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Tracey Emin: Those Who Suffer Love

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Tracey Emin's really done it this time

 

Those who suffer love, the exhibition’s title work

New feminism: Power Line

Twin Brain, one of the depictions sewn onto reclaimed bedspreads

Power to shock: Totally Engaged

I have always loved Tracey Emin’s bed (without ever dreaming of sharing it). My Bed was part of her room at the 1999 Turner Prize show, the year she was shortlisted but didn’t win. I liked its dirty sheets, overflowing ashtrays, used condoms and empty bottles.

Dissenters told me this was the work of a lazy artist with a hangover who couldn’t get up in the morning. But it had an artistic logic. The Bed was like one of those photos of a junkie’s messy bedroom by a documentary photographer, someone like Nan Goldin. It had a political power, too. It was a taboo-busting feminist sculpture that turned the image of a woman-as-harlot into harlot-as-heroine, and it seemed, rather handily, to suggest a future with a lot more opportunities for men, too. It wasn’t what men expected liberated women to be, but nor was it what orthodox feminists wanted women to be either.

Emin’s new show at White Cube’s gallery in St James’s is dedicated to her drawings, which take the form of monoprints, embroidered cloth and handwritten neons. Here is another of these landmark works that redefine female identity, works that pepper her career. You’re going to think I am a voyeuristic male art critic to say it; you might even think that I am someone who searches for their sexual kicks in art galleries.

But after this show, no museum exhibition about feminist art, art about the body or sexual identity in art will be complete without this work. It’s a stop-frame animation, made from Emin’s typical, spindly, blotchy ink monoprint drawings.

In it, a female figure — of which you don’t see the head and which, though it bears resemblance, Tracey denies is her — masturbates energetically.

It’s a shocking symbol of female sexual desire, and totally of its time: an emblem of a new kind of feminism emerging from the trendy academic discipline of gender studies, in which pornography, sexual violence and voyeurism are not necessarily sexist, male and exploitative.

Those new ideas are typified by an American PhD student I met last week who, as part of her gender studies course, made a lesbian porn movie as a class project (true story). Emin’s animation is part of the radically changing way our society perceives sexuality.

But she is nothing if not contradictory. On the wall opposite the video is one of her neons, green this time, with one of her irritatingly grandiose romantic statements — the title of the exhibition — Those Who Suffer Love. Art critics will struggle to find something interesting in such banality, while psychoanalysts may ponder the juxtaposition of a video of auto-eroticism opposite a sign about intimacy between two people.

Born in 1963, Emin has become Britain’s second best-known contemporary artist, after Damien Hirst. Although she didn’t go to Goldsmiths — she studied at Maidstone and the Royal College of Art — she became part of the mostly Goldsmiths Young British Artist movement in the Nineties.

She made her name quickly with banners with English flags and petulant statements sewn on them. The thoughts on them looked trivial at first, but Emin captured the lingo of everyday Estate English, the retorts of a rebellious teenage girl or of lovers having a row with great precision: “No f**king way, I said, no”, “At the age of 13, why should I trust anyone”, “No, you listen”. Her subjects, repeated too often for many, were her troubled childhood, absent father, a teenage rape, abortion and promiscuity.

There was a shop in the East End that she ran with fellow artist Sarah Lucas; her tent, titled Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1963–1995), shown in 1997 at the Sensation show; and then the Bed in 1998. These were all good conceptual works, which put the boot into the dry analytical feminism of other female artists, who arranged their baby’s nappies in grids or appropriated make-up adverts. Tracey certainly sewed a lot of dumb, self-indulgent statements onto her hangings but she had a great ear for speech, she was describing something bigger than herself, a whole society, and the way she combined the procession banners of mining towns with punk graphics and sewing classes was historically adept. The result was a quilted Ken Loach.

By the end of the Nineties, Emin was a celebrity artist. That was Phase One of her career. Phase Two has been a lot less appealing. I don’t much like the “ambassador for art” persona she has taken on, like the Queen Mum of contemporary art, always good for a platitude about what a good thing art is.

She gave me one last year at Frieze, amid the first shock of the banking crash, opining, on the one hand, that the value of art had not been absurdly inflated, and on the other that the recession would be good for it.

Her art, meanwhile, was going round in circles. Every drawing seemed to show her with legs spread wide. She was cashing in on the art boom, churning out endless neon signs with Valentine’s Day-style messages about love on them — the worst I spotted at Art Basel last year, a red neon heart with the message “I love you” scrawled inside.

