Until now, I have avoided writing about Tracey Emin in this series of ‘Significant Works’. It just seemed too obvious. She rose to fame on the crest of the YBA wave in the 1980s. Those Young British Artists who delighted in poking a finger in the eye of the establishment.
Once the enfant terrible of the art world, she was made a Dame this year in the King’s birthday honours list. There is nothing more establishment than being a Dame (as well as an academician of the RA) and setting up your own art school as she has done in her hometown, Margate. So, it seems a good time to re-assess this once mauvaise fille . Her life story is well known and has, over the years, reached almost mythic status. The difficult childhood, the rape suffered at 13, dropping out of school only to be forced back at 15 when she spent most of her time in the art room, then attending and dropping out of what was at that time Medway College of Design in Rochester. The abortion at 18 and the recent decimation of her body by bladder cancer. Unlike most of the YBAs, Tracey didn’t go to Goldsmiths, where under the tutelage of Michael Craig Martin, self-promotion became as important as the artwork produced. Instead, she graduated from the Royal College and, in 1993, opened a ‘shop’ with Sarah Lucas, becoming friends with Damien Hirst and exhibiting in the now legendary exhibition ‘Freize’.
It’s hard to talk about her work without referring to that bed. Shown as part of the Tate’s 1999 Turner Prize exhibition, My Bed whipped up all the usual huffing and puffing as to whether such an object, along with the accompanying detritus, could be considered art. Yet, despite its notoriety, it never actually won the prize, losing out to Steve McQueen. Its first appearance was in a dingy Waterloo council flat in 1998. The result of a traumatic broken relationship, the piece was raw, confessional and iconoclastic, highlighting both sexual need and depression. Mouldering in bed for four days without eating or drinking anything other than alcohol, Emin finally looked around to realise what she had created.
The bed is an image that resonates throughout our lives. We are born in beds, we die in beds, lie in them in ill health, have sex in them. By casting herself as the primary star in her own psychodrama, she created a cathartic confessional scenario, a charismatic mise-en-scène that spoke of love, pain and abandonment. A subject that has been tackled head-on in the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton but rather less by women artists. At a time when it was still largely taboo to do so, Emin highlighted not only female sexual desire but female vulnerability. Her relatability and refusal to compromise when dealing both with sex and mental health set a new benchmark for contemporary British art. My Bed became the sensation that launched her career.
Theatrical in its design, it is, in fact, a carefully orchestrated piece of figurative sculpture that employs arte povera or ‘non-art’ materials, the detritus of the everyday, perhaps influenced by the anti-artwork of the Italian artist Piero Manzoni who (reputedly) filled 90 small paint cans with his own shit. The minimalist rectangle of the bed with its crumpled sheets is juxtaposed with the chaos of what surrounds it. On a small stool, there’s clutter of objects: a plastic mirror, an ashtray full of Anadin and aspirin (presumably to deal with a hangover), lip balm, an apple core and a condom in an orange packet, along with Rizla papers for rolling joints. On the rug area lie a couple of empty Absolute Vodka bottles, dirty tissues, a tube of KY Jelly and a pair of bloodstained knickers. The bed, here, is both a site of sensual pleasure and a place of emotional escape. Bacchanalian and depressingly sordid. But what is most arresting is that, like some crime scene, the protagonist is absent. What we see is the aftermath of an event. The main player has exited the stage.. We can imagine her there alone, nude, spaced out, drinking and popping pills, masturbating in an attempt to deaden feelings and blot out the world. But she’s done a bunk if, in fact, she was actually ever there. In this piece, she is her own puppet mistress. We are looking at not ‘truth’ but a montage, a visual narrative. What is left is an approximation of a moment in time. A story in which we assume the artist once featured. The scene is a work of the creative imagination, not a ‘real’ bedroom.
Thirty-odd years after its inception, My Bed still resonates, dividing critical opinion. I admit that in the past when I wrote about Tracey Emin, I found her self-absorption and narcissism excessive. Her work was solipsistic, especially when so many working women were having a really hard time trying to make ends meet or bringing up children alone in tower blocks on very little money. But we have moved on. Tracey has been life-threateningly ill with cancer. She is no longer young. By her own account, she’s a different person. Sober and single, she doesn’t smoke, doesn’t have sex, doesn’t have periods. Her life and values have changed. They have become deeper and more philosophical, as could be witnessed in her recent exhibition of paintings alongside those of Munch in the RA. Looking at My Bed now is like looking at the diary of a young woman one once knew. An immature romantic who believed that love and sex – along with the ensuing self-destructive psychodramas – were life’s ultimate goals. Certainly, it’s a self-absorbed work, but time and age change how we view it, and, for many, this carefully constructed mise-en-scène may still reflect something of their lived reality.
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance critic. Her fourth novel, Flatlands, from Pushkin Press, can be bought here: Flatlands by Sue Hubbard | 9781911590743 | Pushkin Press. Her latest poetry collection, God’s Little Artist: poems on the Life of Gwen John