The new exhibition devoted to the work of the British artist Tracey Emin, currently at Tate Modern in London, is her biggest yet, with over ninety works on view, and the first since her recovery from major surgery for bladder cancer in 2020. In a series of winning interviews, she has talked openly about the impact of being given six months to live, her life-changing surgery (she now has a stoma and uses a urostomy bag), her recovery, and her entry into what she gladly calls her \u201csecond chance,\u201d her \u201csecond life.\u201d When she was made a dame commander of the British Empire in 2024 she had just received the four-year all-clear from her oncology team, and she said the news made her feel \u201clike being born again.\u201d Visitors to the exhibition will be able to see, she laughs, just how much she is \u201cthoroughly enjoying the second part.\u201d<\/p>\n
And why not? Once renowned for being drunk during a TV interview and walking off set, disparaged for her \u201cnarcissism,\u201d and vilified by the conservative press for her scandalous Turner Prize entry, My Bed (1998)\u2014an installation of her actual bed\u2014she is now an artist whose work sits at the very center of the British art establishment. Everyone knows Emin. She is not only a CBE and a dame; she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and became a Royal Academician the same year. In 2011 she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy, and in 2023 a Trustee of the British Museum. She heads her own art institution, providing subsidized studio spaces and residencies funded by the Tracey Emin Foundation. Every major media outlet in the country has interviewed her, exploring her views not only about painting and the politics of making art in Britain but about education, wealth, immigration, austerity, the health of our rivers, the toxic policies of Reform, the dangerous rise of right-wing, xenophobic rhetoric, and the ubiquity of violence against women and girls.<\/p>\n
A second life needs a first, and although not billed as a retrospective, the exhibition charts a chronological route through her work. Curated by Maria Balshaw (her last show as director of the Tate) alongside Alvin Li and Jessica Baxter, and with considerable input from Emin herself and her creative director, Harry Weller, it tells a story of transcendence. Weller is explicit about this:<\/p>\n
I wanted to show where Tracey\u2019s been, her heritage, where she\u2019s come from, the fact that she transcends trauma, whether that\u2019s sexual abuse, or abortion, and surgery, of course. I also wanted to showcase that she\u2019s a serious painter. She is up there with the big boys, and those men, and those expressionist painters as well\u2026. She competes with them.<\/p>\n
So we begin at the beginning, with where she\u2019s come from: a quilted blanket stitching the story of her parents\u2019 relationship and her birth, with her twin brother, Paul, in July 1963 in Mayday Hospital in Croydon; a mini autobiography scrawled on numbered sheets of notepaper (spelling mistakes and crossings out included); a wooden rollercoaster entitled It\u2019s Not the Way I Want to Die that evokes the Scenic Railway, a 1920s ride at the Dreamland funfair in the seaside town of Margate, Kent, where Emin grew up. There might be other ways of telling the story of her origins, by focusing on her teachers, friends, and collaborators. Emin stopped attending school at the age of thirteen, but in England in the 1970s you weren\u2019t allowed to disappear from the school roll until the summer you turned sixteen, and as Emin explains, she was required by social services to attend at least three days a week.<\/p>\n
Two of those she spent in the art room and on the third she took English, math, and PE. She got the education she needed, carved out of the one that was required by the state, and later went on to study fashion at the Medway College of Design and printmaking at Maidstone Art College (both now part of the University of the Creative Arts), then got an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. Where she came from might also include her friendships with some of the Young British Artists in the early 1990s, especially Mat Collishaw and Sarah Lucas (with whom Emin ran a shop selling mostly their own work in East London in 1993), and the financial patronage of Charles Saatchi. Shorn of these institutional networks, the exhibition tends to suggest an artist born of her own entrails\u2014though that is also true.<\/p>\n
In the second room of the show you encounter a bottleneck, as visitors crowd into the relatively small space to watch the six-minute video installation Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995). Made when Emin was thirty-two, the short film is shot like a 1970s home movie on Super 8, and it tells a story of Emin\u2019s adolescence in Margate. The British seaside looms large in the nation\u2019s cultural consciousness, and many of our images seem stuck in the 1950s\u2014sticks of rock candy, men with hankies knotted on their bald heads, sunburn, the tacky red and yellow of buckets and spades. Margate was the site of some of England\u2019s first amusement parks, and Lindsay Anderson\u2019s O Dreamland (1953), one of the first Free Cinema documentaries, featured the penny slot machines in the arcade, the cups of tea, the vacant looks of adults and children \u201cenjoying\u201d their free time. The odd thing about the photographer Tony Ray-Jones\u2019s images of Margate from the 1960s and Martin Parr\u2019s from the 1980s is that they seem interchangeable: it\u2019s as though once the English get onto the sand, we become timeless.<\/p>\n
