girls are in there daring one another to ring up boys. And somehow this laugh speaks volumes about the woman.
For in her rapid ascent from the legions of Young British Art to being nominated for the Turner Prize, the whole point about Tracey Emin has been the fact that she expresses herself as the original precinct kid and disco girl: ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’ – as she described herself on a banner being towed behind a plane above the seafront of her home town.
As an example of myth-making within the history of art, you could say that Emin has used her perceived ‘ordinariness’ to much the same effect that Salvador Dali used his eccentricity, converting herself into a modern icon. In Britain, the yobs and the snobs have always had a soft spot for one another, and even the street-trader twang of Mad Tracey’s Thames Estuary accent has caused a shiver of delight down the spines of the male metropolitan gentry who tend to be in charge of the art world. For within the marble halls of the cultural establishment, a woman like Tracey Emin is wholly exotic.
But now Emin’s fame has splashed way over the edges of the enclosed, confusing world of contemporary art. In Tracey Emin – and the woman and her work are completely indistinguishable – the zeitgeist surfers of the late 1990s have identified the perfect mascot for contemporary Britain’s twin obsessions with real-life drama and public confession. Her art is entirely autobiographical, presenting only Tracey Emin’s highly visceral account of Tracey Emin, across a whole range of media from films and neon sculptures to writing and embroidery. And as it is a depressing fact that most women experience verbal abuse from male strangers, so much of Emin’s art is a direct response to all of the men who have called her a slut or a slag. Similarly, she explores her own relationship with those degrading labels, using a kind of child-like sincerity as her torch to see by.
Emin’s source material for the agony, confession and sexual memoirs that comprise the written pronouncements in her art begin with her birth. She describes the conception of herself and her twin brother, Paul, to be the result of a passionate affair ‘when my Mum and Dad got a crate of gin and a crate of scotch and fucked on the carpet in front of the fire – that’s how we came about’. With her distinguishing frankness, Emin has made no secret of the fact that her Turkish Cypriot father, a chef, was maintaining one household in London and another, with her mother, in Margate. Tragically, at the age of thirteen, Tracey was raped. Subsequent to this, she became sexually promiscuous ‘between the ages of thirteen and fifteen’, and more or less gave up attending school. Next stop would be art college.
By foregrounding sexual confession, accounts of her own despair and the innermost secrets of her relationships with friends, lovers and family, Emin has slipped into the whole current cultural climate which puts forward soft-core sociology as a subtle form of authorized, and highly ambiguous pornography: the daytime-TV studio debates that cleverly mingle sex with violence, the broadsheet columnists who offer up every last detail of their private lives as insights into the way we live now, and the docu-soap television programmes that derive their power from zooming in on the breakdown of their subjects.
‘That’s the whole reason why I’m popular,’ she says. ‘It’s the way the psyche of the nation is right now. Ten years ago, in terms of art, there was no room for me anywhere. No galleries would show my work or listen to my ideas. They’d presume me to be pathetic, and self-indulgent …’
Then Emin gives another of those laughs, and makes a kind of ‘yes, I know what you’re thinking’, eyes-raised-to-Heaven expression of self-criticism, before adding, ‘And there’s a lot of people who still think that I am pathetic and self-indulgent …’ When you meet her, Emin seems fragile to the point of bird-like: a petite, slender woman wearing embroidered mules and an elegantly simple dress, with a pink cashmere cardigan loosely knotted around her waist. She looks much younger than her thirty-seven years. The force of her personality seems to reside in her almond-shaped, coffee-coloured eyes – the strongest evidence of her Turkish Cypriot background – which can shift their expression from mean suspicion to melting vulnerability from one second to the next. She seems too small for the large red sofa on which she is sitting, in her vast, top-floor studio loft in the heart of Whitechapel – the district of London’s East End that is enjoying renewed fashionability due to its increasing population of young artists, and their accompanying galleries and cafes.
‘During Thatcherism,’ Emin continues, ‘if you didn’t fit in with the crowd, you were on the outside, and if you were on the outside then you were a nobody. And that was the general feeling for everything, no matter what your place was in the hierarchy: you had to fucking fit in, and if you didn’t – forget it. And the whole culture was built on that. But get rid of Thatcherism, and everything was turned around. Then, it became the cult of the individual, the loser and the outsider – because those were the types who had been ignored for fifteen years.
‘So suddenly we’ve got everything from “The Jerry Springer Show” to Princess Diana’s confessions on TV, or Paula Yates saying all those things the other night that – well, I didn’t find them difficult to listen to, but I did find them surprising. That your husband died from this auto-wanking thing rather than committing suicide. But that’s how much things have changed: there’s an audience who want to listen to these things now, whereas before there wouldn’t have been. It’s like people want to watch “East-Enders” because they don’t want to think about their own lives; then you’ve got this other thing where you home in on real people’s tragedies, lives and stories. And people feel that they can relate to that.
‘But that’s also why a lot of people don’t like my work – they’re sick of me. But the fact that I’m there is because of the psyche of the way that people are thinking now. And of course, that’s all going to change – I know that. But I’ve always done self-portraits, anyway. It’s like I read Julie Burchill’s autobiography, I Knew that I was Right All Along, and I read her column, too, and there are loads of cross-over things with my work in that.’
Kneeling on the floor behind her, an assistant is working on one of Emin’s famous embroidered textiles: a large square montage of fabrics that shouts out its witty slogans (‘Planet Thanet’, for instance) in what look like letters made of fuzzy felt, as part of a vivid, visual cacophony of accusations, confessions and emblematic signage. At a glance, it looks like a multicoloured version of the graffiti in a bus shelter, but it is a strand of Emin’s work that is compelling, somehow managing to coerce the reader into studying every last centimetre of its public announcement of private feelings.
In terms of its artistic lineage, it brings to mind the feminist reinvention of embroidery samplers made by women artists in ‘The Subversive Stitch’ exhibition, or the ‘Fun City Bikini’ pieces made back in 1970 for the ‘Cunt Power’ issue of Oz magazine. Similarly, the famous poster campaign developed by the Madeley Young Women’s Group in the early 1980s, using slogans to educate boys in their social treatment of girls – ‘We hate you when you call girls slags’ for example, or, ‘What You Staring At?’ – rehearsed aspects of the sentiments and tactics that can be found in Emin’s embroideries.
But where the artistic precursors of Tracey Emin’s aesthetic were usually defining the political position of women’s collective experience, Emin articulates her personal experience as a wholly autobiographical, multimedia epic. Her drawings have an expressionistic intensity that has earned them comparisons with sexually charged and neurotically taut works by Egon Schiele.
Expressing the experience of loneliness and pain arising from violation – or a sense of having colluded with acts of violation – and the inevitable, accompanying self-hatred, Emin’s art could be seen as both a calling to account of the people who have shaped her life, and as a purgative ritual through which she attempts to regain her innocence. In this way, she claims her accounts of personal experience have a political validity.
And in this there is a kind of Napoleonic ambition. Emin presents herself through her
