Tracey Emin : Art and celebrity excerpts

ADP magazine 1(5): This is the new shit! | Published 14 December 2009
Page 4 of 7

Click the photo to see a clip of Tracey Emin during the live Turner Prize 1997 show.

In 1997, Tracey Emin appeared on a television arts programme discussing the question "Is painting dead?" She had a broken finger and was blind drunk. Contemptuous of the intellectual debate being conducted by a number of male critics, she uttered some dismissive remarks, swore and then staggered from the studio saying she was going home to phone her mum. Such boorish behaviour, which served to reinforced the view that many visual artists are anti-intellectual, made her instantly notorious.

During 1998, Tracey Emin collaborated with the pop music star Boy George to make a sound recording entitled Burning up. George provided the music while Emin supplied the lyrics, which she also spoke on record. [1]

Boy George ft. Tracey Emin. Burning up.

Tracey Emin. My bed (foreground), (1998).

In 1999, Emin was nominated for the Turner Prize and exhibited several works at Tate Britain. The principal piece was entitled My Bed and consisted of a mattress, stained sheets and pillows, plus the debris of indulgence: dirty knickers, used condoms, empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts, slippers, etc. (The assemblage was a memorial to several days Emin had spent in bed drunk and miserable.) In other words, this was not a sculpture that had been made by the artist’s hands; it was more like a Duchampian readymade: objects the artist had selected; again, like Hirst, it was a presentation rather than a representation but nonetheless the objects functioned symbolically, that is, they evoked such themes as "loss, sickness, fertility, copulation, conception and death". (The American artist Robert Rauschenberg had presented a bed earlier, in 1955, but in his case it was transformed to some degree: he slapped paint on it and hung it on a wall.)

Tracey Emin’s "unmade bed" at the Tate Gallery attracted a great deal of media attention, and lick to see an "artistic intervention" by two artists. Click to see more of Tracey Emin’s darker media coverage.

Although Emin did not win the Turner Prize, her bed attracted the most publicity and visitors. (Arguably, the Tate Gallery used her as a loss leader.) Two Chinese artists— Jian Jun Xi and Yuan Chai— then jumped on the bed and had a pillow fight; this satiric action prompted further press reports. When Saatchi noticed how much attention My Bed was receiving, he bought it for £150,000.

A year later Saatchi paid Tracey Emin £75,000 for a dilapidated, blue-painted wooden beach hut (in which she had once lived with a male lover) that she had rescued from the seafront at Whitstable, Kent. It was entitled The last thing I said to you is don’t leave me here and was exhibited in the Saatchi Gallery along with photos of Emin crouching naked inside the hut taken by her current male partner and artist Mat Collishaw. During September 2001, one of these photos appeared several times in the Guardian advertising a competition sponsored by British Telecom and the Tate Modern gallery. The photograph was one of the prizes.

In 2001, Christie’s of London auctioned a Tracey Emin installation— Exorcism of the last painting I ever made (aka The Swedish Room)—which had previously appeared in a Swedish gallery (Galerri Andreas Brandström, Stockholm, 1996). It fetched £108,250. When Tracey Emin inspected it, she complained about how badly it had been treated by the owner and stated that the knickers that were part of it were not the original pair she had supplied. Emin had lived inside the installation for a fortnight while naked. Holes with fish-eye lenses punched in the enclosing walls enabled visitors to watch her try to overcome a six-year painting block. It would seem, therefore, that this work appealed to voyeurs and was not that different from sex industry peep shows. Some of the time Emin used her body as a living paintbrush to make marks on canvas. This piece was clearly derivative—reprising Yves Klein’s Anthropometry performances of 1960 and it was, therefore, incestuous—art about art. Since the Stockholm exhibition had combined live performance and installation, the new purchaser— Charles Saatchi— surely acquired only half a work of art.

Reference:
[1] It can be found on an audio CD that accompanied the book We love you (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions/Candy Records, 1998).

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