Tracy Emin

She kind of went off the rails for a year or two and I wasn't happy about that (really drunk, disorderly people frighten me) but she seems to have gotten her shit together now. Whenever I see her these days she is in head to toe Vivienne Westwood gear.

Sorry for swooping down on everyone but I've written fairly extensively on Tracey, collaborated with her, still consider her a friend and have met her mum, dad and twin brother, so I feel compelled to defend her work. Also know quite a few of the people embroidered on that tent, too.

I may be getting myself in conceptual trouble here, but I don't believe that all art is exhibitionist. What about Robert Smithson and Don Judd? What about Christo? I wonder why you felt to use such an overrarching generalisation to legitimize Emin's work.

My views of Tracey Emin are not arrived at primarily through knowing her, although I can't discount that from the equation. I merely mention these things because it would be disingenuous not to. Transparency is good. I found the early work raw (for me, a word with positive associations) and was touched by it, particularily the building-up of a narrative through the use of mementos, some of which are incredibly painful for me to look at, eg. the crumpled pack of cigarettes removed from the pocket of her uncle at the scene of his death, in a crash. I see the noose/condoms piece and think of sex and death, but I'm part of the generation who had to cope with this thing called AIDS from about the first second I ever considered having a sex life, which I know for a fact is something Tracey has done a lot of thinking about (that's what the tent is about, according to one interpretation she gave at the publisher's lunch for our book launch).

I see the cataloguing of things which are 'fleeting' and recontextualised in an exhibit, kept in the permanent collections of museums. The contradiction entices me. I think she is a very powerful female artist in the first ten years of her career; she uses a lot of materials (quilts, felt) that we associate with softness and femininity and makes them hard, or hard to look at. I think she is VERY intelligent and makes some of the more dysfunctional aspects of her nature understandable to the rest of us, and I personally do not ever feel like I am watching a freak show or being wound up through attempts to shock. Much of the time I see also her annoyance with the male gaze and male appraisal, eg. the Margate 'slag' video piece. Then she turns her relentless eye for cataloguing back to herself, and has the different parts of her personality talk to each other and fight over what she should do with her life. What she is showing is all true, which makes her distinct from spin doctors, although she does have many of the same talents for storytelling. I think it is TOO EASY, when an artist uses the visceral, to say that it's all down to shock value. She is one of the least superficial artists I can think of working today.

Gaah! Need my Sudafed and a nap.

I liked that those two chinese ppl had sex on it, too. Art = you can do it too.

Suzy, do you think the "fag packet in a bucket of sand" work we've been reading about lately is any cop? I think it's shit. And if that fag was the very one tweezed out of James Dean's lifeless mouth, it would still be shit. Is art art when the references which make it important are entirely within the psyche of the artist?

Is Tracey Emin an example of artist as art herself?

I'm moved by the documentary side of it and if she shocks me (occasionally) I get off on that - perhaps there IS something to do with male squeamishness at female ick about her art (a la The Sex Revolts) - I happen to get something out of passing that squeam barrier.

I also really love Childish stuff though (music and poetry more than woodcuts) and he's obviously got an informed debunk-oriented take on all that Brit Art nonsense.

Is Nick Momus on the tent?

But I cannot help wondering just how much of the artistic path she treads has been influenced and inspired by her time with Billy Childish.

I know nothing of her actual art beyond vague cynical desciptions and fuzzy pictures, so can't really comment.

No, Nick Currie is *not* on the tent though there was a moment in 1997 before she copped off with Mat Collishaw and was talking about giving up sex for Lent where I'm pretty sure he would have liked to be. We went to see Tracey and Billy read together at a thing in the South London Gallery which was HILARIOUS due to Tracey interrupting Childish reading with questions like, "Billy, is that about the time you gave me gonorrhea?" which made me and N. think but for the grace of a non- existent God...

I felt at times , angry, upset, attracted, sorry for her, pleased for her, wanting to protect and a whole spectrum of emotions for someone whom I previously new nothing about other than the usual judgemental media crap.

The account of her life whilst a young teenager in Margate almost moved me to tears because I have a vivid imagination and I was trying to push out the the thought of my own 15 year old daughter being subject to the same life of abuse at the hands of exploitative older men after a 'bit of young'. Yech!

