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Home , Brian Sewell, Ivan Massow, My Bed, South London Gallery, Tracey Emin

Modern Painters Autumn 2002 pp. 112-117

Emin for Real

What does the divide in opinion about ’s tell us about art-world prejudices and social politics - and about the work in question?

BY MARCUS FIELD

Is Tracey Emin the real thing? You know, is she a real artist like Coca-Cola is a real dark and sugary fizzy drink? I’m afraid this thorny old question will be sending critics and art audiences into a frenzy again this autumn in advance of Emin’s forthcoming solo exhibitions in (MoMA), New York (Lehmann Maupin) and Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum). So we can expect acres of newsprint, plenty of glossy magazine pages and hours of television discussion devoted to the subject. In addition a new book of academic essays, The Art of Tracey Emin, published in September, aims to settle this question once and for all: have we all been duped by the scribbling and the swearing, the sewing and the spewing, or are we in the presence of genius?

It seems astonishing that such questions are still being asked, but the division in reactions to Emin’s work is so extreme that this argument looks set to run like a modern-day Ruskin versus Whistler. Of course, everybody loves a good row, especially newspaper editors. And it is certainly revealing to check out the for and against categories among Emin s reviewers. The anti brigade is led largely by middle-aged and older men of a certain background. ‘Ignorant, inarticulate, talentless, loutish’, is how described Emin in an review of the ’s ‘Ant Noises’ in 2000. And of The Hut (1999), (1998) and Everyone l Have Ever Slept With 1963- 95, (1995) he said:

these are no more than self-sentimental memorabilia...no more art than the brassiere of Marilyn Monroe sold by Sotheby’s some years ago, or the codpiece of Linford Christie sold for charity.

Sewell’s sentiments were echoed by critic Michael Glover when he wrote in of Emin’s solo show at White Cube2 last year that her ‘art consists of little more than the random outpourings of a vacuous narcissism’ and that the entire exhibition was ‘unadulterated, self-indulgent crap’. Guardian critic defected to the anti-gang when he addressed Emin in an article saying that he was once ‘touched by your stories. Now you are only a bore’. And former ICA chairman famously held Emin up as an example of all that was wrong with ‘concept art’ when he wrote in The earlier this year that ‘anyone who has met Emin knows that she couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag’.

Quite a battering. So how do these critics explain the extraordinary appeal which Emin has for collectors and, more importantly, for the public who make no investment in her work other than their time and attention? Mostly they dismiss her fans as ignorant, like a crowd of plebs gathering around a falrground sideshow.

But Andrew Nairne, director of MoMA, Oxford, challenges this view. He remembers the effect of seeing the artist’s work at the South Gallery in 1997.

It was like someone breaking a window, a blast of fresh air. It punctured various ideas about the levels to which art is autobiographical. Suddenly other artists seemed coy or distant.

Rachel Lehmann, director of New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery, agrees:

I think what New Yorkers feel is that she is very much part of the work, that she is completely inseparable from her work. They are aware of the poetic sensitivities in her language too.

Lehmann says that interest in the 1999 show, which featured My Bed, was slow to start but grew over the duration of the exhibition. Of this autumn’s show, she says, ‘I have a lot of American collectors calling me and asking to make sure I give them a preview before the show opens’. For Andrew Nairne there has never been any question about the status of Emin’s work as art.

The evidence is very strong. She got a first from College [in printmaking] and a Masters in from the Royal College. And if you look through it there’s and craft — the forms are very traditional.

What the anti-Emin brigade finds difficult, thinks Nairne, is the ‘direct and personal’ nature of the work, which is precisely the element that appeals to her followers. ‘The extreme irony and distance of work coming out of French theory in the ‘80s has vanished; he says. ‘Artists like Emin are not ignorant. They have just got on with it and they do it straight.’ And surely it is this issue about how much a work of art needs to be interpreted that lies at the heart of the argument. The problem is that an artist like Emin is a threat to the professional critic because there is generally nothing in her work to unravel. It is all there, spelled out, often literally, in black and white. Perhaps it’s a deliberate reaction against all the conceptual games of ‘shifting meanings’ and ‘exploring notions’ and ‘posing questions’ that have become the mainstay of art-school education but which meant little to a poor girl from . Emin has talked about her disillusionment with these ideas, and she even gave up making work altogether after finishing at the Royal College. ‘Painting for me was completely moribund: it was completely bound up with failure; she remembers.

