One of these years I will finally make it to the Edinburgh festival and spend a few weeks running around trying to see everything. It's been over a decade since I was last in Scotland, and it's been almost that long since I first became acquainted with Tracey Emin's work when I saw her famously rumpled bed in the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition. While the festival is pretty much wrapped up for this year, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art there in Edinburgh is still displaying Emin's first major retrospective until late fall. Covering her 20 years of artistic practice, the show features the aforementioned My Bed as well as more recent work, all of it characterized by what even by American standards would be considered some major overshares about her life. Jonathan Jones finds the whole thing completely discombobulating, but ultimately comes out in Emin's favor:
It's Not the Way I Want to Die is the title of a rickety wooden ruin of
a seaside rollercoaster, the most poignant recent object here, redolent
of decay and mortality. In the end, the most shocking thing about this
exhibition isn't the abortions, or the rape, or the condoms - it's
Emin's acknowledgment of the passage of time. We first knew her as a
Young British Artist, and she is now the first of that generation to
make the drab dawn of middle age a part of her work. Emin presents
herself as an emotional artist, but her real strength is intellectual:
she confuses art and life in a way that is profound, philosophical and
has a core of greatness.
I have a very strong recollection of a video that was running at the Turner show in which Emin talked about how every aspect of her life is her art, and how she is never not doing art. With her trademark knowing smirk and commitment to brutal honesty she can be an easy target, but Charlotte Higgins says it's that way she tangles up her work and life that makes her so darn interesting:
Emin tends to get belittled, sometimes because her work is uneven - and
sometimes because its material is dismissed as trivial or
self-indulgent (a criticism that often, I believe, conceals a touch of
misogyny). Today I found myself thinking it was high time we took her
seriously.
It's true that Emin's individual pieces often don't do a lot for me, but taken as a whole her work stands as an extraordinary document of one woman's life as an artist in all of its complexity. I'm so curious to see what she does during the next 20 years.