However things picked up and I can only admire the strength and artistic vision and sheer reach of this slip of a girl.

I wish I still had the video of the late night interview where she upset all the pretentious , brain dead, eye dead, 'intellectuals' by appearing drunk and mouthing off at them in classic 'housing estate' english which, of course, failed to connect with the assembled dinosaurs and made them an even bigger joke than they had failed to realise they were. Tracy in her seemingly incoherent style just simply outclassed the lot of them even when pissed. Great.

If her art is a piss-take then who cares? I believe she deserves her success. She has worked hard and long for it. Even If I didnt wish the success for her as an individual I would still be glad that someone like her from that background could rise to the top and prevail through her own efforts rather be granted her place by the establishment.

I hope she still likes to dance and drink and cause trouble and be outrageous to people who cannot see the world they live in through the smog of all the 'theories' and crap they have learnt about art through reading rather than looking.

Tracy blazes away like a Turner sunset over Margate sea front and they both will stand (one day) as equal pillars of British art.

Tracey's life is and was a contemporary, real, harsh, gritty life, not a Hardyesque life. Her art talks to people now. (Not for 19th century people facing the mechanisation of rural working practice in leafy Dorset but for youngsters facing the cloning of humans very soon now!) Her art and her life (and herself) are not always pretty and not always obvious.

Go to Margate in Kent. Look at an English council house estate, find out what peoples daily lives and concerns and hopes are! Talk to people who have experienced sexual exploitation of the variety Tracey Emin went through. Try and and live that life and then see if it looks anything like a Polanski portrayal of Hardy's 'Tess' or Vermeers scrubbed young women.

Traceys tent, for instance, was not just about naming whom she had had sex with. It was about all she had ever slept with. She even includes her twin brother as they had once shared a womb! She includes the lost babies, the result of teenage abortion and a mis- carriage, and she includes her mother. Its not about bedhopping and titillation its about all those people who were in her life (or who could have been) and the tent was a real tent and was where she spent days considering suicide at a low point of her life.

This is not 'fluff'. This is confession of a very real and searching kind. This is definitely the sort of stuff that a great modern novel could be based on.

Later the same publishers paid her £80,000 to write a novel. She still has not delivered the MS.

Rockist.

To be a little less knee-jerk in my opinion of her work, I'd say that I like art to fill me with a sense of wonder or amazement, or to draw me in and think. When I see her stuff, and I've seen plenty, I just think "hmm, that looks tatty" or just feel dragged down by the mundanity of it.

do you still care about her either way?

The great thing about Emin is her antagonism; she's a charmless, virulent dervish with the mouth of a trucker who recognizes that she who shouts loudest wins. It may not be subtle, but the posh ladies should remember that she has created the kind of show their 60s sisters would have been proud of.

credulous moron-bait.

^real talk

Future tax exile?

Artist Emin may quit UK over tax

If so, I hope she sets up in Villa Nellcote (from the Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street tax exile years)

She's not very good.

― Tom Parkinson, Friday, February 8, 2002 1:00 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well said.

Srsly, anyone who earns enough to put them in this bracket and then has the crassness to complain gets not one iota of sympathy from me.

Particularly when their fortune comes from being being adopted court jester to the biggest publicly-funded racket going.

Emin will be taking Ed Vaizey, the shadow arts minister, around the Frieze art fair in London when it opens next week. While there she will be offering to design and make personalised neon signs for up to 10 buyers each willing to pay £65,000.

Any individual wanting a neon must fill in a form with 15 questions so that it can be customised. Questions will include your favourite colour and poem, and some more personal ones such as whether you believe in God or talk while making love.

Stuff your 50% tax, I’m taking my tent to France

She seems to get her ideas from Momus (e.g. Stars Forever album)

LOL would be interested to know how many flights the British Council have underwritten to send her to group shows and exhibits worldwide since she became a millionaire. Seeing as she is self-employed she has the capacity to write off vast amounts of things that a normal PAYE worker can but dream of: transport, clothes, studio expenses, materials, blah blah blah. Nul points for sympathy (although there must be a hivemind for rich douchebags that you access when your friends are ES magazine party types).

Is this the most up to date Tracy Emin thread? Wondering if there is a good Emin book at all?

(Slightly randomly, bought a greetings card of a drawing of a bird ... without noticing that it was by Emin until I'd got it home).