Emin manages to sidestep all that in her film, which is, almost uniquely in portraits of the English seaside in summer, absent of people. We see\u2014through grainy footage seemingly held in a shaky hand\u2014the empty beach, the amusement arcade, the high street, the lido, in a washed-out light. It\u2019s all recognizable, just one step away from the clich\u00e9, and yet strangely alien. Emin\u2019s voice-over\u2014simple, direct, unfussy\u2014describes the world of her childhood in the late 1970s: thirteen-going-on-fourteen-year-old Tracey, who has stopped going to school and exults in a summer in which there\u2019s \u201cnothing to do but dream,\u201d go to the pub, eat fish and chips, and have sex. Sex was \u201csomething simple,\u201d \u201cit was something you could just do, and it was for free.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always loved this film for the way it brings the viewer inside the head of the girl in Margate in 1977, and of the grown-up woman looking back, without compromising either of them. Emin recalls the \u201cpower\u201d sex gave her, the sense of adventure and \u201clearning,\u201d when it was good: \u201cThere were no morals or rules or judgments, I just did what I wanted to do.\u201d She describes the degradation when sex was bad, and grown-up Emin wonders about the young men, aged nineteen, or twenty-five, who wanted to have sex with a child. Soon enough she finds another source of power: \u201cBy the time I was fifteen I\u2019d stopped shagging, but I was still flesh and I thought with my body. But now it was different, now it was me and dancing.\u201d<\/p>\n
She goes on to describe entering a competition in the summer of 1978. It was a heat in the national disco dance championships, and it was going to be her route out of Margate, until the men she had had sex with started calling out \u201cslag,\u201d and her confidence faltered. But this isn\u2019t a story about shaming. Instead, that moment gave her direction: \u201cI thought I\u2019m leaving this place. I\u2019m getting out of here. I\u2019m better than all of them, I\u2019m free. And I left Margate. And I left those boys. Shane, Eddie, Doug, Tony, Richard\u2014this one\u2019s for you,\u201d she says, and the sound of Sylvester\u2019s \u201cYou Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),\u201d which reached number eight in the UK in 1978, replaces her voice while the film is still skimming over Margate scenes, before cutting to Emin herself for the first time, dancing alone. Why I Never Became a Dancer could have been titled How I Became an Artist, and the single word that would summarize it is \u201cconviction.\u201d<\/p>\n
Getting the script right is central to Emin\u2019s work. She makes artworks into documents of the past, and turns manuscripts into pictures by putting them on the wall; she writes across her paintings, and sews insults (\u201cMad Tracey from Margate\u201d), epigrams, messages, love tokens, and snatches of overheard speech onto quilts, blankets, and even her grandmother\u2019s chair. Perhaps the most famous example is the tent appliqu\u00e9d with the names of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963\u20131995, which included her mother and her twin brother. That work was a companion piece to Why I Never Became a Dancer, made the same year, and like the film focused on putting names to sex and intimacy\u2014making it real. The tent isn\u2019t included in \u201cA Second Life\u201d because it was destroyed in a fire at Momart\u2019s East London warehouse in 2004.<\/p>\n
But there is plenty of writing in the exhibition nonetheless: letters and anecdotes written out by hand and framed alongside photographs, an old passport, a removed tooth; neon signs flourishing \u201chand-written\u201d epigrams; the scripted yet somehow still \u201cunmade\u201d and provisional video installations; instructions sewn onto huge collaged blankets, such as The Last of the Gold (2002), an A to Z of directions for what to do if you are thinking about having an abortion:<\/p>\n
INSIST on Having an Abortion as SOON As possible\u2014IF you have The money (300 pound) you can be treated within 24 hours\u2014IF you go through the NHS You may have to wait up too SIX weeks depending on availability And Then They MAY Say NO\u2026 If you do decide you want to have the baby, don\u2019t listen to anyone, just listen to your heart.<\/p>\n
