Women at the Helm features and celebrates the contemporary British artist Tracy Emin. We explore her iconic installation “My Bed” and dive into her “jagged recollections” from her memoir, “Strangeland.”
>Tracy Emin at the Tate Museum
>Read her evocative memoir:Strangeland
>Image Credit: Ben Gurr
Script: Contemporary female artist Tracy Emin employs a wide range of media, drawing, sculpture, video, installation, painting in her autobiographical, described by Tate Museum as “confessional” works of art. She “extends the boundaries of traditional representation.” This episode will look to Emin’s iconic 1998 work, My Bed, her 1997 monoprint, Terribly Wrong and her memoir Strangeland as a springboard to the ways her life is imbued in her work. I love this because I can harness her “words” and not just the perspectives of art history commentators. Though I will evoke aspects of her works and writings that resonate with me personally. I love this new direction of my podcast because artists who also write deepen my engagement with their works and practice. They also inspire my own writings and ongoing passion projects in composing a memoir and crafting art talks.
I did experience My Bed at a museum, but to be honest, I do not remember which museum or exhibition. My Bed is part of the collection at the Tate Museum in the UK (Emin was born and raised in the UK), but I am certain it was not at the Tate. What I do remember is recognizing the work in what I suppose was a traveling exhibition. I recall leaning over the edge of the blue carpet that sticks beneath the box-frame wooden bed, unmade from white (stained) linens and misshapen pillows to take in many objects. They include empty bottles of vodka, condoms, Polaroid selfies, cigarettes, underwear, sauce packets from take-out restaurants, newspapers, and a small stuffed animal toy. To be frank it was disturbing to take in the messiness of Emin’s strewn arrangement of objects. Emin and I are the same age, both born in 1963. But we part in what My Bed would look like if I created it in my thirties, or twenties or ever. I am in awe of the brazenness, or the word is fearlessness in making and then displaying this installation to the public. Before I married, I lived at my parents’ home and slept in a white canopy, four poster twin bed. I did not drink or use drugs or smoke. My sexual history was pillared by my marriage. I do not want to come across judgmental; I am sharing with you my initial reactions; Emin is just so unapologetic. So raw and reflects her mental and I think emotional states. What I admire and wish I were more like Emin; is her disregard with appearances or what is considered “acceptable.” My Bed is a snapshot moment in Emin’s life.
In an interview with Tate Museum, Emin describes how My Bed, the work came to be. She says, “In 1998 I had a complete absolute breakdown and I spent four days in bed. I was asleep and semi-unconscious. When I eventually did get out of bed, had some water, went back and looked at the bedroom and I couldn’t believe what I could see this absolute mess and decay of my life and then I saw the bed out of that context of this tiny bedroom and I saw it in just like a big white space I realized I had to move the bed and everything into a gallery space.” She describes the bed as actively “folding, moving, turning.” It is not a static object. And this I agree—it is absent of a body, yet we see full throttle, Emin’s body, Emin’s state of mind, her emotions. She notes that the objects no longer “relate” to her present life; it is a time capsule.
Her work is relatable because being in a depressive state is an experience many of us have been hurled into. Our bodies writhing in that darkness, moving, folding, turning amongst the linens, atop the bed, what objects would be strewn across the floor or on a nightstand in my bedroom if it truly mirrored that state of being? As I wrote that question, I paused to really think about the collection of objects and the state of the linens on my bed would reflect my moments of despair? The objects would shift over time or decades of my life; if I was in my young twenties, there would be food, indulgences of carbs like plates of pasta, macaroni and cheese, cheesecake, crusty Italian bread; scrawls in my notebook; plain pages, not ruled and always with pencil. Handwritten in cursive, eloping lines and curves of what ails me, a pillow at the top of the bed and one vertically down the center of my bed to cushion the space between my folded legs. A rosary, that was twisted around my fingers in pleas that the Virgin Mary or Jesus her son would alleviate my pain. I read a lot of fashion magazines in my twenties, so definitely Vogue, the issues where supermodel Janice Dickinson (we share dark hair and eyes and full lips) wore haute couture. If only I could be that thin and perfect.
