"Mad Tracey From Margate"

[rhythmaning]

Picture from National Galleries of Scotland

Say what you like about Tracey Emin – she knows how to give catchy titles to her work. Such as



“My Cunt Is Wet With Fear”. But that is Tracey, apparently: it is all about her. I guess that might be true of any artist – when we look at a Rembrandt or a Rothko, we are seeing their interpretation of the world, and we are seeing what they choose to show, what they leave in and take out.

Much has been made of the fact that Tracey Emin’s work is all about her life – the notes for the current retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art describe her as the most autobiographical artist around. But she is still an artist: she is choosing what to show: it is still . And in Emin’s art, it revolves around the stories she wants to share.

She works in lots of different media; I liked the neon signs and some of the installations, and disliked a lot else. The neon literally shone; the installations – like the famous unmade bed, "My Bed" – I found interesting, but niggled slightly: to what extent was the bed the same bed that was exhibited in the Turner show? Are the used condoms on the floor the same? Is it even a worthy question? (Although the picture of the bed which appears on the SNG website shows the bed back to front – I can’t read any of the writing to work out if the picture has been reversed or if the bed has been set up differently. Or does it even matter?)

Picture from National Galleries of Scotland

Emin’s work seems so full of artifice – seems so intent on telling the story – that it raises a lot of questions like these.

Following an abortion and the depression which followed in (I think) 1990, she allegedly destroyed all the work, and make any new works for several years. But… But before she destroyed her work, she took photographs of it – every piece. So it was a kind of “conditional” destruction – she kept the option of going back to it, as indeed she does in this exhibition, with a piece she describes as her “first retrospective”, consisting of a series of small photographs of each piece she destroyed. Again – showing us what she wants us to see. She is making active choices – like any artist – but it is not everything. The artist isn’t the work.

A lot of the exhibition is about her family – her father, my mother, her nan; more is about sex and its outcomes – her abortions – and the lack of other outcomes: her desire for children. She isn’t alone in these thoughts – many women in the mid-forties will have had abortions, many will wish they had children – but they are central to Emin’s art in a very emotive, visceral way: the bed is (supposed) to be the one she retreated to following an abortion, where she lay for weeks (although – given the used condoms – presumably not alone); there are many sketches women (taken to be Emin) lying back, genitals exposed – some are about sex, some are about abortion; there are several series of work explicitly about abortion.

There are several video pieces. In one, she explains how, as a young teenager in Margate, she would regularly have sex with men many years older, and how she vowed to leave Margate (it is actually a rather uplifting piece). Another is based on Munch’s “The Scream” - Emin curled on a wooden pier, then screaming.

Emin’s work has a history of being destroyed – first by her, later by fire in the Saatchi Collection, which means that one of her most famous pieces, “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995” – a tent with the names of (apparently) everyone she slept with between her birth and 1995 – couldn’t be displayed.

There are several hanging embroidered fabric pieces – I was going to write carpets, but I’m not sure if that is the right term! These I don’t really understand: incorporating text and pictures sewn onto the fabric, they still tell stories – about her parents (“Hotel International”), about her grandmother, about her relationships (yes – a lot about sex, abortion and being childless); the text is often misspelt, or attached backwards (back-to-front “n”s, for instance). I heard an introductory talk by the curator of the show when I first visited back in July, and he said that she was dyslexic; but there are other text pieces – letters, mainly – with adequate (if not perfect) spelling, and the embroidery is now done by Emin’s studio assistants – so she could get it right if she wanted. (Does it matter? Fuck knows – I doubt I’d like the embroidery more if the spelling was correct.)

The curator told various stories about Emin; he believed she was completely without artifice, that what you saw was the real Tracey Emin; but he also described her apparently random moods as they were setting the show up – Emin had been very hands-on, repeatedly cancelling her return to London (although since she was interviewed on tv from a suite in the Balmoral Hotel or similar, I can’t necessarily blame her!).

I found this an intriguing exhibition, then – bits of it I loved, a lot I really didn’t like. Artists have always used themselves as models, and Emin continues that tradition; but she is still the model, not the art itself. And she is only using her life as the starting point to create her art: she is telling stories like artists before.