I had the pleasure of interviewing Dame Tracey Em in 2013when I was a cub reporter with this media. The occasion would have been a gallery show, the motivator a PR push motivated to help sell the bronze, neon, and body-oriented paintings that had recently come to define her mid-career output. I didn’t know much about her work beyond that my bed (1998), but my admiration for him was enough to make me want to talk to him. This was the heyday of Tumblr and I couldn’t believe someone could do something so personal and impactful. She cocked an eyebrow at me as I sat down at our table in the restaurant at the Standard under the High Line. “I’m a much healthier influence than, say, Sylvia Plath,” she told me of her legacy. “I’m alive.”
This sui generis personality takes center stage in Emin’s biggest ever survey, which has just opened at Tate Modern. Her title, “A Second Life,” refers mostly to what art has given her, and it is possible that by passing through the exhibition, one can get to know her as well as if she had met her in person. The show was conceived in close collaboration with the artist and gathers more than a hundred works in painting, video, textiles, neon, sculpture and installation – four decades, from small photographs of destroyed art school paintings to recent canvases and bronzes shown for the first time.
But the show is organized in two parts, a first life and a second that followed the artist’s public battle with bladder cancer and the radical 2020 surgery that removed her bladder, abdomen, urethra, parts of her intestines and lymphatic system, and half of her vagina. Emin would encourage the recall of these details, even when talking about the first half of the exhibition, at the center of which are two extremely personal installations. First there is The exorcism of the last painting I ever did (1996), which records the three weeks Emin spent locked inside a gallery in Stockholm, working naked, trying to come to terms with the painting six years after it rejected him after experiencing a miscarriage. There are the canvases, the easel, the bottles, the bed. You might read it as evidence of a breakdown, but let’s remember that the resulting work was by no means the last painting she ever did.
Then there is my bed (1998), the Turner Prize-nominated installation consisting of a messy mattress complete with pantyhose, cigarettes, condoms. When it first debuted, the tabloids caused all kinds of moral panic about drinking and casual sex, but now that it’s pretty much a quintessential piece of British art, you can see what it’s really about: the small pleasures and big hassles that come with having a body. The absence of the body is made more present by what the Tate has installed nearby, a neon sign that reads, “It’s not me that cries, it’s my soul” and a bronze of a female bust with one limb. Emin’s post-90s work has been far more compelling than that of other young British artists, and the Tate has done a good job of showing us the bottom line, which can be considered the salutary influence Emin had on her.
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