But finally in 1993, at the age of thirty; Emin found her true voice when she exhibited souvenirs, diaries and fragments from her life story in what was her first - and she thought her last-solo show, ‘My Major Retrospective’, at the newly opened Gallery. In a self-conscious flicking of the Vs to many of her contemporaries, Emin announced on the press release:‘While most artists these days wear their Derrida in their jacket pockets, I wear my art on my sleeve’.

The show didn’t make her a household name, but it drew enough plaudits to make her confident about saying what she had to say and saying it louder every time. ‘Is it art?’ wrote David Lillington of the exhibition in Time Out.

Well, in a sense, of course it isn’t, but it puts the question into such high relief as to disarm it...Emin brings the frontstage. The themes are biography; confession, transformation, the relation of art to life, to words. How serious it all is. It’s about as real life as you can get.

Ah, real life. It is this of course that many high-minded critics and art lovers find difficult to stomach about Emin’s work. But for somebody like me who first became aware of her when the infamous tent was exhibited in ‘Sensation’ at the Royal Academy in 1997, it is her stories of small-town life and her direct way of conveying its pleasures and pains that speaks to us. For anybody from suburban Britain Everyone l Have Ever Slept With 1963- 95 (1995) immediately strikes chords. Its very title echoes the common parlance of teenagers hanging around on the high street, its hand-stitched form recalls the state- school needlework lessons, and its concerns are the ones us ordinary people share — the memories of the people we have loved, the intimate family moments, the mistakes we made.

And Everyone l Have Ever Slept With... was just the beginning. Anybody who has ever felt a fascination with art but has felt marginalised by the establishment which constantly champions work that is exclusive and esoteric above the direct expression of everyday experience must have joined me in punching the air when a drunken Tracey cut through all the crap on ’s live television debate ‘Is Painting Dead?’ in 1997 to say; ‘You’re not relating to me anymore. I want to be with my friends. It’s live, but I don’t give a flick about it’. We could only agree and sympathise: how little we too would have to share with Roger Scruton and David Sylvester, two men whose lives and language appeared trapped in the tiny bubble of high culture.

The language of Emin’s texts on so many of her , appliquéd blankets and speaks to anybody of her generation who has ever lived an ordinary small- town life. ‘YOU DONT FUCK ME OVER/YOU GENTLY LIFT ME OUT OF BED LAY ME ON THE FLOOR AND MAKE LOVE TO ME’ from the Garden of Horror (1998) blanket is one of my favourites. ‘ALL THE FUCKING/ALL THE SHAGGING/ALL THE LOVE THAT I HAVE MADE’ from All the Loving (Underwear Box) (1997) is another. The collector Judith Greer once showed me a wall of Emin monoprints filled with such sentiments in her London dressing-room. They seemed just right there - in amongst the underwear, describing in no uncertain terms the ups and downs of many women’s lives. But for people like me it doesn’t matter how much these would be worth or what critics say about them — we relate to the trials and tribulations of the subjects in Emin’s drawings as we do to our family and friends or the characters in a TV soap or the contestants in the Big Brother . We say, ‘I remember when that happened to so and so’ or ‘it happened to me’.

And don’t tell me it’s not art - to me many of Emin’s drawings and sewn pieces are more beautiful and meaningful than anything by; say; Keith Tyson or , let alone by the overrated painter Peter Doig whom critics seem to love so much. And to the those who say she’s really a writer posing as an artist, I would agree with the interviewer Lynn Barber who said ‘she needs both — the fierceness of the words playing off the delicacy of the art -to really make her point’.

