Wearing her art on her sleeve
Britain’s formal art establishment has started taking Tracey Emin seriously, but at 44, she’s still dependent on her damaged past for her subject matter. So is Britart’s princess redy for her crown? AFTER ALL THESE YEARS in the limelight, and with her wealth and cult status secured, you might think that Tracey Emin would have begun [...]
Britain’s formal art establishment has started taking Tracey Emin seriously, but at 44, she’s still dependent on her damaged past for her subject matter. So is Britart’s princess redy for her crown?
AFTER ALL THESE YEARS in the limelight, and with her wealth and
cult status secured, you might think that Tracey Emin would have begun to mellow. But the original bad girl of Britart, whofamously embroidered a tent with the names of everyone she had ever slept with and who displayed her dirty knickers to the world alongside her unmade bed for the 1999 Turner Prize, is the first to admit that the feeling of being comfortable in her skin is yet to come.
the feeling of being comfortable in her skin is yet to come. “I’m still angst-ridden,” she says, “and I still get depressed.I have to deal with things on a daily level like anyone else. Just because I work hard and I’ve been successful, it doesn’t mean that I don’t suffer and feel the stresses and strains of fe.”
A spiky enfant terrible in the commonly closed, self-regarding world of art, Emin has – somewhat astonishingly – finally been assimilated into the establishment. Currently, she’s representing Britain at the prestigious Venice Biennale art exhibition, making her only the second female artist to have been asked to do a solo show for Britain, following Rachel
Whiteread in 1997. And the Royal Academy of Arts, that soberest of artistic bodies, has gone one step further by making her a member last March. Emin, however, assures me she’s “not establishment, never will be”; even if, on paper, all the evidence suggests the opposite.
“Being an artist means that you’re on the outside,” she says. “On the outside, looking in. That’s still the same, the same as my life was 20 years ago, except that with a lot of my problems, I can now find a way out. I’ve worked hard on myself, but I still drink too much and I still say things I regret, and I still behave in a way in which I shouldn’t.” Even so, she shows
an uncomplicated joy at these recent honours: the phone call from the Royal Academy delighted her.
“I said yes straightaway!” she laughs. “The Royal Academy is made up of all these really respected architects and older artists. Being an artist can be lonely, so it’s really cool to have a couple of drinks with people and talk about art, even if you argue or fight about it.”
Emin has never hidden the fact that she’s a party girl, even if it’s a scaled-down version these days.“About once every six months I’ll stay up all night; you know, go to one place, then another place and so on, then realise, ‘oh my God, it’s now 8am,’” she says. “Whereas before, I could stay out for days on end.”
Has all the partying taken its toll on her health? Clearly stung, Emin bites back: “No, I don’t drink
spirits, I’ve never taken drugs, I hardly ever drink coffee, I swim every day and I have an incredibly healthy, organic diet, so you just take those words back.”
This isn’t the first time during the course of our hour-long conversation that Emin gets irked. Later on, I ask her whether, through works like her famous tent, she’s taking revenge on ex-lovers or those who may have let her down, as the theme of betrayal seems so prevalent in her work.
She then asks me for the specific names of people I think she is taking aim at. I say that I haven’t a clue, and ask if it isn’t just a general theme of her work, that she feels hurt and let down? “Well, you’re wrong,” she snaps testily. “Any more questions about ex-boyfriends?”
Speaking to Emin, she can sound so vulnerable, almost childlike in her tone of voice, her turn of
phrase. The way she offers up her sentences with coyness, it’s as if she’s tentatively awaiting your approval – and then, suddenly, she can turn prickly.
“Even though I might get really drunk on a bottle of wine, that’s because I can’t take my drink,” she justifies. “I’ve got a very measured and sensible lifestyle in many ways. For example, I’ve got a very tidy house which people don’t expect. Everyone thinks it would be completely hectic, but it’s not; it’s completely in order. It has to be because my life is very complicated.”
Escaping the bedlam of her mind has been a lifelong theme for Emin. Born in 1963, one of twins
(her brother is called Paul), Emin grew up in the seaside town of Margate in Kent and experienced a helterskelter childhood. Her ethnic Turkish Cypriot father met Emin’s mother when he was already married with children. Instead of leaving his first family, Emin’s father maintained two households for months.
Emin’s parents then ran the Hotel International in Margate, where she lived in relative comfort until the age of seven. But the business collapsed and her parents’ relationship imploded soon after.
