Oh Tracey. Why do you taunt us so? With that cheeky, lopsided smile... why do you seduce, tease and build our expectation?
Last week I went to bed with Tracey Emin. After almost two hours, I was left panting. I cried a little too. Her work is such. It disgusts yet engulfs me; it is intimate as it is distant; comic as it is tragic; personal as it is universal.
Emin's Love Is What You Want retrospective show at the Hayward Gallery is impeccably curated (by Ralph Rugoff and Cliff Lauson). From the word go, visitors are taken on a journey through Tracey Town. Front seat. It's a whirlwind, a rollercoaster-ride. Up/down; bump; break; move; stop; start again.
There's no getting off.
The show is as exclusive as you want it to be. As engaging as you allow it to be.
Just like her emblazoned festoon-like blankets, or her Schielesque embroidered cottons, the exhibition galleries are a neatly-woven web of Emin's vociferous outbursts, her narcissism, her sexual exploits... of her trying to make light of all the drama and suffering.
Her life and work is read like a diary. Literally. And this is how the show is presented to us, as pages, carefully strewn all over the place, much like her presence in and out of the media. Yet this 'book' contains no secrets, it's pages, explicit images and hungry words are displayed like holy relics. Are they ever revered? I wonder.
The whole is broken down into intimate sub-divisions or chapters, which consequently take us through Emin's pain and process. Each chapter a self-sufficient nucleus, capable of sustaining and generating itself, yet one which was evidently born from something greater, larger, which allows components to revel at the convergence.
Tracey Emin is a 'painter' of pictures, but just as much, she is a 'painter' of words. She comes on strong, forcing her way through, imposing herself onto our senses. But is it real, or is it just a front? She wears her heart on her sleeve. And that heart is plastered, painted, scribbled, photographed and filmed for one and all to see. A pain too vast to contain? It must be shared, perhaps then, it may be halved.
Tracey's omnipresence at the Hayward is almost daunting. Her face, her open legs, her detritus is spread across the halls. She has latched onto the surfaces, infecting, morphing them into an extension of the self. The result is sexual as it is morbid. Much as she is.
My Bed might not have been included in this show, but the used tampons have. It was nevertheless a disappointment. Although perhaps a foolish expectation. My only expectation. That crushed, I saw Tracey in a different light, an outsider's light. I could have been an intruder watching her heart-breaking confessions in How It Feels; a bird circling the bridge as she interacts with an infatuated slobbering dog in Love is a Strange Thing; the sand nestled beneath Knowing My Enemy.
I described experiencing Emin's work as a rollercoaster-ride; what I failed to mention is that the journey is just as emotional as it is visual. Her multi-faceted persona, her alter-egos rub off on you. I haven't stopped thinking about Tracey since.
True, she's a flirt. Her confident air transpiring, oozing from her work. Perhaps she is a mere tease. She takes us some of the way, with her promises of love, physical satisfaction, adventure. But do we climax? It's time for a cold shower.
