Tracey Emin’s solo show at the Hayward Gallery Love is What you Want (until 29 August) is, as expected, an artistic, social and controversial event. For arguably the most famous living woman artist in the UK, the exhibition carries considerable kudos as an important cultural event.
Curator Cliff Lauson has staged the exhibition in a way that reduces the autobiographical aspect of Emin’s art through the structure of a chronological survey, and instead highlights her creative diversity.
Rooms and spaces are dedicated to mediums, showcasing different modes of making from the ubiquitous monotypes and blankets to neon signs, video art, sculptural structures, needlework, and the novelty of animated loop.
Entering Room 1 is a claustrophobic experience. Two walls are densely hung with Emin’s early colourful blankets. The floor space is taken up with Knowing my Enemy, 2002 – a precarious looking wooden pier occupying nearly ¾ of the floor space, on its edge a wooden shed. On the wall is a neon sign in Emin’s handwriting. The room is loud, busy, crammed. And provides a perfect introduction.
It immediately speaks stylistically about Tracey Emin, indicating instantly her versatility in setting the scene. Chronological sequence is interspersed with thematic blocks, her blankets establishing a narrative. Her traumatic childhood is narrated in the first person, a voice of remembrance which is repeated throughout the retrospective. It is up to the viewer to decide whether this confessional narrative is autobiographical, fiction, or an elision of both.
The last room on the top floor of the gallery was the highlight of the exhibition. It was, for me, a new encounter. As Emin commented in her interview with Ralf Rugoff, she is aware of a new phase in her femininity: ageing is probably the hottest topic in contemporary art history and, true to her oeuvre, Emin is unflinching in contemplating this new stage.
Emin, like many other modernist and postmodernist artists, works hard at being an enfant terrible. Within this tradition, using the artist’s autobiography has been a revolutionary thematic shift from academic genres of painting; Courbet did so in the mid 19th century. More recently we can evoke the art of Frida Kahlo, who was ‘discovered’ by Western postmodernists only after the publication of her comprehensive biography by Heyden Herrera in 1983. Famously, Kahlo has been seen as a postmodern artist before Postmodernism, and indeed there are strong affinities with Emin in the depiction of abortions and masturbation as well as the fictionalizing of her family for expressive purposes.
Emin presents her autobiography in highly dramatic terms: dysfunctional family, born a twin, childhood memories of riches lost, mother’s poverty, father’s double identity, abject youth with rape, bullying, and public humiliation to the point of having to leave her home town. It makes a fascinating narrative which renders the biography a pre-text to Emin’s work. Yes, everybody knows about her tent Everybody I Slept With (by the way, Fia Darvell is sore you forgot her), even more about My Bed, 1998 and most people have firm opinions about the more erotic and sexual content of Emin’s monotypes. Like Frida Kahlo, Emin is a seductress and controller of her audience. Size matters as much as theme, and makes viewers come close to her art, or recoil – either physically or emotionally. Often she makes viewers reluctant voyeurs.
And Emin’s art is suffused with text. In fact, there is so much text in her art it is really surprising that it has received so little attention beyond her mis-spellings.
Single letters, words, sentences, letters, diaries, newspapers cuttings and neon lights speak in a wide range of voices. Sometimes the voice is factual (Hotel International, 1993); sometimes she quotes insults hurled at her (Psycho Slut, 1999). Long hand writing usually presents recollections, letters, poetry – Emin wrote and published Exploration of the Soul, 1994 and read it out as a performance piece. Neon light signs are aphorisms. Patchwork blankets are the background for appliqué letters, words and sentences embroidered in a riotous bricolage.
In her text she employs a double-speak about herself, in both the first and third person. Much of the language is confessional in nature, some in a declamatory voice, other times simply a listing of places, people and events. Many themes and events are repeated – a repetition that could be read as a post traumatic need to revisit. The appliquéd blankets contain narratives that are disrupted both textually and visually by changing size, direction, patterning, and the patchwork backgrounds at times ‘enclose’ a statement, or elsewhere are broken down to support a single appliquéd letter. This jarring bricolage of pattern and meaning assaults the senses of the viewer, with language coming together and disintegrating at one and the same time. Documentations, letters, newspaper cuttings are presented with photographs and other works to create the impression of an undisputed factual autobiography.
But how much is fact, and how much fiction? The exhibition uses autobiography as a powerful spring-board, at the same time claiming her artistic license to fictionalise. The tenacious dramatisation and repetitive nature of her work means some themes become like a mantra. Her texts provide the context, but at the same time they both obscure and hint at what lies at the heart of her art.
So what is so new or difficult to accept in Emin’s work? Her work is anchored in the modern history of art; she uses her voice to express her identity and as such holds a mirror to contemporary life and the dilemmas she shares with her generation. Her art is knowingly rooted in modernism, from Titian’s mythic female nudes to Manet’s translation of this theme in Olympia, a key work of modernism, in which Maurant is brazenly reclining, seductively on an untidy bed, wearing nothing but fashionable jewellery and slippers. Not to mention the plethora of feminist performance and installation art of the late 1960s and 70s. Emin has defined herself as an Expressionist.
In conclusion, this exhibition is an opportunity to examine afresh her early work and assess how more recent work evolves in relation to it. For me this is the thrill, and as for the debate of what art is for, and who, that is an additional bonus. A variety of opinion is the spice of life in the art world / Nedira Yakir, July 2011