If you’re someone who isn’t properly thinking about art for the first time, you know you could position Tracey Emin somewhere between the conceptual spirit of Joseph Beuys and the aggressiveness of Florentina Holzinger. Between the rise of Damien Hirst and the colourful impact of Andy Warhol. That could work, yeah. But looking at Emin’s largest ever survey exhibition at Tate Modern, it becomes quite obvious that she is an artist who shouldn’t be compared.
Obviously, artists are compared all the time. But let’s try to explain her in a singular, standalone way: Emin’s work has been, since her early beginnings in the ’80s, unapologetically honest in a very expressionist way without being abstract, if you know what we mean. Her work is autobiographical, investigating themes such as trauma and personal growth, sickness, violence, being a woman in the society of the 20th and 21st centuries and how to allow yourself to be reborn, in spite of as well as in collaboration with your inner demons.
That’s probably also the reason why the exhibition at Tate Modern is titled Tracey Emin: A Second Life. Conceived in close collaboration with the Margate-based artist herself, the show celebrates her work from the past 40 years, but also the fact that Emin survived a long struggle with cancer. That she came this far feels like a rebirth in its own right, allowing Emin as well as all of us an extensive, proper reflection on all the things she’s given the art world.
Alongside paintings from the first solo show she ever hosted in 1982, the exhibition includes photographs of Emin’s works at art school. Photographs, because she destroyed all of them following a difficult period of her life. At the same time, the video work Why I Never Became a Dancer tells stories from traumatic events she experienced in her teenage years. I Could Have Loved My Innocence from 2007 on the other hand addresses a sexual assault. In How It Feels from 1996, Emin addresses an abortion that went wrong; a challenging personal experience through which she investigates institutional failure, physical and psychological conflicts after refusing motherhood, as well as the societal misogyny that comes with it.
If you haven’t known Tracey Emin before (which we doubt), now should be the first moment in which you can grab her artistic spirit a bit. A thought that could wander through your mind while strolling around Tate Modern: so many great artists of the past only rose to fame after their death. Think of Johannes Vermeer, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin. But Emin is very much alive, in a way staring death and ending over and over again right into the eye. Maybe that’s another reason why her work feels so powerful compared to others. Ah, now we compared her again. But sometimes context is important to let thoughts develop.
To continue with the exhibition: at the heart of everything sit two of her most iconic installations. Firstly, to be chronological, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made from 1996. Here, she reconstructed a gallery in Stockholm, in which she locked herself in for three weeks. The goal: reconciling her relationship with painting, which she had abandoned six years prior after experiencing the abortion.
The second very worth-mentioning installation is My Bed from 1998, a piece everyone should learn about in school and that almost everyone should have seen already, actually: a dishevelled bed with crumpled blankets and sheets, empty vodka bottles on the side. Empty cigarette boxes, condoms, bloody underwear, a stuffed animal, all lying on the floor as if kept and left there for days. Well, it doesn’t just look like it, it actually is like that. My Bed was created after Emin experienced a phase in her life in which she remained in bed for four days, not eating or drinking, except for alcohol.
Back then, even though it gained a lot of media attention from the beginning, critics were unimpressed, claiming it was something anyone could have done. The next logical question would have to be: what did they have to say about Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917? Just saying, even though Emin’s legacy doesn’t need defending anymore.
These two installations are placed in the geographical centre of the exhibition, kind of creating a border, a portal that moves the visitor from Emin’s first life to her second. The second life describes a reality post illness and surgery, exploring new dimensions while heartbreak and pain are still present. Part of this section are expansive paintings with a spiritual character, more abstract, illustrating a life that is being lived to the fullest.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life at Tate Modern, on view until August 31 by the way, proves that Emin has a definite, resolute determination to live in the present. To continuously grow and challenge yourself, and not to allow yourself to be crushed in a world that is brutal and harsh. Or wait, let’s rephrase that: allow yourself to be crushed but force yourself to get up again. Literally. So, whoever is in London right now should definitely take the chance to see an incomparable artist.