I came across a second bottleneck in front of the twenty-three-minute video How It Feels (1996), a painfully fraught account of Emin\u2019s experience of an abortion in 1990 (unknowingly she was pregnant with twins, and one of the fetuses was retained in her uterus for more than a week). Emin stands in front of the office where a doctor tried to persuade her that she\u2019d make a good mother, and the clinic where she eventually had the botched procedure, expressing her anger at the men who refused to listen to her and her own terrifyingly mixed feelings in the aftermath. That crisis is everywhere on show in the exhibition\u2014in My Major Retrospective II 1982\u20131992 (2008), a series of 180 tiny photographs stitched onto fabric, representing the work she destroyed following the \u201cemotional suicide\u201d of her abortion; in the mock-up of a performance in Stockholm in 1996, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, in which for three weeks Emin locked herself naked inside a room furnished with only canvases and acrylic paint, in order to overcome five years\u2019 aversion to painting following her abortions (third bottleneck); in the many drawings and paintings of splayed legs, bellies, and dripping blood.<\/p>\n
How It Feels is a portrait of pain and confusion, and it\u2019s no wonder that the UK anti-abortion organization Right to Life quotes passages from it in their propaganda, especially Emin\u2019s admission that she was \u201cwracked with guilt\u201d following the procedure, but not the part where she insists that, even so, she made the right choice. It took me several visits before I could watch the film all the way through, although I\u2019m not in the least bit squeamish. I was puzzled by my reaction, and rather ashamed of it. Perhaps it was too close for comfort. I\u2019m nine months older than Tracey Emin; we were both born in Croydon; we were in the same grade; we might have met, if Emin\u2019s family hadn\u2019t moved to Margate; and we both got pregnant in our mid-twenties when we were unemployed and effectively single. Emin has said that she hoped her film might be \u201cuseful\u201d to others, and perhaps I didn\u2019t want her speaking for me.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy art is a place where people can expose themselves by looking at it, and they can feel their own feelings and their own emotions,\u201d she told the BBC in 2024. Perhaps that is exactly what was happening. I was feeling my own feelings and wanted to hold hers at bay. But I think my discomfort had as much to do with Emin\u2019s refusal, or inability, to overcome her own ambivalence. She thinks with her body and names the abortion as it was, and still is: a catastrophe, a \u201cmistake,\u201d but a necessary one. There is no coming to terms with the experience. Her methods of dealing with her personal history look similar to psychotherapeutic reckoning: memory, naming, truth telling, repetition, narration, explanation. She has even suggested recently that tackling taboo subjects like rape, abortion, and teenage sex abuse in her art is \u201chealthy.\u201d But the works themselves are antitherapeutic. They don\u2019t learn anything, and instead keep us inside the mess of experience.<\/p>\n
The biggest mess is the mess of Emin\u2019s most famous artwork, My Bed, with its stained mattress, soiled sheets, bloody underwear, used condoms, cigarette packets, pregnancy tests, and bottles of vodka. Beds are a staple of Emin\u2019s art. She gives a wonderfully technical answer when asked why there are so many beds in her paintings, explaining that the angled line acts as an anchor to the rest of the image, allowing all sorts of forms to emerge: \u201cI can make anything work from that line in the painting, anything I want\u2026it\u2019s just a device.\u201d The beds in the pictures are always peopled, with female bodies reclining, splayed, or skewered, sometimes dying, sometimes in ecstasy, and sometimes not alone. But like the voice-over section of Dancer, and like the appliqu\u00e9d quilts or the empty tent, there\u2019s no body in My Bed, and it\u2019s all the more haunting for that. It is a portrait of abjection\u2014Emin has said that when she got out of the bed after a period of depression she was disgusted by what she saw\u2014but also of self-protection. The bed had seen her through her breakdown.<\/p>\n
My Bed is disturbing in the same way as Dancer and How It Feels. These are all works that refuse to offer a perspective outside of emotional and bodily confusion. What they ask from the viewer is recognition and, as I found in my aversion to How It Feels, it\u2019s not always easy to give. When critics discuss My Bed aesthetically (comparing it to Robert Rauschenberg\u2019s 1955 bed, for example), it seems less true to the experience of seeing the work than the tabloid outrage that followed its first exhibition. Something revolting was being put on display and exulted in. But seeing the installation in this show nearly thirty years after its first outing, Emin told the BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg that the bed looked \u201ctiny, and sad,\u201d and that she cried on encountering it again. Recalling other settings where the bed gave off an aura of \u201crumpy-pumpy\u201d and \u201cfecundity,\u201d she suggested that having come through an encounter with death, what speaks to her now is the \u201ctime capsule\u201d of her life and, she implies, the forlorn vulnerability of her younger self.<\/p>\n
