induced nourishing’ or a collective memory. The blanket Not too much to ask (2004) can be read as looking forward to a utopian future where love is

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limitless and exceeds national categories. ‘I want an international lover that loves me more than the world’, Emin declares. What is needed is emphatically not a national lover, a local lover, one held by boundaries; after all, a national lover could only love you as much as his or her country. The logic of the phrase is that an international lover can love you more than the world. This is an ironic and melancholic logic undermined by the fact that Emin also refers back to her Freudian romance with her father (owner of the International Hotel). Enver Emin is both evoked, and perhaps rebuked – her international father loved the world more. ‘Fatherland’ is somewhere outside, and it has, once again, a utopian quality in Mad Tracey from Margate. Everyone’s been there (1997). In bold capitals the blanket declares ‘she was masterbatin’, and ‘I said fuck off back to your week world that you came from’. The blanket speaks of adolescent sexuality, but it is a childish comfort blanket too. A smaller panel tells us with a touching, awkward illiteracy, ‘Hey dady I love you you and me on our island standing by the sea the pass and the present’. Stitched along the lower edge is a telling line – ‘in Turkey we say when you learn to love a rose you learn to love the thowns’ – illustrating how Emin has little sense of Cyprus as separate from Turkey, as anything more than Turkish territory. In Conversation with my mum (2001) Tracey discusses motherhood with her mother, particularly the challenges and difficulty of motherhood. Tracey asks her mother how she feels about having a ‘half caste’ daughter and talks about her own abortion. Her mother supports her in that decision and tells her that she shouldn’t have children, that her success depends upon her remaining childless. We are forced to sit on small chairs designed for children and to watch a small television balanced on a rickety table that looks like it belongs in the installation Knowing my enemy (2002) that she would subsequently build for her father. We are children. Perhaps we are the twins Paul and Tracey? Or are we Tracey’s two aborted children? We sit on traditional wooden chairs with woven straw seats ubiquitous in Cyprus. The chairs take us back to a paternal Cypriot beginning, the screen to English maternal dilemmas. The film Emin & Emin Cyprus 1996 (1996) shows the artist’s fatherland as a tourist destination, the shore unnamed, unmarked territory. The soundtrack includes Emin’s father singing Uskudara Gideriken, a popular late Ottoman song about an Ottoman lady’s seduction by her male secretary on a rainy journey, the sound of the roar of the waves and most memorably the tenderness of her declaration, ‘I love you daddy’ at the end. From Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) to George Cukor’s A Star is Born (1954), the landscape of shore and the sea brings intimations of death with it. There is an elegiac quality to the work, an intimation of the fear of her father’s last abandonment. The seascape is de-territorialized, denied a specific location. History and geography have imploded into the father–daughter relationship: ‘you and me on our island standing by the sea the pass and the present’. ‘I’ve often tried to make a place in my work where I think my dad would be happy. Or where I would be happy’, Emin observed in an interview when discussing her installation Knowing my enemy (2002).39 Yet, by contrast with the cosiness of the quilts, Knowing my enemy does not seem to be a place to be happy in: it is a precarious, inhospitable, dangerous structure. Emin imagines discovering it in an unspecific location: ‘You can imagine coming across it on a beach somewhere, and finding there’s no one there, but then just as you’re walking

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away, you turn back and you see the curtains move.’40 It is ‘somewhere’ almost nowhere, a sort of utopia, an uninhabitable, untenable space that is home against the odds. Would Enver be happy here? He was not happy to stay at the International Hotel. Who is the enemy? Enver identifies his enemies as alcohol, smoking, gambling and sex. The artist avers that he gave his daughter a letter in order to get her to cut down on her drinking. But the title invites the question: does Tracey know her enemy? Do we know ours? Are our enemies within like Enver’s and perhaps Tracey’s? Is this a refuge, a place of escape from our enemies or a prison to exile them to? The film Sometimes the dress is worth more money than the money (2000–2001) highlights the key aspect of Emin’s diasporic identity: its geographical non-specificity. Although filmed in Cyprus, the setting, which could be anywhere, is thrown into question by the use of Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack. Morricone’s film scores for Sergio Leone are an emblematic part of the Spaghetti western, the genre of western films made in Italy from the mid-1960s. These films retold the American US western myth as international co-productions with multilingual actors. Emin’s film also conjures a mythic realm: the myth of the frontier, the myth of the bride and the site of the translations, transpositions and transformation of myth from one symbolic territory to another. Emin returns again to the family romance of her relation to her father, casting herself as a Cypriot bride. This is evident because she has money pinned to her wedding dress. It is a Cypriot peasant tradition to pin money on the bride and groom at the wedding rather than to give gifts. This is not a custom practised in Turkey; it is a Greek and a Cypriot tradition. Tracey portrays herself as a bride, running across the translocated terrain of her patrimony. The sacrificed lamb, traditional for the wedding feast, also calls to mind the murderous father at the heart of Abrahamic religions. There are numerous references in Emin’s work to religion. Most numerous are references to Christ and Christianity, although she does make occasional references to Islam, to angels and a visit to Konya to the shrine of the Sufi poet and mystic Rumi in Strangeland. Sometimes the dress is worth more money than the money includes a close-up image of Atatürk, whose name means Father of the Turks, founder of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923, an icon whose statue is in every town square, whose image is found in every official building and in many homes, shops and restaurants. If for some in Turkey today his secularist and militarized modernity is now a devalued currency, for others it is still a compelling rallying image, as compelling as the flag itself. Emin’s title makes a factual reference to the status of the Turkish lira, which prior to its devaluation in 2005 when one New Turkish lira equalled a million old Turkish lira, was the least valuable currency in the world. Sometimes the dress is worth more money than the money invites viewers to wonder whether Emin’s Turkish Cypriot legacy is a gift in a defunct currency that has no exchange value and does not circulate in any economy, leaving her alone in a displaced desert. The tradition makes no sense. The money is worthless. For Angela McRobbie, although ‘Emin’s concerns are absolutely the same as those which have been at the heart of early second wave feminist art, . . . there is displacement, and a logic of substitution, which says “this is about me, rather than this is because I am a woman” ’.41 While for McRobbie that personalization is problematic as an approach to gender, when it comes to exploring diasporic hybrid identities this approach is a source

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of richness and complexity. Diasporal identity is not fixed, it is built out of collective memories and connective social relations and each diasporal story is an individual (family) drama. The tidal waves of demographic charts which map the mass flows of labour across the globe, particularly of the post-war colonized return to the heart of the British Empire; the sociological analyses of immigrants and the ‘second generation’; the discourse of ethnic communities – none of these captures the private particularity of the experience of hybrid identities, where parents are the sole source of originary myth. Emin’s art articulates with a clumsy and honest particularity how the fatherland is contained within the father; in Emin’s case, an absent father. The artist’s inability to engage with her patrimony beyond her relationship with her father brings to light how a diasporic fatherland can be a fragile and impractical construct, rather like Emin’s installation Knowing my enemy, an ineffectual shelter built out of absence, ignorance and unknowability inhabited by an oriental immigrant ghost, not a place of belonging at all.

