Tracey Emin: Art and Celebrity excerpts
Now onto the queen of art+celebrity from John A. Walker’s book.
Book excerpts: John A. WalkerADP magazine 1(5): This is the new shit! Published 14 December 2009.
Page 1 of 4.
During the 1990s, Tracey Emin became as famous in Britain as Hirst when interviews, gossip items, satires, caricatures and photographs proliferated in the press, in fashion and art magazines and on the Internet. She also appeared on television several times and, like Hirst, was honoured by television arts editor Melvyn Bragg when, in 2001, he devoted a South Bank Show to her. Like Hirst, Emin paid no heed to the traditional stereotype of the English: being modest, polite, liking privacy and suffering adversity with a stiff upper lip.
Her life story is known in some detail, mainly because she herself has made it the subject of so much of her art, which has therefore been called “confessional”, “angry vagina” and “victim art”. (It could also be called “me, me, me art” and “misery art”.) She is an artist who has taken the commodification of the self to a new extreme. Emin has used art galleries to confess her sins the way Catholics use confession booths. As many television programmes and autobiographies testify, the willingness of people to confess all in public—especially experiences of childhood abuse—has become very widespread in recent years. (There is one subject celebrities are generally reticent about: their personal finances.) However, one of Emin’s photographs comments ironically on the relation between money and her body. It shows her sitting on the floor naked pushing banknotes between her thighs with coins in front of her. Its title is: I’ve Got it All (2000).
Unlike Madonna or Sherman, Tracey Emin does not adopt fictional personae or masks. In her case, it seems there is no artifice, only authenticity. She concluded a Radio 4 interview in July 2001 by insisting: “I am genuine.” Sincerity by itself, however, is no guarantee of high quality art.
Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963 but grew up in the downmarket seaside resort of Margate. Its only previous claim to fame in terms of visual art was that J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) lived and worked there at various times. (Margate plans to open a Turner Centre in 2004 to attract more visitors.) One of Emin’s nicknames is “Mad Tracey from Margate” and she once remarked angrily: “I grew up in Margate and somebody’s going to FUCKING PAY FOR IT.” By birth, she was only half English: her father, Enver Emin, was a Turkish-Cypriot chef and hotel manager with black African ancestors. Pamela Cashin, her mother, was an English chambermaid. Both were married to other people when they met; they lived together for seven years. Enver, a lothario, is proud of his many sexual conquests and love children. Emin’s stepmother currently assists her by sewing her quilts. Emin has a twin brother Paul who complains about the publicity that she has attracted to the family and he has dismissed her art as “a load of bollocks”.
Tracey Emin, according to her own accounts, has experienced much pain and unhappiness during her life: a rape at the age of 13, a series of underage sexual encounters, two abortions and a miscarriage, anorexia, severe depression, an attempted suicide, bouts of excessive drinking, ill health and heavy cigarette consumption. As in the case of Dennis Hopper, many of her troubles were due to self-destructive behaviour. Her education ceased early when she left school at the age of 13 and so she never learned to spell accurately. However, the numerous grammatical and spelling errors and reversed letters in her embroidered designs are now part of their charm and artistic effect. She gives her exhibitions melodramatic titles such as Every Part of Me is Bleeding and one of her neon signs stated: “My Cunt is Wet with Fear.” One of Emin’s few works about someone else was about her Uncle Colin but he, poor fellow, was decapitated in a car crash.
Despite having no educational qualifications, Tracey Emin managed to escape her miserable background during the 1980s by attending several art schools. She studied fashion at Medway College, Chatham, then switched to the Sir John Cass School of Art, London (1982-83), and studied fine art at Maidstone School of Art (1983-89), and painting and drawing at the Royal College of Art (1991-93). She also learnt printmaking, was a youth tutor for Southwark Council and took part-time course in philosophy at Birkbeck College, London University. In 1992, in a fit of despair, she destroyed all the art she had created up to that time.
An important influence on Tracey Emin’s development during the 1980s was an older man with anti- establishment attitudes—Billy Childish (b. 1959, aka Steven Hamper). An artist, punk musician, dyslexic poet and small press publisher, he was the victim of an abusive, traumatic childhood. They met in Chatham in 1982 and had an intense affair for four years. Articles on Childish argue that Emin’s art derives from his because it was expressionist and autobiographical. [1] The two have feuded because Childish, a defender of traditional craft skills and art forms such as painting, despises conceptual art, while Emin accused Childish of being “stuck, stuck, stuck!” (in the past). He embraced this criticism by founding, with others, “Stuckism, the first Remodernist art group”, which regularly issues denunciations of the Turner Prize from which the Stuckists are excluded. (He has since left the group.) Childish favours amateurishness, independence and self-organisation; he rejects the official art world and the culture of celebrity to which Emin now belongs. However, he maintains his own website to assist sales and the mass media are increasingly taking an interest in him. [2]
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References:
[1] Graham Bendel. (3 July 2000). Being Childish. New Statesman.
[2] Ted Kessler. (24 March 2002). My hero is Vincent van Gogh... Life: Observer Magazine, pp. 10-14.
Don’t miss
- Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst in the artdesigncafe.com library archive.
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