The new animation is not Tracey’s first film by a long stretch. Previous videos include Sometimes the Dress Is Worth More Than the Money (2000-2001), in which she wanders across an open landscape in a wedding dress covered in bank notes. The animation in this exhibition is the first I’ve managed to watch for any length of time. Curators and fans have always pointed to her emotional and sexual honesty as the defining virtues of her work — but what’s the value of honesty if the thoughts expressed are banal drivel?

But all that may have been Phase Two, and we could now be in Phase Three. Emin’s drawing show has been two years in the making, includes work from 1991 to the present day, and demonstrates the benefit of long preparation. It has to be said, however, her sketches are not everyone’s cup of tea. Some people find her swiftly executed scrappy doodles so bad that she might as well write a suicide note as dedicate a whole show to this activity. But I think this is a serious exhibition that shows, perhaps for the first time, what a serious artist Tracey Emin can be.

Downstairs, the gallery is free of the glitz, pomp and bloat that usually characterise White Cube shows. No diamonds or marble here! In the larger work on show, three more-or-less bedspread-sized hangings, Emin has reclaimed worn old blankets, patched over their holes with other bits of cloth, and sewn the scraggly outlines of figures on top. In one, Twin Brain (2009), a woman stands nervous and naked. From her head protrudes one of Emin’s indecipherable squiggles. It may be a symbol of a line of thought or an umbilical cord. No matter, it’s the fragility and tentativeness of the scrawl that counts. It’s a delicate line that doesn’t know where it’s going or what it means — an evocation of the artist’s uncertainty.

On another wall there are grids of pages from Emin’s Monoprint Diaries from 1991, scrawled notes and squiggles on lined paper, made as unique prints, when the artist was dealing with the aftermath of one of her abortions. Some of the writing is back to front, a consequence of it being written normally and the print showing the reverse. At other times you can read it right to left, which means Emin has had to write it backwards. That’s neat: the work is either challenging for her or for the viewer.

If you want to find out what she’s really thinking, you should bring a small hand-held mirror to this exhibition. At times Emin says the crushingly obvious, at others you have to work hard to find out what she means. In the middle of the room, made from worn pieces of wood, is a spindly sculpture of a tidemark, one of those poles surmounted by a lantern-like lattice that stand in the bay at Margate and indicate the height of the water. It’s a clever symbol of loneliness plucked from her home town that maps on to the loneliness she so often refers to in her work.

In this show, there is the sense that Emin is becoming an important artist. She is, the exhibition demonstrates, a great draughtswoman. Maybe not by the classic standard, even if the jerky economy of her lines have a superficial similarity to Egon Schiele, but Emin knows how to use drawing to reveal psychology. The line shows agitation and torment. The process is interesting: in her technique of monoprint, the artist inks up a sheet of glass, places a piece of paper against it, then draws on the other side of the glass with a implement. Where pressure is applied to the glass, the ink is pushed on to the paper. It means that the artist never knows exactly how the image will turn out — and it produces those pleasing characteristic smudges — so the process is itself uncertain, involving the Surrealist automatic-writers’ element of chance.

There is a remarkable unity between the different media that Emin works in, apparent here for the first time. Her quick drawing style matches her awkward irregular handwriting, which is reproduced in the neon signs and embroidered texts. The thin sculpture fits in too, a kind of wooden scrawl whose recycled material connects to the old blankets on the wall. Then there is the synchronicity between style, materials and themes — always a sign that an artist has something to say. This is work about the contradictions of intimacy and loneliness, vulnerability and passion, an autobiographical scrapbook of fragments which turns the viewer into a detective, psychoanalyst and anthropologist, trying to piece together motives and meanings.

I’m sure we all wish Tracey wouldn’t bang on about her abortions so much. We might long to see more of the clever, less obviously autobiographical works, such as the touching cast replicas of baby clothes, Baby Things (2008), that she distributed around town at the Folkestone Triennial last year. We might like the neons to be as interesting to read as they are exciting to look at, instead of the one downstairs at White Cube that reads like a bad teenage poem: “You make me feel like nothing/a speck in the midnight sky/A million miles away/A slowly dying star/Your star.” The suggestion might be that post-coital conversations with the artist could have a high cringe factor. But as an artist, Tracey Emin is a lot like my little sister: when she’s bad, she’s very, very bad, but when she’s good, she’s brilliant.

Tracey Emin: Those Who Suffer Love opens tomorrow at White Cube,
25-26 Mason’s Yard (Off Duke Street), SW1 (020 7930 5373, www.whitecube.com). Open 10am-6pm, Tues-Sat. Until 4 July.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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