Notes 1

Ralph Rugoff and Cliff Lauson (eds), Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want (London, 2011). 2 Martin Coomer, ‘Tracey Emin interview: “I’ve never been out to shock” ’, Time Out, 17 January 2014. 3 David Usborne, ‘Tracey Emin: Lady liberty’, Independent, 26 November 2009. 4 Felicity Thistlethwaite, ‘He came to me: Artist Tracey Emin discusses her friendship with PM David Cameron’, Express, 27 February 2015. 5 Hannah Furness, ‘M&S unveils new “leading ladies” advert featuring Helen Mirren, Darcey Bussell and Tracey Emin’, Daily Telegraph, 19 August 2013. 6 Peter Aspden, ‘Tracey Emin: the artist on being the toast of Miami’, Financial Times, 13 December 2013. 7 Rosemary Betterton, ‘Why is my art not as good as me?’ in M. Merck and C. Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin (London, 2002), pp. 23–38; Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London, 2009). 8 Hilary Robinson, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (London, 2006). 9 Chris Townsend, ‘Heart of glass: reflection, reprise and riposte in self-representation’ in Merck and Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, pp. 79–101; Christine Fanthome, ‘Articulating authenticity through artifice: the contemporary relevance of Tracey Emin’s confessional art’, Social Semiotics, 18/2 (2008), pp. 223–36. 10 Lorna Healy, ‘We love you Tracey’ in Merck and Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, pp. 155–71; Ulrich Lehmann, ‘The trademark Tracey Emin’ in Merck and Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, pp. 60–78. 11 Lotte Jeffs, ‘The Crush, Joan and Tracey’, ES Magazine, 16 August 2013. 12 Alison Boshoff, ‘Are these REALLY the women to save M&S? A foul-mouthed sex-obsessed artist, a topless pop princess and the racy grande dame of British drama’, Daily Mail, 19 August 2013.

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13 Liz Jones, ‘A life more Eminent: Tracey Emin opens up her intimate photo memoir – and tells Liz Jones why her “not always palatable” past has shaped her life’s work’, Daily Mail, 21 April 2013. 14 Jonathan Jones, ‘Tracey Emin: confessions of a conservative artist with nothing to say’, The Guardian, 21 January 2014. 15 Jonathan Jones, ‘Tracey Emin is still the real thing – and that’s why we love her’, The Guardian, 3 April 2015. 16 Pierre Oberling, The Road to Bellapais: The Turkish Cypriot Exodus to Northern Cyprus (New York, 1982). 17 David Hannay, Cyprus: The Search for a Solution (London, 2005). 18 Martin Packard, Getting it Wrong: Fragments from a Cyprus Diary 1964 (Bloomington, 2008). 19 Nergis Canefe, ‘Markers of Turkish Cypriot history in the Diaspora: power, visibility and identity’, Rethinking History, 6/1 (2002), pp. 57–76. 20 Ibid., p. 70. 21 Spivak explains Derrida’s concept of sous rature in her translation of the first American edition of Derrida’s De la Grammatologie (Paris, 1967). She comments on ‘a certain philosophical exigency that drives Derrida to writing “sous rature,” which I translate as “under erasure.” This is to write a word, cross it out, and then print both word and deletion. (Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible.) . . . In examining familiar things we come to such unfamiliar conclusions that our very language is twisted and bent even as it guides us. Writing “under erasure” is the mark of this contortion.’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Translator’s preface’ in J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak, Introduction by Judith Butler, Fortieth Anniversary Edition (Baltimore, 2016), p. xxxii. 22 On the distinction between race and ethnicity see Raj Bhopal, ‘Glossary of terms relating to ethnicity and race: for reflection and debate’, Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, no. 58 (2004), pp. 441–5. 23 The full text of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, delivered on 20 April 1968, is given in the Telegraph, 12 December 2007, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html (accessed 27 August 2017). 24 Floya Anthias, ‘Researching society and culture in Cyprus’ in Y. Papadakis, N. Peristianis and G. Welz (eds), Divided Cyprus: Modernity and an Island in Conflict (Bloomington, 2005), p. 190. 25 ‘Revealed: Artist Tracey Emin and her baroness cousin are descended from Sudanese slave’, Daily Mail, 18 July 2010; ‘Tracey Emin’, 12 October 2011, available at http://www. whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/episode/tracey-emin (accessed 27 December 2017). 26 Tracey Emin, Strangeland (London, 2005), p. 70. 27 Ibid., p. 133. 28 Emin, Strangeland, pp. 72–5; Rugoff and Lauson, Tracey Emin, pp. 229–31; 29 Rugoff and Lauson, Tracey Emin, pp. 126, 235–6. 30 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis, 1986), p. 19. 31 Emin, Strangeland, pp. 113, 116. 32 Emin, Strangeland, p. 125. 33 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 2004), p. 1, emphasis in the original.

Dream and Diaspora 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Ibid., p. 5 Ibid, p. 212, emphasis in the original. Canefe, ‘Markers of Turkish Cypriot history’, p. 62. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 62. Ralph Rugoff, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’, Tracey Emin, p. 160. Ibid., p. 160. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, p. 121.

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All at Sea: Bad Girls, Hut Myths and Tracey Emin’s ‘Property by the Sea’ Gill Perry

Bad Girls and ‘It’ Girls In his exploration of aspects of celebrity culture since the seventeenth century, theatre historian Joseph Roach describes a certain quality possessed by abnormally interesting and high-visibility people, many of them performers and public figures. He uses the term ‘It’ – ‘a pronoun aspiring to the condition of a noun’ – as a broad category that encompasses the elusive, often sexualized quality that characterizes celebrity figures (both female and male), that has been partly constructed through, for example, the dissemination of mass produced images, biographies and media gossip.1 Emin’s status as a highly visible media celebrity and ‘It Girl’ (at least in the 1990s and early 2000s) would seem to fit Roach’s nuanced analyses of celebrity myths from Nell Gwyn to Clara Bow and Princess Diana. In fact, it has often been argued that a media obsession with her notorious ‘personality’ has tended to displace discussions of her art with, according to Neal Brown, ‘an emphasis more on an overstated legendizing and mythologizing of her as a famous person, and as disorderly, controversial and irrational’.2 I suggest that this emphasis on her mythologized personality has both displaced and informed readings of her work. Perhaps, as Jeanette Winterson has suggested,‘the noisy arguments around Emin’s works are good for art’.3 They invite critique and exploration of the uneasy relationship between biography and art, an awareness of the different narratives that circle around her work. Moreover, now that her celebrity status might be seen to be waning as she assumes a less controversial identity as a middle-aged former young British artist (yBa), perhaps we are better able to review the historical significance of her earlier visibility, filtering out those myth-making narratives in which her ‘bad girl’ personality seemed to overshadow the rich layers of meaning suggested by her artistic practice. There is a particular contradictory notion at the heart of Roach’s analysis that seems to underpin both her legendary ‘fame’ and some of her most interesting works. He argues that manifestations of ‘public intimacy’ are central to modern celebrity culture.4 This oxymoronic concept is used to describe the illusion of availability and intimacy that is part of the ‘It-Effect’. It offers viewers a fantasy of closeness to, and knowledge of, 133