What I love about My Bed is Emin’s decision to turn her depression and languish in her bed into art, an expression of her inner being. Her memoir, Strangeland, published in 2005, seven years after she created My Bed, Emin uses the written word as a form of expression. The by-line of the memoir is “The jagged recollections of a beautiful mind.” Strangeland is composed of short autobiographical vignettes or pieces of her life in three sections: Motherland, Fatherland, Tracyland. There is abuse, neglect, a rape alongside kindness, humor, family relationships. Her use of language is criticized. Reviewer Alev Adil asserts, as an ‘autobiography’ Strangeland fails abysmally, Emin writes, in the conventional sense, very badly. Her grammar and sentence construction are shoddy; she works with a limited palette in terms of vocabulary and technique.” And there is a good argument for Avil’s view. But that is what makes it so gripping, dare I say delicious to read. The “jagged recollections” in her book are like what is strewn across the blue rug in My Bed. A chaos of objects, each one with a singular story that makes up the landscape of the artist’s mind and body.
My favorite recollection is from the section Motherland. Every recollection or vignette is titled like chapters in a book. Pages 31-32 in my edition; “Like a Fucking Dog: When the Truth is Hard to Bear.”
In her memoir, I paid most attention to the section Tracyland, vignettes of Emin as an adult, as an art student and artist. Juxtaposed to one life experience is a monoprint, also in the collection of the Tate Museum, “Terribly Wrong.” First, Let us dive into the work. A monoprint is a form of printmaking where the image can only be made once, unlike most printmaking which allows for multiple originals. Emin creates her monoprint by drawing on a piece of glass and pressing it against paper to give it a mirrored image. Composition, against cream-colored paper is text and a figure expressively rendered in black. In reverse, in tight cursive writing are the words “Terribly Wrong.” Beneath that phrase is printed, in larger letters, “Somethings Wrong,” a couple of the letters are in reverse and note that something is plural, somethings. Written is Somethings, below that is Wrong and next to that word is a figure, a female figure on her back, She is foreshortened, we do not see her head, her legs are splayed open, right leg is bent, knee points to the ceiling, and the other leg extends in a lying position. Our attention is drawn to the opening between her legs, her vagina, an “indistinct liquid mass is expelled.” The lines that make up the body and the words are delicate and curvilinear though described as “scratchy.” Terribly Wrong is based on an abortion the artist had during a ‘week from hell’ in 1994. During this week Emin had major dentistry, split up with her boyfriend and had an abortion. Let’s read an excerpt from her memoir about this experiences. Text juxtaposed to the art work. . Pages 153-159; I will read a few passages of the vignette “Abortion How it Feels.”
The pain of losing her boyfriend, the abortion, through these events, the artist Emin “places herself centre-stage in her work, telling intimate stories about her life. She says, “It’s like a cleansing of my soul. It’s not just getting rid of baggage or carnage. It’s not that simple. Something actually happens within me. Journalist Rachel Campbell-Johnson poignantly observes, Terribly wrong’s backwards letters draw attention to the idea of Emin drawing herself in a mirror, and through monoprinting, being able to see herself as others see her. I see her through a lens of compassion within a sea of chaos and sadness.
What is relevant is the way these events become more than part of her history, more than an inspiration for her work, it becomes part of her body, her personal truth, as evident in the lines from the same vignette: Postscript: Five Years Later/It Still Hurts/But I know I did/The right thing.
Thank you for listening. The resources used for this podcast are in the show notes. I will see you next month for another episode. I plan to celebrate Patti Smith, highlighting her photographs from her exhibition Camera Solo in 2011 at the Wadsworth Atheneum. I had a wonderful encounter with Smith. She signed her memoir Just Kids. She is so powerful and deep…I am such a fan of her work. Thank you!