>> Tracey Emin slept her way to the top – but not like that. Before her unmade bed became the talk of Great Britain, the unruly YBA perfected the art of self-disclosure by pitching a tent in the South London Gallery, inviting viewers to venture into her intimate history and dream of relationships unbound by capital.
Spike Art Magazine Issue 69
pdf
“Star Trek is a world where love exists but no sex”, Tracey Emin observed in 2007. This would have been just after the Cinderella of contemporary art was selected to represent the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In her weekly column for The Independent, which ran from 2005–09, Emin points out the obvious parallels between the cult phenomenon, Star Trek, and the cult of contempo- rary art that has both celebrated and denigrated the fifty-eight-year-old Young British Artist for a quarter of a century. Like The Enterprise, the art world is a galaxy populated with lifelong relation- ships as professional as they are platonic. But come on: are you really not going to sleep with anyone?
In 1995, Emin boldly went where no woman had gone before when she debuted Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 at South London Gallery, for a group show titled "Minky Manky". The dome camping tent, the interior of which Emin hand appliqued the names of everyone she’d ever volun- teered her consciousness to, quickly became an icon of Young British Art. “It took me six months to make”, she recalls, after learning that the work was destroyed, ten years later, when Charles Saatchi’s art storage warehouse caught fire.
True to her word in recollecting everyone she’d ever shared a bed with, Emin also counted two unborn children amongst the peers of the campground, alongside her colleagues, her childhood best friends, and a bunch of artists who don’t even show up in Google search results but were, back then, in the scene – with Stuckist Billy Childish dead centre. Closer attention reveals the name of her grandmother, her mother; no doubt, also, her abusers.
In a 2006 interview, Julian Schnabel will commend Emin for how open and willing she is to share from the grotto of her personal life. For a working-class woman who, throughout the 1990s, was known to the majority of the public as the wanton contemporary artist who’d appeared drunk on television more than once, Emin’s response to Schnabel is nothing short of Foucauldian: “People say my work is confessional.” This is delivered with out a trace of irony.
On the “Minky Manky” floor, the entrance to Emin’s tent was drawn open, and flashlights were offered, inviting guests to lay back on the patchwork tarpaulin, open their eyes and think of England. The nepotism (“She’s slept with everyone – even the curator!”) was more scandalous than the implication of sex.
Six months after The Tent appeared, and on the opposite pole of 90s London, Princess Diana of Wales surrendered herself to the BBC on the current affairs television programme Panorama. One could describe the six months Emin spent in her living room in Waterloo sewing the 102 names into a consumer grade camping tent in the same terms as one could the fifty-four minutes HRH sat in a padded living room facing the young journalist Martin Bashir to tell “her side of the story” about separating from Prince Charles. Today, the “scoop of the decade” continues to generate currency; a number of documentaries on the documentary circulated British media channels on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the event.
“Well, it took a long time to understand why people were so interested in me, but I assumed it was because my husband had done a lot of wonderful work leading up to our marriage and our relationship”, the Princess recited carefully. “But then I – during the years, you see yourself as a good product that sits on a shelf and sells well, and people make a lot of money out of you.”
Tracey Emin and Princess Di cross paths on the spectral plane of paparazzi and God-given right; perhaps their images pass through one another like ghosts in a tabloid-infused dream. They occur on an axis of late capitalist subjectivity which could constitute the Second British Invasion: the 90s were the era of not only the YBA, but Thom Yorke, Vivienne Westwood, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and, of course, the monarchy. These cultural phenomena were undeniably framed by the drama of confessional media: stateside, Real World held a sovereign timeslot on MTV; meanwhile, Hole’s seminal album, Live Through This, had already been ranked the #1 record of 1994. One didn’t need to look far to see the cultural logic of lived authenticity on full display.
Emin was one of the first women to become a professor at the Royal Academy of Art since the institution was founded in the eighteenth century. She has been awarded at least two honorary doctor- ates, has dined with the Queen of England, and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2013. Unlike Diana, she is allowed to get away with bad behaviour; like Diana, she has also been accused of “not having an intellectual bone in her body”. Both women were and are luxury goods. It’s a status that confuses critics who would make the claim that Emin’s work is her life, and who understand Emin’s autobiographical practice as inextricable from her, her body, the totality of herself.
The patchworked letters on the tarpaulin floor of the tent read like an epigraph: “With myself, always myself, never forgetting”. But it matters that the tent was empty, that its formal integrity interrogates the vacant space between clothing and architecture, and most of all, that its interior was reserved not for the body of the artist but for the gaze of an outside that had penetrated Emin since before she could bleed.
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 was art history’s ultimate wall text. How much does it really matter, art historically, or even ontologically, that the tent was destroyed? Do the men of power inside still afford Emin her visibility? Or have these individuals slipped away into abstraction, into the what-could-have-been of the aborted foetus, into surplus value? In The Outside Can’t Go Outside, Merlin Carpenter unpacks the discourse on art’s potential to extract value from social relations. This, Carpenter explains, often leads to rushed conclusions about what constitutes artistic labour and how the process of cultural value is understood as productive.
The celebrity afforded to the British elite on the part of UK’s privately funded cultural institutions begs the question of “intrinsic value” and invokes speculation regarding the nature of representation itself. Carpenter asks what constitutes an artwork’s worth: “The guarantee of the biography of the artist? The power of the gallery? Price fixing or oligarchy? Energy stolen from the bohemians who decorate the room? Or something intrinsic to a work which evidently could be anything?”