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its celebrity subject, often in the absence of the real person. Endless media attention, confessionals and the availability of imagery contribute to this illusion. And Emin, of course, has encouraged this process by building so much confessional material into her works and interviews. ‘Public intimacy’ is paradox-ridden, Roach argues, conveying ‘contradictory qualities simultaneously: strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience; singularity and typicality among them.’5 Emin’s status as one of the ‘bad girls’ of 1990s British art, a perception that has been both accentuated and hijacked by the media, has contributed to those contradictions at the heart of her celebrity identity. Although Roach did not embrace the modern idea of ‘bad girls’ within his concept of ‘It Girls’, it can constitute (I suggest) a part of that gendered celebrity concept. The idea of the artist as ‘bad girl’ has had many inflections, including an association with post-feminism in the humorous and transgressive strategies of many US-based artists of the 1990s, such as Ann Agee, Janine Antoni and Renee Cox.6 In the UK, the notion of a naughty or dysfunctional femininity, associated with British artists such as Emin or Sarah Lucas, became intrinsic to their notoriety and fame. But as many art historians and critics have argued over the last few years, this concept of ‘bad girl’ art has carried with it some gendered stereotypes of a particular sexual or scatological ‘naughtiness’ reserved for ‘girls’.7 ‘Bad girls’ were often seen to be emotionally, sexually and artistically ‘all at sea’, a metaphor that has particular resonance for this essay. At the same time, the label has also been retrieved for a form of critical practice. It has been consistently associated with feminine sexuality and a deliberate manipulation of the body – as material and metaphor – to disturb and challenge some of society’s most cherished assumptions.8 The strategies deployed by artists such as Emin and Lucas have been both mischievous and subversive, often using visceral images to convey a keen sense of the absurd. I will seek to retrieve and explore a notion of ‘play’ (sometimes gendered),9 rather than ‘bad behaviour’, identifying it as an important strategy within some of Emin’s installation works. As I shall argue, to be ‘all at sea’ is not necessarily to be out of control or ‘naughty’. An important aspect of play is humour; in art practice a use of visual humour can take many forms, and much has been written on the roles and strategic nature of ‘women’s humour’.10 Moreover, mischievous or playful forms of visual art have often enhanced media attention and celebrity status. This chapter focuses on a series of her sculptural constructions that seem to me to epitomize the paradox-ridden discourse of feigned intimacy at the heart of some celebrity myths. Emin’s repeated use of the everyday theme of the wooden hut, especially the beach hut, often informed by – or displayed with – some intimate autobiographical information, reveal her ongoing attempts to fuse aesthetic, sculptural and confessional concerns. As I suggest, these are works that are also inflected with many rich cultural, gendered, psychic and playful narratives, albeit narratives that may require some historical and intellectual ‘excavations’. I am deliberately using the archaeological term ‘excavation’ here, both literally and metaphorically, in order to emphasize the highly constructed material forms of these works, which the viewer is invited to explore. And there are many relevant cultural and playful associations of the theme of the hut, related to our acculturated notions of ‘home’, belonging and growing up, that can enrich our understanding of Emin’s uses of huts.

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The artist herself has shown an awareness of the contingency of a concept of ‘home’ that is not necessarily the same as the physical space that you inhabit. In 2006 she declared: Home is a strange place and only exists when I feel secure. Home isn’t a place you go back to. It’s the place where you are. London is my home, my house is my home, my little cat is my home, my love is my home. All other places are memories: Margate, Medway, Turkey, Cyprus, my tiny flat in Waterloo. For many years I was like a nomadic bag lady, carrying my things from place to place.11

The fluid nature of her concept of home is further accentuated in a decision made in 2017 to partly relocate to Margate setting up a studio and exhibition space in the old Thanet Press building. Objects, feelings, memories and associations then contribute to the spatial imaginary that is loosely labelled ‘home’. Houses and huts and associated ideas of ‘home’ are popular themes in recent and contemporary art, rich in clichés and contradictory meanings.12 Emin’s huts provide vivid examples of the literal and metaphorical possibilities of a simple wooden ‘dwelling’ when appropriated, refashioned and reclaimed for art.

Beach Huts and Wooden Homes The first room of Tracey Emin’s major retrospective Love Is What You Want at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2011, was dominated by two types of work from her oeuvre, both carrying associations of domesticity. A wall of quilts framed a central space filled with a rickety pier, leading to a beach hut or fisherman’s shack. Knowing my enemy (first exhibited at Modern Art Oxford in 2002) appeared precarious and weather-worn, with its derelict structure and peeling, green-blue paint. The broken supports of the raised wooden walkway seemed about to collapse upon the unwitting visitor. Despite its scale, Emin has consistently claimed that this installation was ‘not a set for a play or a corporate product. It didn’t come out of a mould. There’s something else going on with it’.13 Raised up above head height and including a ladder that does not reach the ground, it was not to be conceived, then, as a stage set that invites us to play on it or in it, but rather as an object that invokes imaginative play. Emin continues: ‘You can imagine coming across it on a beach somewhere, and finding there’s no one there, but then, just as you’re walking away, you turn your back and see the curtains move’ (ibid.). Reminiscent of little beach huts she loved around Margate Sands, Emin constructed this shack, adding some homemade curtains in the window, thereby endowing it with a deliberate touch of sentimentality and apparent domestication.14 Other recycled planks of wood were used to construct the pier or ‘jetty thing’, partly inspired (as she claims) by a bridge in Cyprus where her father was born. Positioned alongside the pier was a confessional letter to the artist from her father, titled Knowing my enemy, describing his difficult childhood and problems with alcohol, gambling and sex. Emin’s dysfunctional family history, then, was offered as the key to understanding the work.15 At the same time the material form of this construction, with its unstable, broken bits and evocative curtain, evoked puzzling, even mischievous meanings.

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This is one of many installations, including her notorious My Bed (1998–9) that Emin herself has positioned as largely autobiographical or confessional. And the many interviews that have accompanied her solo shows and publications on her work, have helped to reinforce that status, encouraging us to see those seductive autobiographical explanations as unmediated, as the undisputed meaning of these installations.16 Thus her account of Knowing my enemy offers an irresistible, even childlike account of its biographical significance: I’ve often tried to make a place in my work where I think my dad would be happy. Or where I would be happy. And one of my dad’s dreams was to live in a little hut on the beach with a corrugated-iron roof, and to hear the sounds of the rain coming down on the roof and the sea lapping up. And this is a dream that I shared with him.17

Of course, in drawing heavily on her own recorded statements I am colluding with these readings. But my purpose is not to deny this confessional status, but rather to suggest that the meanings of such works are not unproblematic. They depend at least partly on a repetitive, self-representational strategy, which Emin has actively pursued. As Chris Townsend and Mandy Merck argued in 2002: ‘Where the work of an older male artist might be read less confessionally, Emin’s age and gender, combined with the thematization of intimate relations and artistic production, make her a spectacular emblem of her own oeuvre.’18 I suggest that Knowing my enemy offers a multiplicity of meanings that inflect the confessional narratives with other cultural, gendered and spatial issues and concerns. This is an object informed by (Tracey’s) childhood play, and which also invokes meditations and imaginings around the themes of ‘home’, sea, identity and sculptural practice. Such mediations become, perhaps, even more relevant as the artist’s mellowing image, and the long lens of art history, increasingly separate the viewer from the ‘bad girl’ of earlier decades. Wooden structures and huts have consistently been at the heart of her practice, although it is more often her deployment of everyday domestic objects (beds, items of clothing, shoes, quilts, neon, etc.) that has dominated critical accounts. Weathered and recycled, wood has featured prominently in her oeuvre since 2000. In works such as Salem and Sleeping with you (both 2005), she uses both towers of wood and neon, a deliberate juxtaposition of reclaimed or ‘natural’ materials with a tacky, industrialized form of lighting that has become a signature medium. And her 17-foot-high helterskelter, Self Portrait (2000) and rollercoaster, It’s not the way I want to die (2005), are both massive wooden structures which, like Knowing my enemy, tower above the viewer, while also having personalized titles. Both also relate to the seaside leisure industry that she grew up with in Margate; they are replete with echoes of her childhood play on the helter-skelter and the (now) Grade II listed scenic railway at the local theme park Dreamland, which was renovated and re-opened to the public in 2015. In celebration of this reclaimed fun park, Guardian journalist Zoe Williams described a ‘candy striped phoenix, saved from being turned over to featureless residential properties by the indomitable energies of the Dreamland Trust . . . But your hair will still be raised: 17 rides are currently open’.19 In the 1960s, Dreamland attracted up to two million visitors

