Tracey Emin : Art and celebrity excerpts
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Tracey Emin’s My Bed at the Tate Gallery attracted a full range of media attention. Click to see more of Tracey Emin’s darker media coverage.
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 [1] 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. [2] 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. [3]
References:
[1] Click to see a review of Tracey Emin’s art show, that contributed to her being shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999.
[2] Graham Bendel. (3 July 2000). Being Childish. New Statesman.
[3] Ted Kessler. (24 March 2002). My hero is Vincent van Gogh... Life: Observer Magazine, pp. 10-14.
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