Off to the Tate for the first morning proper of A Second Life, could have opted for the distractions of a thousand conversations on the opening night or indeed the relative peace and quiet of the press preview, curiosity demanded a first morning viewing though, partly to get a sense of the vibe, to see how busy it was, to get a feel for what the public are thinking. Would there be a crowd? Would it just be a trickle like most art shows are on a dull Friday morning in February? There’s a queue at 10.30am, the Tate is busy, you might (almost) say buzzing and not just for the first day proper of the big Tracey Emin retrospective, is it a retrospective? The story so far? Surely there’s a lot more to come? Surely her best work is the work she’s producing at the moment? The Tate in general is busy, the Tracey Emin show is very very busy, I like that it is…
“Spanning 40 years of Tracey’s career, the show brings together defining works and pieces never exhibited before, highlighting her lifelong use of the female body to explore passion, pain and healing across painting, video, textiles, neons, writing, sculpture and installation” –
Really can’t take her being a Dame seriously, not only because the whole outdated misguided concept of knights and dames really should have been thrown in the bin years ago, but more because as much as I know she is now, I still can’t really think of Mad Tracey From Margate as part of the establishment (did I see her described as a national treasure somewhere earlier today?), Dame Tracey Emin; “one of the most important contemporary artists of her generation” and we’re queueing to get in, pensioners, school girls, middle ages paint-spattered men, academic types in rebellious socks and there’s one of her big quilts or banners or whatever they are waiting as we do walk in, one from the early days almost the start of things in terms of a wider awareness of Tracey as an artist, there it is at the start of the show and the start of the 90’s or was it the 80s? The one with “Mad Tracey From Margate” in the middle of it, there to remind of where it all started (well at least in terms of us knowing about her)
Her art has always been raw, brave, visceral and more importantly, so so emotionally open, bleedingly honest, red. I don’t hide the fact that I’m an admirer, especially of where it has all gone and especially in the way Tracey Emin paints now – I’ve said it many times on these pages, I get stick for it, hate mail (mostly from hate-full males, mostly from bitter, dare we say jealous, male artists who tell me she can’t paint, that she’s nothing but an attention seeker like no other artist ever was – hey, here’s my painting on a wall, pay attention! We’re all are seeking attention, us artists, or we’d never exhibit ourselves).
I like Tracey Emin, I care about her, at times I’ve worried about her. I particularly admire her recent paintings, her way of drawing with a paint brush, her bold moves, her lines, the energy in her line, her colour, those reds, blues, pale pinks and urgent blacks. Her lines excite me, the marks she makes (the marks she removes), those decisions and the way it has all grown and grown. I admire the way her current body of work, her most recent big canvas pieces, are by far her best things or indeed anybody’s best things, she has become one of my favourite painters, not just an artist, one of my favourite painters (when others of her YBA generation have pretty much gone down the pan and long since lost the plot). I love standing in front of one of Tracey Emin’s more recent paintings and especially being in a room of her paintings (however emotionally difficult that and they might sometimes be).
So you have her whole art life here, well besides all the early work she destroyed or that got destroyed in that warehouse fire, you have all the excess of the last century, the excesses that in some ways she did symbolise, all the sex, drugs and red wine, all the successes, the sometimes obscene excesses, that late night debate on Channel 4, the nauseating Cool Britannia times. A Second Life and being here with all these people of the first day really isn’t about all that stuff from the last century though, she’s way beyond that now, this is about her as an ongoing artist, as a person she has become, as both, they both go hand in hand, you can’t see the join where one starts and the other finishes, this about her life, all of it, everything laid bare, all there for us to come to terms with as much as she has had to, it surely is impossible not to care? Impossible to react with your own emotion, to care about the person who laid all this out as her art in such an open honest flawed sometimes very fragile way.
I like the way this all works, the exhibition I mean. This show is not the great big white walled bright light it could have been, it feels intimate, personal, just you and the art on the dark walls, just you and her and her life, there on the dark colour of the walls, in the low light. However busy it might be in here, it feels right, it feels personal, whoever has put all this together, a team I guess, deserves a mention, it could so easily have been a rather cold, rather stiff, loud, clinical white-walled gathering of her work, but this is far more intimate, far more revealing, this is dark and right there. Actually it feels like the old Tate rather than the Tate Modern, it feels right.