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a year, and apart from its legendary helter-skelter, scenic railway and ghost train, it boasted a wall of death and a roller disco. Moreover, the railway has been rebuilt ‘wooden slat by wooden slat, back to its rickety, grinding glory’,20 carrying echoes of Emin’s own building projects that simulate raised wooden rails and pathways, going nowhere. When viewing Self Portrait (2000), It’s not the way I want to die (2005) or Knowing my enemy (2002), we are forced to look up. We cannot access the structure, denying the experiential or intimate connotations of Emin’s personalized titles. When standing on a real pier or helter-skelter, it is terrifying to look down. Propped up on wooden supports, these sculptural constructions invert the looking process and deny access to the heart of the work; they seem to resist our desire to engage physically, to tease the viewer. Through their titles, they suggest some intimate and playful meanings, but are physically inaccessible, quite literally echoing my notion of ‘feigned intimacy’. Wood is often used to build unreachable and untouchable works, albeit works that resonate with memories of childhood fun and fairground excitement. In some respects, these structures are returned to the status of monumental, carefully constructed sculptures uplifted on plinths. As such, they encourage the need for convincing explanatory narratives, which Emin often generously provides in interviews or accompanying text. Yet some meanings are almost out of reach in these large-scale works. Emin’s narratives are inflected with other cultural metaphors that can enrich and extend her own autobiographical emphasis. Her diasporic family history brings together identities nurtured in Turkey, Cyprus and Britain. Born in Turkey to a Turkish Cypriot father, she grew up in the Hotel International run by her mother in Margate.21 While the pier in Knowing my enemy was apparently partly inspired by a bridge in Cyprus seen on family holidays,22 wooden piers are also popular landmarks of British coastal resorts and their Victorian and Edwardian histories, especially along the southeast coast of England. Such piers were also evidence of a growing leisure industry – spaces of play. Nowadays, many of those English piers are often in a state of disrepair. They are bridges sited on national boundaries, and raised above – but offering access to – the sea. They lead both somewhere and nowhere, are both magical and terrifying; the idea of end of the pier has always carried its own resonant metaphorical baggage. But by placing a hut at the end of the pier, over imaginary water, Emin could be seen to place a ‘home’ partly at sea, on an unstable border. Europe of the late 1990s to the present has been accompanied by increased policing of national borders and legislation on immigration from outside the EU, policing that has become even more topical in the so-called immigration and Brexit ‘crises’ of the mid- to late 2010s. As Deborah Cherry has written: This reconfiguration of the edges of Europe drew a line at Turkey, a country enjoyed as a holiday destination by many Europeans but currently excluded from membership of the European Union, tracing diasporic paths and movements between the two and mapping connections and disjunctions shaped by family, culture and ethnicity.23

Emin’s diasporic family background can be seen to have imaginatively informed this composite, seemingly unstable work, with a little curtained ‘home’, a feigned intimacy, positioned precariously at the end of the pier.

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The hut itself, even at the end of a collapsing pier, also evokes associations that are closer to home. Before Knowing my enemy, Emin’s appropriated beach hut (without pier) found at Whitstable had already been moved into the gallery in 1999 in The last thing I said to you is don’t leave me here (The Hut). She bought the dilapidated structure in 1992 with Sarah Lucas, and subsequently used it as a weekend retreat, at a time when she was still earning relatively little and ‘it was brilliant, having your own property by the sea’.24 When the work was exhibited in 2000 in the second Saatchi exhibition Ant Noises, Emin added ‘(The Hut)’ to the title, asserting the associations of this work with ideas (and myths) of dwelling, and surrogate ‘homes’. For Emin, such myths are closely connected with themes of identity and belonging, exemplified by the two photographic self-portraits that she exhibited alongside The Hut, and which are given almost the same title. The last thing I said to you is don’t leave me here 1 (2000, National Portrait Gallery, London) shows the naked artist kneeling on the floor of the hut with her right hand on her knee and her eyes closed. The companion image The last thing I said to you is don’t leave me here 2 (2000, Tate) is a self-portrait of Emin sitting naked in the corner of the beach hut with her back to the camera, with wet hair and a small tattoo of a scorpion on her left shoulder. She appears both vulnerable and private, recalling the ‘dejected figure of a punished child’.25 Emin has provided an account of why she enacted these naked poses: ‘The hut is a bare and naked thing. I thought it made perfect sense if I was. It’s also got some kind of weird, religious look in it, like I’m praying or something.’26 Being naked, then, is associated with the private space of the hut. This bare, largely empty space, functioned both as a space of anxiety (‘Don’t leave me here’) and as a surrogate home, separated from her actual home. Like many of her works, the possible meanings are ambiguous. But in her repeated use of this theme, she was also (perhaps unwittingly) tapping into a more romantic European historical and cultural legacy around ideas of ‘homes’, huts and ‘dwelling’, especially the idea that the hut could offer some sort of escape from the alienating pressures of modern life. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) explored the idea of the hut as a dwelling that could signify both a physical building and a ‘home’. In his difficult essay ‘Building, dwelling, thinking’ (1954) he argued that dwelling (in the sense of making a home) is a basic characteristic of consciousness, directly opposed to ‘homelessness’.27 He believed that the latter condition, a symptom of modern life, was susceptible to alienation and existential homelessness, a view that encouraged his romanticized ideas of ‘primitive’ homes, provincialism and the German homeland. Heidegger’s famous ‘hut’ (die Hutte) that he built in the Black Forest Mountains in 1922 was his response to this perceived alienation, and an embodiment of his own ‘hut myth’.28 His controversial notion of homelessness as the condition of the modern subject has also informed more recent theory on the modernist artist as metaphorical alien or ‘exile’.29 Of course, Emin’s social exile was at least partly rooted in what was seen as a defiant ‘bad girl’ stance, and a difficult personal life, lived (early on) in poverty on the margins of the professional art world; her ‘hut dream’ was also rooted in a fantasy of belonging and property ownership. Heidegger, however, was engaged with the geography and phenomenology of space, with the notion that ‘dwelling’ and ‘home’ involve spatial, material and temporal experiences that in turn inform consciousness, hence the cleansing possibilities of the ‘primitive’ hut and its ongoing appeal. It has

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taken on a metaphorical status as a point of resistance to modernity and its technological advances.30 Although such complex philosophical ideas did not directly inform Emin’s thinking, her repeated use of the theme of the hut, shack or shed as a personalized space of retreat, belonging, or even growth suggest that she perceived the spatial and material experiences of her huts as central to her sense of self, while also functioning as objects choreographed for public display.31 In 2004, Emin and several other contemporary artists and designers were invited by the Victoria and Albert Museum to transform a garden shed into a creative and conceptual alternative to the traditional Chelsea Flower Show. Ten artists and designers refashioned identical garden sheds that might somehow represent a nation of (English) shed lovers.32 Emin’s response was to intensely personalize the mass produced structure with significant objects associated with her own life. Called Something for the children and billed as a ‘Wendy house’, a naming evocative of childhood play, the outside was painted bright red, and the inside furnished with possessions that she owned or made, including patchwork curtains (echoing the form of her quilts), cat pictures, pieces of furniture and drawings. Behind the patchwork curtains, Emin displayed a sketch of a woman having an abortion, alongside a collection of ceramic cats. She also embroidered a tablecloth to resemble a Ouija board, laid on a child’s table, with a kitchen knife in the centre. Many of the objects were fresh from the stage set of a theatre production of Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles, which Emin had designed.33 Eerily feminized and referencing her own experiences and domestic activities, and perhaps ‘bad parenting’, the V&A shed became a space of ‘public intimacy’, offering diverse clues and references to her personal life, childhood memories and artistic career. The curator of the show, Susan McCormack recalled: ‘When she came, Tracey said that as a child in Margate there were allotments behind her house and she spent a lot of time in sheds doing things like rearranging furniture.’34 Once again, a little wooden house provided the frame for mischievously ‘rearranging the furniture’, for the display of a seemingly intimate series of metonymic objects. In his influential book The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard identified the ‘hut dream’ at the heart of what he calls the function of inhabiting, with its roots in the house itself.35 Echoing some aspects of Heidegger’s ‘primitive’ hut, Bachelard’s nostalgic account sees the hut as a kind of metonymic house, a condensation of the house’s centre, hence the appeal of ‘legendary images of primitive houses.’36 Describing himself as a phenomenologist looking for the roots of the function of inhabiting, he sees the cosy hut as offering a recurring dream of secure and sheltered dwelling: ‘When we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage, or to go more deeply still into legend, of a hermit’s hut.’37 Although Bachelard’s phenomenology would appear to be highly vulnerable to poetic and sentimental influences, his ‘hut dream’ resonates with aspects of Emin’s iconography. Her highly personalized ‘property by the sea’, her dad’s dream to live in a hut on the beach or her shack with homemade curtains, suggest private retreats, without modern utilities – a ‘primitive’ home from home away from the pressures of the metropolis in which she had struggled to make a career in art. Yet as we have seen, for Emin such spaces are never unproblematic. The hut itself has a paradoxical status within recent cultural history: it has figured in philosophical and architectural discourse as a point of resistance to modernization,

