The artist's first major retrospective has been drawing record crowds at Scotland's National Gallery of Modern Art since opening this August in conjunction with the Edinburgh Festival. Highly polarising both as artist and personality, the dynamic Emin never fails to command attention; and the riveting works of "20 Years" similarly transfix the viewer.
Confessional Art
The show comprises a collection of works including, inescapably, My Bed (1998), whose entry for the 1999 Turner prize garnered a firestorm of publicity for the prestigious competition as well as the artist. The multi-media installation recreates Emin's bed complete with stained sheets and various detritus by turns sordid and touching - the product, according to the artist, of a period of profound depression from which Emin emerged to see her environs as ultimately sustaining.
"Famously, Tracey Emin's art is all about Tracey Emin," reads the Gallery guide, forthrightly addressing the crux of much criticism of the artist - her perceived over-reliance on autobiography. The confessional nature of her art, so striking in My Bed, is equally apparent in such works as Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), an affecting video account of triumphal escape from her seaside hometown of Margate; and Hotel International (1993), an appliquéd blanket originally conceived as a curriculum vitae for an early gallery showing.
Young British Artists (YBA) Movement
One gaping absence from this prodigious expressionist oeuvre is the seminal Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995), the appliquéd tent made internationally famous in the 1997 exhibit Sensation, the defining show of the Britart or Young British Artists (YBA) movement. The piece was lamentably destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire in 2004, along with other works by YBA luminaries including Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili and the Chapman Brothers.
Certain reaction to the Momart fire reflected a sometimes bewildered, sometimes cynical suspicion that modish YBA pieces did not constitute art (in contradistinction to the traditional paint and sculpture media), and pieces like Emin's tent could be recreated. The spuriousness of the suggestion goes to the very heart of Emin's art.
"It was that moment and that time in my life...I couldn't remake that time in my life again any more than I could remake the piece," Emin told the Guardian's Gordon Burn immediately after the fire for his May 27, 2004 article "Burned into the memory".
Indeed, Emin revealed at the "20 Years" opening that she had rejected a £1 million offer from the Saatchi Gallery to recreate the piece. "To recreate it would have been morally wrong. It wouldn't have that emotional input to it," Emin told reporters. "It wasn't simply the names of everyone I'd ever slept with. It was about intimacy."
Artistic Struggle
Much of Emin's work is not only intimately personal but viscerally wrenching. Dominant themes include abortion, sex and depression; but one aspect of Emin's confessional art sometimes overlooked addresses directly issues of artistic expression and the creative struggle.
Perhaps the most arresting piece in the show, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1998) is an installation created via a process of publicly grappling with demons Emin had associated with painting since destroying all her paintings in 1988 following a traumatic abortion. Emin spent two weeks naked locked in a room inside a gallery with painting materials, on display to viewers via wide-angle lenses as she reconciled herself with the medium.
The result is a fascinating microcosm of the most important, if sometimes neglected, side of Tracey Emin - the consummate artist.
Tracey Emin: 20 Years runs through November 9, 2008 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
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