Of course that’s not to say that all of Emin’s work is good. By far the least successful of her pieces are those where she falls into the trap of engaging with on its own terms. Her Self Portrait (2001), a wooden helter skelter which also makes reference to Vladimir Tatlin’s tower, is the worst kind of -overworked and ultimately banal. It also suggests an element of arrogance on the part of the artist which she might do well to avoid. As soon as Tracey steps away from the subject of gritty urban life, a subject she knows well, and attempts to take on critics or her contemporaries on their own ground, things go horribly wrong. And this is what we will be watching out for when Emin’s new work is revealed at Lehmann Maupin in September, and later at MoMA, Oxford (the Stedelijk show is a retrospective).

So far the signs are good. Amongst her most recent work is a series of white hotel sheets delicately embroidered with figures resembling those in her monoprints. On one of them, to be shown in New York, is the line ‘Its not bad art/Its just my brain hurts’. Another shows a woman masturbating as a puff of pretty embroidered flowers rises above her head. There are also two new blankets, both to be shown in New York. One of them marks an interesting shift for Emin in that it deals with international politics, but seen from a personal perspective —her take, if you like, on the war against terror. Appliquéd across the American flag are the words ‘I DON’T THINK SO/AS IF I’M NOT AFRAID ENOUGH’, and below them is a hand-stitched reproduction of a poster offering gas masks and biological suits. ‘DON’T TRY TO SELL ME YOUR FUCKING FEAR; responds Emin. The punk lyrics of the ‘70s (remember Crass?), which these words resemble, never spoke to me as eloquently as this protestation in gold thread.

Critics will have a field day with Emin’s new work (She is even making a new bed for the New York exhibition, an updated version of My Bed which features a four poster luxuriously made-up with embroidered blankets and set off with a gold life-mask ofthe artist.) Ironically the inevitable media frenzy will bring fresh accusations that it is Emin herself who manipulates and milks publicityforher own ends. Well, certainly she has proved herself adept at handling the press pack, a situation which can only have raised the profile of her work.

‘She has been fearless in playing the media at their own game. She believes it’s part of the modern artist’s job to “spread the word”’, noted Lynn Barber in ‘Parkett’ last year. And Emin herself acknowledges how much she has learnt when she says in an interview to be published in The Art of Tracey Emin,

I was so stupid. I could have done that piece [the performance/ installation Exorcism of The Last Painti ng I Ever Made, 1996] in America or in Germany or London, and I was so worthy. Oh no, I did not want it to sensational at all. ... But if I had done it in England it would have been in the Sun and the Mirror and the queues would have been going round the block

These days, Emin appears regularly in paparazzi photos (always happy to pose) and Vivienne Westwood adverts, and even writes a hotel review column for GQ. There have been rumours about her writing a novel and even making a film with director Michael Winterbottom (she was seen strutting down the Croisette at the Cannes Film Festival this year). And she certainly takes a keen interest in how her work is presented in the press (Thames and Hudson apparently proposed a cover photo of an unmade bed - not My Bed - for her new book, a suggestion which Emin quickly rejected in favour of a drawing done specially for the purpose). The publicity -including the more negative pieces -have all helped fuel the myths surrounding the life of the artist and her work. We might not know how much of it is true (‘I decide to show this or that part of the truth, which isn’t necessarily the whole story; it’s just what I decide to give you’, says Emin of her work), but when push comes to shove nothing in the media beats the direct and candid style of the words in the work.

And it is because the words in Emin’s work speak to me so clearly that I most resent the publication of The Art of Tracey Emin this autumn. I suppose it’s inevitable that the art history establishment — the universities, the critical theory courses and the rest - would eventually want to claim Emin for their own. So, in this book, we are subjected to Deborah Cherry, Professor of Art History at Sussex University, talking about Emin’s notorious My Bed in terms of Derridean ‘débordement’, and we hear all about the ‘tropes’ and ‘specificity’ and the signs and signifiers. You can almost feel the angst as editors Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend (respectively Professor and Lecturer in Media at Royal Holloway College) try to get to grips with what Emin’s work really means.

Well, as Tracey might say: ‘you just fuck off back to your university where you came from and don’t give me your shit’. And she would be right. ‘I’m good at what I do, I’m not a fake’, she declared on Radio 4’s On the Ropes last year. She doesn’t need the blessing of the academy to make her a real artist. And neither do we.