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encapsulated in the idea of ‘Heidegger’s hut’ as the domicile of the hermit philosopher escaping his ‘crisis of dwelling’.38 At the same time, the modernist architect Le Corbusier also identified the simple hut or hutte as an ‘eternal’ architectural model. He explored the idea of the primitive cabin or hut (hutte) by the sea in some of his earlier writings on architecture published in L’Esprit Nouveau. In his lecture Une Maison – Un Palais of 1928, in which he described his ambitious plan (with his cousin Jeanneret) for the competition for the League of Nations Building, he also set up his ‘eternal architectural model’ (l’éternel fait architectural) that is la hutte.39 Inspired by the fishermen’s huts that he saw in Arcachon on the southwest coast of France, he perpetuated his own version of the ‘hut myth’. He provided a quasi-lyrical account of these groups of wooden dwellings nestled under pine trees on the sand dunes which separate the Bassin d’Arcachon from the Atlantic. He identified a basic simplicity and ‘un programme pur’ in huts conceived without historical pretensions or fashionable taste and made of available local materials. These were compact dwellings, he argued, that followed both intuition and reason. Moreover, they followed the same basic measurements – they were built to human scale, with the maximum economies of space: ‘one day, after having suddenly understood them, I wrote “Mais ces maisons sont les palais.” ’40

On the Beach In fact, Le Corbusier conceived and built his own famous beach house or cabanon41 as a space for creativity in 1952 at Roquebrune, Cap Martin on the Côte d’Azur. Built as a holiday house only 15 metres square and attached to his favourite café, this compact wooden structure has entered French architectural history as an iconic motif for pared down living by the sea. Now granted World Heritage status by UNESCO, it self-consciously embodies some of those contradictions implicit in the ‘hut dream’. Equipped with built-in furniture, lavatory and washbasin, and designed along the architect’s modular principles (based on human proportions), it is both modernist and ‘primitive’, an appropriation of the idea of the simple hut for a modern aesthetic. Conceived as a space of creativity much like Heidegger’s hut, it also straddles that mythical gulf between modern design and rustic fantasies. This synthesis is encapsulated in Le Corbusier’s ironic comment: ‘I have a chateau on the Côte d’Azur . . . It’s extravagant in comfort and gentleness’.42 Le Corbusier’s legacy has contributed then to the evolution of the ‘hut myth’; his fishermen’s huts on the beach could encapsulate myths of architectural harmony, simple ‘primitive’ living and life on the fluid margins of a country. Although they are often reclaimed or re-appropriated structures, and were certainly not conceived as architectural models or exemplars, Emin’s beach huts, with their distressed wooden walls and absence of telephone and electricity, signify some related myths of simplicity, of a ‘bare and naked’ form of living. And like Le Corbusier’s huts, they are directly connected with the beach and the sea, with those ‘edges’ of nationhood that stand on shifting sand. Beaches and coastlines are liminal sites, washed over by the ebb and flow of the sea. They speak powerfully of local and national borders and frontiers, and the natural environment in flux. They are always at risk from being on the coastal edges, an

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inherent danger (and associated fascination) that is signified by Emin’s repeated use of pier-like structures that can hover uneasily over imagined seas. However, beach huts have also been easily appropriated in the media as quintessential emblems of Britishness. A blog (adapted from an article) by Sunday Times journalist Katie Glass and titled ‘Some like it hut’ argues that ‘they stand for a peculiarly British romance with the mundane’.43 Glass believes that they encapsulate some characteristically British obsessions including the weather, nostalgia, property ownership, banal everyday life and tea. She even identifies a love of beach huts as a common denominator, uniting unlikely bedfellows Emin, the Queen and Keith Richards: Of all the things the Queen, P.D. James, Keith Richards, Tracey Emin and I have in common, my favourite is that we love beach huts. The Queen used to picnic in hers in Holkham, before arsonists blazed it in 2003. James plans murders in hers at Southwold, and I like to imagine Keef [sic] jamming with the boys at his in West Wittering . . .. Emin flogged hers to Charles Saatchi for £75,000. I’d planned to do the same, but it hasn’t worked out.44

Emin’s Englishness (or rather ‘Britishness’) is thus affirmed, despite the fact that (as I have argued) her beach huts can speak of a more complex, often troubled, diasporic identity. Re-staged huts by the sea offer rich pickings for journalists and critics seeking to retrieve Emin’s British identity and the relationship of her work with her ‘home’. The reformed ‘bad girl’ can easily be reclaimed as a ‘national treasure’. In the process, a rich seam of meanings evoked by that uneasy transition is left unexplored. Little huts retrieved from, inspired by or threatened by these English coastal ‘edges’ are heavy in metaphorical possibilities and have also appeared in the work of other contemporary British artists. For example, Nathan Coley and Richard Wilson have both addressed the theme of (the destruction of) seaside homes in run-down areas of the English south coast. Coley’s 46 Brooklands Gardens (2009) is a house-like structure of brightly painted plywood and steel installed on an empty plot in Jaywick, a residential area established in 1930 as a place where Londoners could buy self-build chalets by the sea, escaping the metropolitan pollution. The openness and patterns created by the coloured slats contrast with the somewhat dilapidated ‘chalets’ around the structure. Along the same coastline west of Dover, another ‘hut dream’ was literally turned inside out in Richard Wilson’s 18 Holes (2008), positioned on the promenade at the Folkstone Triennial in 2008 and referencing the town’s depleted leisure industry. He demolished and reassembled the abandoned crazy golf course behind the promenade into three concrete beach huts, provoking and teasing the viewer to decipher the holes and traces of the original putting green on the reconstructed surface of the huts.45 In contrast with Emin’s heavily personalized structures, both male artists have explored the beach hut or chalet as an impersonal vehicle of metamorphosis and transformation. That said, like Emin’s works, their structures reference a (largely) working-class English seaside leisure culture in decline. The artist Lubaina Himid has produced many painted and written reflections on the theme of the beach house that offer less contradictory readings. Using her combined art and text, she has used the imagery of the sea and the beach house to chart a nomadic

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personal history, from her birthplace near the beach in Zanzibar, to memories of beaches in Lancashire, the Isle of Wight, Havana, Blackpool, Brighton, Santa Monica, Malibu, Dieppe and St Ives, among other coastal sites. In her exhibited works in Beach House (1994) and her evocative writings,46 she uses the literal and metaphorical status of the beach house, shack or dwelling place to reference obliquely issues of colonization, childhood memory, slavery, transnational identity, gender, play and dreamy pleasure: Piers – wooden magic walkways out into the waves, terrifying to look down between the boards to the swirling foam below . . . Brighton: an endless row of beach huts pale pink, deep magenta, lilac, purple, salmon, apricot, sky, lemon, orange, banana, violet, pale green, turquoise; small and ready for flasks of tea with iced buns or white wine with chicken sandwiches . . . At Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk in front of a pine wood, in which nestles the queen of England’s beach house, is a huge and flat expanse of pink grey sand, it swells and floats up to the horizon. Five of us walked up and then down that beach; a famous five arguing parrying displaying conceding, collaborating and isolating. All on a theme of women painting women. I looked out towards the sea and wished I could stay a year. The beach huts there are sturdy serious small wooden buildings on stilts with wooden steps leading up to the door and down the sand.47