The tears aren\u2019t only Emin\u2019s. I\u2019ve spoken to several people who came out of the exhibition weeping uncontrollably. It\u2019s as though Emin\u2019s own recent work were teaching the earlier pieces a lesson: you thought there was power, but there was only suffering. Emin\u2019s rebirth into her second life is staged as a movement from shadow into light. Visitors progress through a darkened corridor, which I imagine is intended to echo the birth canal, lined with iPhone photographs charting the wounding and healing of her post-operative body, and the stoma to which she attaches her urostomy bag. Having passed through that corridor several times, I would say that most people couldn\u2019t really bear to look.<\/p>\n
And then the renaissance. You emerge from the corridor into a gallery hung with huge painted canvases: bodies, beds, landscapes, and crosses leaking crimson, against seas of blue, whites, and creams and brooding figures in black. Emin has described herself as a \u201cthin painter,\u201d and the brushstrokes, washes, drips, and overpainting are all on display in these canvases. None of the stages of the artwork is hidden. Emin likens painting to going to visit a fortune teller. She makes no preparatory sketches: \u201cI want a painting to tell me something that I didn\u2019t know before, not something I already know.\u201d She\u2019ll apply paint and then wait for the subject of the painting to reveal itself, turning canvases upside down, painting out figures, and adding patterns, giving herself over to the serendipity of the physical process. \u201cIt\u2019s just about paint,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s just me, moving through the canvas, and moving through the ideas.\u201d There\u2019s a wild energy and pleasure of discovery on display in the best of these paintings, though I don\u2019t find they ask much of the viewer. The meanings of those bodies and the crosses they bear are perhaps overdetermined. I admire them (more than the bronzes of female nudes, some tiny, some oversized, that occupy the same gallery and appear inert in comparison), but I don\u2019t feel the catharsis that, I am sure, went into their creation. To be bothered about this, to complain that the paintings have lost some of the emotional challenge of the earlier installations, would be like asking Emin to carry on being confused and unhappy.<\/p>\n
It is striking that by this point in the exhibition, script has almost disappeared, barring a few neon signs. But the narratives and explanations have not been excised completely; they have simply moved elsewhere, into the many, many interviews that Emin gives to accompany her exhibitions. The interviews now carry the storytelling that so often gives authority to the work. They are part of the work itself, as a throwaway remark by Weller makes clear. After Emin\u2019s mother died in 2016, \u201cshe took a year off,\u201d he explains, \u201cand just did no interviews, and just focused on painting and upscaling the bronzes.\u201d Which is not perhaps how most artists would classify time off.<\/p>\n
\u201cA Second Life\u201d is not a retrospective of the artist\u2019s work, despite the fact that it traces a movement from her earliest to her most recent practice. There is too much that is missing for that. I regret the absence of Emin\u2019s bird drawings in particular, and the tiny life-size (antimonumental) bird sculptures installed on tall poles or on rooftops in various locations worldwide. (Although admittedly the bronze birds need to be encountered outside, alongside real birds.) There\u2019s a tenderness and a fragility to these works that speak quietly, and without sentimentality, of our relationship to nature, echoing the broken lyricism of a poet like John Clare, rather than the authority of the storyteller.<\/p>\n
The Tate show chooses story. It is best understood as a carefully staged journey from trauma to transcendence: the deliberately narrow choice of examples of bodily pain from the early work, the dark blue walls, the low lighting, the many interviews focusing on trauma and rebirth are all part of the experience. It\u2019s a journey that makes explicit at every turn the costs of living inside a female body. A recurring subject in the recent interviews is survival\u2014not only her personal survival from cancer, but the survival of her body of work. As Emin points out, she has been exploring rape, abortion, and the sexual abuse of girls for decades, and for much of that time she was met with condescension and misogyny: Mad Tracey from Margate. But over the course of her career those subjects have only become more relevant and more urgent. The bed has become a platform, and Emin is determined to use her status as the new darling of the establishment to keep on saying what she has always said. She refuses to rest up: \u201cAnybody that thought I was ranting on about abortion, thirty years ago\u2014look what\u2019s happening now.\u201d And in another recent interview: \u201cRight now, somewhere, not very far away, someone is either being beaten, locked in a cupboard, being raped, being abused, being coerced into something they don\u2019t want to do.\u201d We\u2019ve been given a second chance, and we would do well to listen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new exhibition devoted to the work of the British artist Tracey Emin, currently at Tate Modern in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-596358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}