Emin has never spoken about the “intellectual” labour embedded in any of her works. Instead, she talks about survival. Tracey Emin was born two hours outside London on Margate Sands, the same dreary locale described in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:
“I can connect / Nothing with nothing. / The broken fingernails of dirty hands. / My people humble people who expect / Nothing”.
The blue igloo tent, she says, reminded her of the resort town she grew up in, a town she affectionately refers to as “The Last Resort”; a town she barely made it out of alive and that did not mourn her when she finally did. Her first experience of blocked ascension was at the age of twelve: dropped from her French class, she remembers sobbing in her mother’s bedroom over a border she’d never be able to cross despite the fact that it was only twenty-two miles away.
“It’s not like I could just go and get some French lessons, or even go and buy learn-to-speak French cassettes. That was my chance gone”, she writes, looking back on the experience in her column.
By the age of thirteen, she’d reinvented her education entirely with something she called “The Springboard Effect”. It involved a totally different definition of sleeping, or at least a different definition than the Tent: “When I say sleeping, I mean sex”, Emin confesses to her readers. “Full-blown penetrative sex. I felt that every time I slept with someone new, I was somehow sent to another place.” By the time she left town, she’d “experienced the journey of passing through somebody else”. After passing through half of Margate, she got started on London.
Emin talks about her Tent as an act of revenge. When Carl Freedman, the curator of “Minky Manky”, told Emin that she couldn’t be in the exhibition unless she showed up with something of epic proportion, it wasn’t because he didn’t, necessarily, respect her as an artist. It was because Freedman was sleeping with her. “Carl said to me that I should make some big work as he thought the small-scale stuff I was doingat the time wouldn’t stand up well. I was furious. Making that work was my way at getting back at him.” Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 can be interpreted (perhaps in the way “An Interview with HRH” actually functioned) as a vengeful gesture, but not as productive labour. Carpenter writes that, like the Princess of Wales, the contempo- rary artist is a stand-in for capital. She represents it. She is neither a wage labourer nor an entrepreneur: she risks herself. “Capitalism can be described as a limit”, Carpenter explains, “only productive labour operating in a violently circumscribed systemic totality is able to increase value. This law of value flattens the nature of reality.”
What appears as cultural production, social capi- tal, immaterial labour, emotional labour, whatever – is, in fact, a form of control. Is Emin’s tent a model of the art world? Or an allegory for the Mod- ern Woman, exemplified by Di – the woman trying to escape tradition, only to find herself subject to the trappings of history? The tent appears as a baby satellite, resisting an outside that feels as dangerous and incendiary as an inside joke.
In her Independent column, it’s evident that the only thing Emin likes more than Star Trek is sleeping. Elsewhere beyond the Tent, she frequently talks about sleeping: sleeping with, but also sleeping in, sleeping to ... “The only place I seem to find happiness is when I’m asleep. And the first moment I wake up and just for a second I for- get where I am. Just existing, being, without the weight of the Self.” When Tracey sleeps, it’s not unproductive, nor is it reproductive. It’s non- productive. Carpenter would call this the opposite of value, or what William Blake designated as “trance”. Trance, Tracey: inside her tent is “the location of revolutionary desire. There is no out- side of value, only a virtual trance-like status.”
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 is an invocation of sleep and thus, surrender. It has nothing to do with those inside, the insiders: “Not once in that tent did it say the names of anybody I had ever had sex with”, Emin reconfirmed in 2008, “There was no differentiation, because the work was about intimacy.” Is this gesture of surrender– succumbing to sleep, drifting off – a path towards resistance, refusal?
Carpenter: “To prevent this outside becoming just a decorative capitalist fantasy like a video game – and thus an assignable space– one has to refuse its status as reality rather than reinforcing it. This is not the trance of Surrealism or even psychoanalysis, where what is imaginary is considered equally real; but one simultaneously more full and empty.”
Perhaps sleep, for Tracey, is an inside job, and one she wouldn’t do again, not even for a million quid. After the warehouse fire, Charles Saatchi begged her to remake the tent. She couldn’t, she explained. Despite the jokes that inevitably arose (“She’ll have to get a bigger tent”), Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 wasn’t an object. It was an event.
In 2008, Tracey Emin was in Uganda during a moment in which much of the country was edging into civil war. She chose to remain there to complete the charity mission she was involved in, the creation of a library for a local high school. “I often feel dissatisfied or dislocated in my life, like I am not complete”, she wrote from room 302 at the Serena Hotel in Kampala. “I tire of seeing the spoils of my hard work constantly pouring into a vat of myself.” At which point, her driver urged her to go outside. She didn’t want to go anywhere tourists go, and much of the city was unsafe. But she went anyway.
In her column, she describes the globalisation, the billboards that would give Saatchi & Saatchi a run for their money, the stacks of charcoal that resembled installation art. Then she went even further outside: “There were lots of people with sores and festering limbs, amputees with swollen, infected flesh that looked like some- thing out of the Great Plague. And everybody, just about everybody, had bright red eyes. All of this took place under an umbrella of semi-darkness. I didn’t want to be a tourist and I wanted to see something I had never seen before. What I saw was my ignorance and my naiveté. These people weren’t the poor people, these were the ones making a living, this was commerce.”