Himid’s poetic descriptions of the beach huts she has encountered – and inhabited – offer countless metaphors of the house or dwelling, including its potential as ‘a place of refuge’, without telephone and as ‘on the edge of time, a woman’s place of contemplation’. She echoes Emin’s desire for ownership and has even referenced Le Corbusier’s ‘Une petite maison . . . The height of the house is two and a half metres (the regulation minimum) it resembles a long box lying on the ground’.48 But Himid also describes the beach house as a site of conflict with potential to represent a troubling and nomadic personal history. Gender features prominently in Himid’s description, in which the beach hut is a space for women’s practice, collaboration and fun. Emin’s beach house, The last thing I said to you, was initially bought as a retreat for ‘bad girls’ Lucas and Emin, as a kind of grown up ‘Wendy house’. Like the more diminutive dolls’ houses, Wendy houses are gendered toys, usually associated with little girls’ desires to play at keeping house. In this beach house, childhood play could be mischievously re-enacted as a space for ‘bad girl’ fun and antics. But for Emin the surrogate feminized home also registers as much more than a cosy ‘home’ – a site of crisis. Her shacks are either out of reach (Knowing my enemy), left bare (The last thing I said to you) or replete with disturbing, intimate references to personal trauma and a troubled adolescence (Something for the children). Acculturated notions of ‘home’ are often associated with security, safety and belonging, countered in recent discourse by problems of ‘homelessness’ caused by poverty and migration. Our relationships with ‘home’ can reveal complex cultural geographies in which established categories of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and social status can overlap and interact. Through these relationships we can distinguish the idea of ‘home’ from its material correlate, the house. The former is largely an imaginary and social construct, replete with mythical associations of ‘homeliness’, of supposedly reassuring

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domestic comfort. Hence Emin’s own statement, quoted earlier ‘Home is a strange place and only exists when I feel secure.’ Feminist theory has reviewed the concept of ‘homeliness’, to reveal some of its gendered connotations and inherent contradictions. The French theorist Luce Irigaray, for example, has argued that the ‘homeliness’ or domesticity of the house is dependent on a particular idea of the maternal feminine subject as ‘placed within the home, sheltered in the home’; but that same home places her in ‘internal exile’.49 While Emin’s huts and beach houses may have been partly conceived by the artist as alternative spaces of ‘homeliness’, evocative of her childhood play and ‘bad girl’ mischief, they are also reconceived as sites of personal trauma, as providing metonymic evidence of crisis and alienation; they are replete with other references to her precarious social, sexual and ethnic identity/-ies. Emin’s huts, then, are redolent with English seaside clichés, but also undermine them; they seem to offer intimate revelations while also staging such confessions as public displays. They are carefully constructed, playful and homely, but also seemingly ramshackle, vulnerable and eerie – paradoxical sculptural icons of ‘public intimacy’.

Notes 1 2 3

Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor, 2007), pp. 1–3. Neal Brown, Tracey Emin (London, 2006), p. 7. Jeanette Winterson, Foreword to Carl Freedman and Honey Luard, Tracey Emin: Works 1963–2006 (New York, 2006). 4 Roach, It, p. 3. 5 Ibid., p. 8. 6 Marcia Tucker’s exhibitions Bad Girls, Parts I and II at the New Museum, New York engaged with gender issues in ways that were ‘humorous and distinctly transgressive’. See: http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Occurrence/Show/occurrence_ id/236 (accessed 29 June 2017). 7 Some of these issues are discussed in my ‘Introduction: Visibility, difference and excess’ in G. Perry (ed.), Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice (Oxford, 2003), p. 16. 8 See, for example, Linda S. Kauffman’s edited collection Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (Berkeley, 1998). Kauffman gathers together essays on performance art, ‘visceral cinema’ and writing that deploy the body and the mythologies of sexuality to critique social, psychic and sexual assumptions around gender and identity. 9 ‘Play’ is an unwieldy notion that has been explored across many disciplines and within the psychoanalytic theory of D. W. Winnicott (see Playing and Reality, 1971) among others. It is a slippery concept that can denote a youthful, childlike activity involving experimental forms of expression. When applied to more adult concerns, it can signify game-playing, the use of humour and jokes, irony, mischievous behaviour and play-acting. For a fuller discussion of the relevance of notions of ‘play’ to aspects of contemporary art see Gill Perry, Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art (London, 2013), pp. 19–25. 10 In 1985, the journal Heresies explored the subject of satire in women’s practice; see Heresies 19: 5/3 (1985). Jo Anna Isaak’s two exhibitions (1991 and 2001) and her edited

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Art into Life collection Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (London and New York, 1996) have become influential sources on this theme. More recently, the feminist art journal n.paradoxa published an issue titled Humour. The editorial pointed out ‘There are literally thousands of bold, engaging, sassy and hilarious works in all media by women artists from all over the world which, individually and collectively, have attempted to make us laugh, cry or knowingly smile.’ (n.paradoxa 36/July, 2015, p. 4). ‘Who is Dolly Bambi?’ in Tracey Emin: Works, p. 77. I have explored many of these associations and mapped out some of the theoretical and cultural issues of the theme in the Introduction to my book Playing at Home, pp. 7–31. Ralph Rugoff, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’, Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want (London, 2011), p. 160. Interview with Andrew Nairne in This is Another Place, Modern Art Oxford (Oxford, 2002). Emin talks here of ‘the sentimentality of my work’, n.p. A transcription of the letter (sent as a fax) from Enver Emin can be found in Love Is What You Want, pp. 229–31. Two major solo exhibitions that included this work were accompanied by published interviews with the artist. See notes 13 and 14 above. Ralph Rugoff, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’, p. 160. Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin (London, 2002), p. 7. Dreamland fell into disrepair and was closed in 2003. Thanet District Council took over control of the derelict park in 2013. It re-opened in 2015, complete with a restored helter-skelter. Marina O’Loughlin, ‘Margate’s Dreamland is back from the dead’, The Guardian, 24 June 2015. She describes ‘a candy striped phoenix, saved from being turned over to featureless residential properties by the indomitable energies of the Dreamland Trust, aided by a dramatic CPO by Thanet District Council, and now, private backing.’ . . . ‘Old rides have been refurbished, old fairground paraphernalia upcycled. But your hair will still be raised: 17 rides are currently open . . . ranging from the vintage galloper merry-go-round, its handsome, brightly painted steeds performing a stately dance, to the hectic, waltzer-meets-rollercoaster swoops of the Crazy Mouse which has us screaming like hopped up teenagers’, available at http://www.theguardian.com/ travel/2015/jun/24/dreamland-margate-kent-fairground-theme-park (accessed 29 June 2017). However, at the time of writing, the future of this theme park is yet again in doubt owing to lower than anticipated visitor figures. Deborah Cherry has explored some similar ‘supplementary’ meanings in her excellent discussion of My Bed, ‘On the move: My Bed 1998–9’, in Merck and Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, pp. 134–54, revised here in Chapter 4. ‘Yes, the bridge in Cyprus, I really loved it and I really liked the idea of making this bridge. The bridge was very similar to what I’ve made for this show, like a pier, jetty thing, and I call it a bridge, because even though it goes nowhere, that’s somewhere’. Interview with Andrew Nairne, This is Another Place, n.p. Cherry, ‘On the move’, p. 154. Emin quoted in Rachel Taylor, Tate website entry, November 2003, available at http:// www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-the-last-thing-i-said-to-you-was-dont-leave-mehere-ii-p11921 (accessed 29 June 2017). A photograph by Johnnie Shand Kydd of 1996 in the National Portrait Gallery Collection shows Emin, Gillian Wearing and Georgina Starr dancing in front of the Whitstable hut before it was moved into the gallery,