Although her father left for pastures new, he hasn’t
evaporated from Emin’s life altogether. “He still
comes to shows,” she tells me, “but he’s 85 now, so
opening nights are a bit too hectic for him.”
After studying at art colleges in the 1980s, when she embarked on a long relationship with the artist
and poet Billy Childish, she moved to London to do an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art.
Her love life in tatters and living a hand-to-mouth existence, Emin tore up all her works in a red mist of self-doubt in the early 1990s. It was only through meeting fellow artist Sarah Lucas in 1992 that she came back to the fold. “Sarah was really instrumental in me starting making work again, being creative with my hands,” she explains.
Emin has always drawn heavily on her own experiences, even the painful ones such as her
difficult relationships with men and her two abortions. Her first (and only) feature film, the
heavily autobiographical Top Spot (2004), followed the experiences of six young girls in Margate in the1980s. Sexual abuse is a central theme and there’s also a suicide scene: Emin has admitted that she was raped at 13, and she attempted to kill herself by jumping off a cliff when she was 20.
“I’m not interested in any more film-making,” she says dismissively. “It’s so complicated and takes so long. I’d rather just make my own little films and show them in a gallery.”
One of the first works to mark out Emin’s controversial career was Everyone I Have Ever Slept
With 1963–1995, a blue tent emblazoned with the names of sexual partners, family members and her aborted children. It was typically provocative and characteristically divisive: critics still either view Emin as a brash, self-flagellating egoist, or a poignant figure with a universal message about our private fears. Snapped up by Charles Saatchi for £150,000, the artwork was famously destroyed in a 2004 storage warehouse fire. This prompted howls of derision from many corners of the press, something that still bewilders its creator. “British culture was destroyed in a fire, yet the British tabloids and the British public were laughing,” says Emin. “We didn’t come across as being a very cool, cultural country.”
Emin shows no lack of modesty when she goes on to describe the tent as “a seminal piece of art that’s gone down in art
history”. But she’s right; it has lodged itself into the annals of modern art. The destruction, she says, hurt on a personal level.
“Now it’s gone and I got nothing from it. I could have made it again, and then I could have probably got a few million quid from it, but I couldn’t make it again.” But why not make a facsimile?, I ask her. “How could I recreate my flat in Waterloo? How could I recreate how broke I was at the time?” she bristles. “How could I cut up all my old clothes, then spend six months selling something in a totally genuine way? It would
just be wrong; morally wrong, ethically incorrect.”
The 1999 Turner Prize saw Emin court even more scandal. Her entry, My Bed, was composed of a stained mattress decorated with worn panties, fag butts and other detritus. It may not have triumphed, but it won the lion’s share of publicity; including when two art students jumped on it in protest.
“The Turner Prize was very distressing,” recalls Emin, still reeling. “My work had been trampled on, then taken out of the show, there was all the stuff in the newspapers, [I was] being door-stepped, being hounded, having hate mail sent to me, being stalked, having minor art groups decide to get aggressive and threaten me. It was a totally unreasonable situation.”
Criticism has dogged Emin’s career. She is one of the most successful artists of her generation, but for every new accolade she has received, she’s had to weather a storm of abuse. Surely, she’s had to become thick-skinned, I suggest. But, true to form, Emin insists that every barb leaves its mark.
“A lot of these bitchy art critics aren’t bitchy people,” she says. “They’re people who have PhDs in art history, MAs and written books, and studied philosophy. They’re really educated and it’s not a case of handbags at dawn; being bitchy for the sake of it. And that’s what’s hurtful.”
Critics aside, Tracey Emin has risen to become one of the best-known artists of the last two decades,cleaving public opinion on her work in two, with her love-it-or-hate-it – but never bland – art.
She takes credit for changing attitudes to modern art. “People are much more open to stuff, I think… I think I’ve played my part in making art more accessible,” she declares. And well she might.
As for Emin herself, how much has success transformed her? “I tell you what it changes: you feel more comfortable with yourself, because you weren’t wrong. Everything you believed in and were fighting for before, suddenly it isn’t a fight. So it means you go with the ease of it, and that’s a brilliant feeling. If you speak to anyone who’s reached a certain level
of success with what they do, they’ll tell you that.”
Venice Biennale continues till 21 November 2007,
www.labiennale.org/en
Interview: Alistair Duncan
Portrait: David Yeo