Her films are here, I didn’t watch them again, I’ve stood in galleries and done so before, they’re achingly honest, intimate, at time brutal and yes, disturbing. her films are painful to watch, and somehow she’s turn it all into something, well into something else, all her shared pain, all her unshared pain, turn into something, well not joyful, but some kind of very very honest raw positive. Everything turned into that positive force for good that art is.
That film made about her almost unbelievable abortion experience in the early 1990s that really really makes you want cry for her, and yes it still casts a huge shadow in here as it did last time at the White Cube, even more so with all her history on show. If you haven’t watched it then you probably should and even if I did choose not to watch it all again today (I did sit through it a number of times a couple of years ago in the White Cube), it will give you lots in terms of what you’re looking at on the walls, in those photos, the row of Polaroids. And there in another room, quietly, without noise, a small shelf, her hospital wristband, an unassuming bottle of pain-killing medicine and a row of children’s shoes. Sometimes It really can feel like too much, not because she shouldn’t share it but because she has, because she’s let all us strangers in, she opened up, she’s made it all into art in such a real life way. Something beyond paintings in a gallery, or sculptures in a room, all this channelling of her life into her art like no one else does.
But then there are the paintings, just as paintings, without anything else, without all the other information, just the drawing and painting and anyone who tells you she can’t paint really hasn’t got a clue. Those recent paintings, her work of the last ten or so years that we’ve been seeing in her big White Cube shows and that we get to see in here in a darker more intimate way, those paintings, I could go on and on about those paintings. I don’t need to go on about her paintings though do I? Surely you can see it. Tracey Emin doesn’t really need her words, although she probably does, the lines of her paintings say it all
– and then there’s that row of Polaroids from the last century, the party shots, oh and the bed, nearly forgot the bed, I wonder if she was tempted to put another one in another room, a nice neat one with her cats curled up? Oh and then there’s the giant bronze outside in the mud on the grass, by the river, oh I could go on. And no, I won’t be cynical about the exit via the gift shop, or the tea trays, the cats mugs, I like that she enjoys her cats so much, cats are fine things, I like people who like cats.
Oh and the reconstruction of her studio, which, like the bed, is just another bit of it now, just another moment shared, that bed doesn’t feel half as important now as it once did, certainly not the centre of attention, just another piece these days, it really is the paintings that are the pinnacle, those lines painted and then painted again (and then painted yet again), and the things she paints, the things she is willing to paint, to share. Oh look, I’m going on, I said I was an admirer – not the neons though, although I guess they make sense as part of it, I really am not an admirer of those neon pieces that run through this show (or the one over the road that I can almost see from my own studio right now), I do like the one in St Pancras Station, that one makes me smile every time I see it, I made a point of going that way home just to see it. I don’t really like all the her neon in the show if I’m really honest I kind of blocked it out. And really the bronzes do very little, it is all about the paintings, and the photos that go alongside, it is mostly about the paintings.
Oh look, there’s (rightly) going to be millions of pieces written about this show, you really don’t need my opinions, it is a great show, an important show (and I like that I passed a big Rose Wylie poster in a tube station on the way), I like that there is queue first thing on the first day, that there’s real buzz, that there’s people clearly moved by it all, I like that Tracey got to do this, that her art has become significant enough for this show to to happen in such a major way, I like that her current work matters enough for this to happen (especially when you think of the current disappointments of others from those days, of that car crash last year over on Newport Street that only briefly comes to mind as an afterthought). I kind of like that I’m going to get abuse for this piece, that she still annoys. I hope this retrospective exhibition isn’t too much of a full stop, that she doesn’t feel her work is done, but hey, if it was to be then good on her, good on Mad Tracey From Margate! And good on the crowd that turned up on the first day.
Don’t go to this show looking for something beautiful (although some of it really is in a way), don’t go to this show for the enjoyment although there is much to enjoy, especially in the line lines of those paintings, especially in the way she paints. Do go to the show though, go for the full frontal (sometimes flawed) honestly, the brutality, the grief, the sadness, the feelings that you probably will share, that even the most cynical of us surely must share, or maybe just go to celebrate a great painter… (sw)
Trqacey Emin’s A Second Life is on at Tate Modern, London until August 31st.
Previously on these pages…
As always, do click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show and get just a hint of it all…
THE ORGAN 