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

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https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw57354/Tracey-Emin-GillianWearing-Georgina-Starr (accessed 20 September 2018). Rachel Taylor, Tate website entry, November 2003, available at http://www.tate.org.uk/ art/artworks/emin-the-last-thing-i-said-to-you-was-dont-leave-me-here-ii-p11921 (accessed 29 June 2017). Emin, as note 24. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, dwelling, thinking’ in D. Farrell-Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (London, 1993), pp. 347–63. See Adam Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge, MA, 2006). See, for example, Nikos Papastergiadis, Modernity as Exile: The Stranger in John Berger’s Writings (Manchester, 1993). In his foreword to Sharr’s Heidegger’s Hut (see note 28) Simon Sadler has written: ‘Building and everyday life have been fundamentally altered by modernity, and Heidegger’s work and the hut in which the work took place (and which is written into the work) have become figured as a point of resistance to modernisation . . . Though Heidegger’s hut might seem like an absurd place in which to ride out the tempest of modernisation, many intellectuals and architects will find it difficult to disavow any curiosity about this place . . . as Heidegger claimed, technology has made us at home everywhere and nowhere a rooftop antenna the sign that we are not at home’ (p. xi). Emin called one of her huts The perfect place to grow (2001, Tate). The work was conceived as a kind of romanticized homage to her Turkish Cypriot father who she has described as a fantastic gardener but a terrible carpenter. In this work a little wooden hut on stilts containing a DVD of her father in the sun is placed next to a line of flowering pots. Ten artists and designers were invited to refashion identical £800 garden sheds, turning them into ‘works of art’ that might inspire a nation of English shed lovers, and to offer an alternative exhibit to the Chelsea Flower Show. Their brief was to loosely ‘explore the formal and conceptual qualities of flowers, gardens and nature’, hence the title ‘the Other Flower Show’. The Other Flower Show: Artists’ garden sheds, Victoria and Albert Museum, 29 May–11 July 2004, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/ the-other-flower-show-artists-garden-sheds/ (accessed 27 September 2018). Les Parents Terribles, Jermyn Street Theatre, London, directed by Timothy Ackroyd, opened 28 April 2004. Quoted in Nigel Reynolds, ‘Emin sheds light on an English love’, Daily Telegraph, 29 May 2004. Named after a small structure built for Wendy in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), a ‘Wendy house’ is a ‘toy house large enough for children to play in’, see: https:// en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/wendy_house (accessed 29 June 2017). Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York, 1964 (1958)). Ibid., p. 31. Ibid. I briefly discuss Heidegger’s romanticized appropriation of the idea of the hut as a response to the alienation of modernism in Playing at Home, pp. 101–2. Une Maison – Un Palais, Collection de L’Esprit Nouveau (Paris, 1929). I am grateful to Tim Benton for his advice and information on Le Corbusier’s idea of the ‘hut myth’. ‘But these houses are palaces.’ Ibid., p. 52. In French, a cabanon is distinguished from a cabane in that the former usually describes a structure that is inhabited, like a chalet, while a cabane is closer to a cabin. Quoted in ‘A soft spot for Le Corbusier’, ‘Design’ section, The Guardian, 3 March 2012.

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43 Katie Glass, ‘Some like it hut’, 4 August 2013, available at http://katieglass. net/2013/08/04/some-like-it-hut/ (accessed 10 December 2015). 44 Ibid. 45 Renowned for his ambitious projects dismantling, crushing and reassembling architectural and industrial materials, Wilson was attracted to a derelict symbol of the town’s depleted leisure industry. He appropriated the abandoned Arnold Palmer miniature crazy golf cowurse behind the Folkstone promenade, from which he cut 18 flat sections. These were then reassembled as three beach huts, each comprising six concrete sections of the crazy golf site. See Perry, Playing at Home, especially Chapter 4: ‘Beach huts’ for a fuller discussion of this theme. 46 Lubaina Himid, Beach House, exh. cat. (Wrexham, 1994). 47 Lubaina Himid, ‘Beach houses’ in G. Pollock (ed.), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London and New York, 1996), pp. 149–55, p. 150. 48 Himid, ‘Beach houses’, p. 154. 49 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London, 1993), p. 65. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Alexandra Kokoli, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (London, 2016), pp. 99–100.

Contributors Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian who works across the fields of design, craft and contemporary art. Currently Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, he has been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Head of Research at the V&A; and Curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee. His publications include Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018); Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (London, 2016, co-authored with Julia Bryan Wilson); The Invention of Craft (2013); Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011); The Craft Reader (2010); and Thinking Through Craft (2007). Curatorial projects include Beazley Designs of the Year (Design Museum, London, 2017) and Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery (Yale Centre of British Art, New Haven, and Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2017–18). Alev Adil is an anglophone Cypriot poet, performance artist and scholar. She has performed at the National Maritime Museum, Tate Britain, the Hampstead Theatre and the ICA London, and internationally in Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Greece, Holland, Ireland, Kosovo, Lithuania, Mexico, Romania, Russia, Switzerland and Turkey. She is also a literary critic, writing for The Independent and the Guardian and currently The Times Literary Supplement. She served on the jury panel for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014 and is acknowledged as one of a small number of reviewers ‘working with a collaborative ethos to promote Turkish literature in the UK’ who ‘nuanced commentaries on Turkish literature in English translation’ (Tekgül and Akbatur, 2013, 46). She has a BSc in Philosophy from the London School of Economics, an MA in Film and Cultural Studies and a PhD in multimedia poetics from Central Saint Martins, London. Her academic publications include research into diasporal and post-colonial memory in contemporary literature and art, with a particular emphasis on Cypriot identity. She is currently Dean of the Faculty of Communication at Arkin University of the Creative Arts and Design, North Cyprus. Deborah Cherry is Professor Emerita of Art History and Theory at Central Saint Martins. She has published widely on women artists, the history of British art, and contemporary art. She has curated several major exhibitions, including Maud Sulter: Passion (Glasgow, 2015; Bradford, 2016), the first retrospective of this ScottishGhanaian artist and writer. Her publications include The Edwardian Era (co-edited with Jane Beckett, 1987), Painting Women (1994), Beyond the Frame (2000) and The Afterlives of Monuments (2013). She has worked at universities in London, Manchester, Sussex and Amsterdam, and she currently teaches contemporary art at New York University in London. 147

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Mark Durden is a UK-based writer, artist, curator and academic. He has written extensively on photography and contemporary art. Recent publications include the edited anthology, Fifty Key Writers on Photography (London, 2012) and Photography Today (London, 2014, translated into French, Spanish, Turkish and Chinese). With David Campbell, he co-wrote the book Double Act: Art and Comedy (Liverpool, 2016), accompanying their co-curated exhibition of the same name held at the MAC, Belfast and Bluecoat, Liverpool. A new and expanded version of this show, under the title The Laughable Enigma of Ordinary Life, was held at the Arquipélago: Centro de Artes Contemporãneas, Azores (2017). As part of the artists’ group Common Culture, Durden exhibits regularly, both nationally and internationally. He is currently Professor of Photography at University of South Wales. Joanne Heath is an independent scholar. Her PhD from the University of Leeds investigated ‘Bodies, Gazes and Images between Hysteria and Modernism’ (2011). Her research examines women artists’ engagement with figurative practices of representation from the modernist to the contemporary moment. She has written on historical and contemporary artistic explorations of motherhood including ‘Negotiating the Maternal: Motherhood, Feminism, and Art’, Art Journal (2013) and in Woman’s Art Journal (2012). She has taught at several universities including York St John University (UK). Camilla Jalving is Deputy Director of Collections, Research and Conservation at SMK (the national museum of Denmark). She holds an MA from Goldsmiths College London and a PhD from University of Copenhagen. She has contributed to a wide range of journals, exhibition catalogues and anthologies on contemporary art and theory, writing on the practice of contemporary artists including Olafur Eliasson, Jeppe Hein, Eve Sussmann, Trine Søndergaard, Sophia Kalkau and Signe Guttormsen, and more historically, on Niki de Saint Phalle. She is the author of Værk som handling: Performativitet, kunst og metode / Art as Action: Performativity, Art and Method (2011) and co-author (with Rune Gade) of Nybrud: Dansk kunst i 1990erne / New Departures: Art in Denmark in the 1990s (2006). Her article ‘Affect and the Participatory Event’ was published in The Art of Taking Part, a special issue of the international research journal ARKEN Bulletin (2017) which she edited focusing on participation in art and museums. Her research interests are centred around performance, performativity, affect and participatory practices linking to questions of spectatorship, self-presentation, modes of presence and absence and the production of knowledge. Alexandra Kokoli is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Middlesex University London and Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. An art historian and theorist originally trained in comparative literature, Kokoli researches the aesthetic mobilization of discomfort to political ends, focusing on art practices informed by and committed to feminism, the fraught but fertile relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis, death, mourning and shame. She curated ‘Burnt Breakfast’ and other works by Su Richardson (Goldsmiths, 2012) and, with Basia Sliwinska, Home Strike (l’étrangère, 2018), and has published widely on feminism, art and visual culture in journals including Art Journal, Women and Performance, n.paradoxa, Performance

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Research, Oxford Art Journal and Hypatia. Her books include The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016); (as editor) Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference (2008); and The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts by Susan Hiller, 1977–2007 (2008). Gill Perry is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the Open University and Honorary Visiting Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published books and articles on eighteenth-century British art and modern and contemporary art and has a special interest in visual art and gender issues. Her publications include: Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth Century Art and Culture (ed. and co-author, 1994); Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and ‘Feminine’ Art 1900 to the late 1920s (1995); Gender and Art (co-authored, 1999); Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice (ed., 2003); Themes in Contemporary Art (co-author, 2004); Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art  1768–1820 (2007); and Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art (2013). She has curated several exhibitions, including The First Actresses: Nell Gwynn to Sarah Siddons (National Portrait Gallery London, 2011–12). John White is a distinguished print-maker with a long association with the Curwen Studio and his own workshop, JWP, in collaboration with Chelsea College of Arts, London, making his own work and printing for other artists. He has taught at many art colleges including Maidstone College of Art. He has exhibited widely, most recently at London Master Printers/Artists (Margate Pie Factory, 2018) and with Alyson Hunter and Michael Heath, Spirit of Soho (the French House, London, 2019) He is preparing a history of printmaking studios in London From Ray to Emin: Printmaking Workshops, 1970–2000.

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Index Abortion 2, 6, 17–20, 22, 50–1, 53, 93, 104, 106–7, 115 n.9, 127, 139 Affect 2, 7–10, 17, 20, 36, 42, 60–4, 93, 106, 123, 148 Ageing 6, 9, 11–12, 26, 59–60, 74, 80, 103–4, 107, 109–11, 114, 133 Architecture 6, 139–40, 142 Art education 4, 6, 7, 11, 16 n.61, 24, 74, 78, 84 n.4, 89–92, 95–100, 102 n.15, 104, 139 Art market 3–4, 6, 11, 25, 57, 76–7, 99 Authenticity 8–11, 16 n.50, 16 n.54, 20–1, 32, 36–7, 41, 43, 49, 53, 60, 62–3, 120 Autobiography, see also confession 2, 4, 6–12, 18, 29, 32–4, 36–7, 48, 62–3, 81, 91, 107, 111, 120, 122, 125–6, 134, 136–7

Emin, writers on 4–5, 8–10, 18, 29, 32, 35–8, 43, 48–51, 73, 81–2, 103, 106–7, 112, 120, 133 Emotion, see affect Ethnicity, see also race 6–7, 9, 12, 17, 34, 56, 73, 75, 81, 120–8, 130 n.22, 137, 142 Expressionism 2, 11, 18–21, 25, 31, 34–5, 43, 49–50, 58, 64, 66, 95–6, 107 Family 1, 3, 6–7, 10, 12, 17–18, 20–1, 23, 25–6, 34, 56, 92, 105–6, 120–9, 135, 137 Fashion 3, 6, 20, 26, 91, 96, 104, 110, 119–20 Feminism 2, 7–9, 11, 31, 38 n.8, 42, 49–52, 62–3, 67 n.33, 71–2, 75, 79–80, 82–4, 90–1, 95, 109–11, 120, 128, 134, 143 Feminist theory, see feminism

Beach, see seaside International conflict 120–1, 123, 126 Celebrity 2–3, 6–7, 9, 12, 17–18, 20, 24, 49, 51–2, 74–5, 78, 80–1, 90, 108, 114, 120, 133–4 Confession, see also autobiography 2, 8, 12, 16 n.54, 21, 35, 42, 48–50, 53, 57, 62–3, 80–1, 107, 111, 120, 134–6, 143 Conservative politics 6, 4, 11, 42, 72, 74–7, 100, 104, 115 n.6, 119–20, 123, 126 Craft 3, 8–10, 13, 24, 39, 41–4, 70, 80, 95, 111 Critical theory and philosophy 7, 9–10, 22, 29, 31–3, 35, 43, 45–6, 51–2, 56–9, 61–2, 71, 75–7, 79, 122, 124–5, 138–40, 143 Curwen Studio 5, 9, 11, 89, 92, 96, 98 Cyprus 6, 9, 12, 17, 34, 56, 73, 120–8, 135, 137 Diaspora, see also migration 5, 7, 9, 11–12, 46, 55–6, 73, 120–1, 124–6, 128–9, 137, 141–2, 147 Documentary 2, 9–10, 17, 19–20, 23, 26, 119

Margate 6, 12, 17, 22–3, 34, 50, 56, 58, 85 n.18, 93, 106–7, 120–1, 124–5, 135–7, 139 Menstruation 48, 51, 110 Migration, see also diaspora 7, 9, 11, 46, 55–6, 67 n.45, 72–3, 121, 123, 137, 142 Monoprint 2, 18, 22–4, 37, 101, 124 Motherhood 2, 9, 11–12, 93, 104–5, 123, 127 Labour politics 5, 75, 95, 119, 123 Performance 1, 4, 7–8, 10, 18, 29–38, 39 n.37, 51–4, 62–3, 81–2, 92, 126, 143 n.8 Performativity 10, 18, 29–33, 35, 37–8, 45, 69 n.75, 83 Punk 53, 119, 123 Race, see also ethnicity 7, 72–3, 123, 130 n.22 Religion 126, 128

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Seaside 12, 18, 23, 26, 48, 74, 105, 127, 134–6, 138–43, 146 n.45 Spelling 1, 10, 18, 35–6, 42, 44, 78, 89, 92, 101, 124 Textiles 1–3, 7, 9–11, 13 n.12, 18, 24, 26, 34–5, 41–4, 47, 49, 52–3, 63, 103, 107, 111–12, 120, 122–3, 139 Trauma 8–10, 12, 17, 19, 22–4, 27, 48–9, 51, 53–4, 61, 63, 93, 106–7, 113, 123, 125–7, 142–3 Turkey 6, 9, 12, 17, 21, 56, 120–8, 135, 137 Turner Prize 2, 11, 24–5, 45, 47–9, 51–3, 78–9, 81–2, 103

Venice Biennale 6, 73, 75–6, 78, 119 War, see international conflict White Cube (gallery) 3–4, 18, 22, 29, 43, 47, 50, 90, 103, 107, 111–12 Women, artists who are 2, 4–6, 42, 51–2, 54, 75, 77–9, 81, 83, 93–4, 99, 103, 109–11, 113–14, 115 n.4, 134, 138, 141–2 Young British Artists (yBas) 4–6, 12, 50–1, 54, 73, 77, 79–82, 99, 134, 138, 144 n.24

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