I had the pleasure of interviewing Ms. Tracey Emin in 2013, when I was a reporter for this outlet. The occasion was an art exhibition, and the motive was to stimulate public relations to help sell the body-oriented bronzes, neons and dotted paintings that had recently come to define her mid-career output. I didn’t know much about her work then clinical (1998), but my admiration for her was enough to make me want to talk to her. This was the height of the Tumblr era and I couldn’t believe someone could make something so personal and so effortless. She raised her eyebrows as she sat down at our table at the Standard restaurant under the High Line. “I have a much better influence than, say, Sylvia Plath,” she told me of her legacy. “I’m alive.”
This unique figure takes center stage in the largest Emin survey, which has just opened at Tate Modern. Her title, “A Second Life,” refers mostly to what art has given her, and one might get to know her through the exhibition just as much as if they had met her in person. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition brings together over one hundred works across drawing, video, textiles, neon, sculpture and installation – spanning four decades, from small images of ruined art school paintings to modern canvases and bronzes making their debut.
But the show is divided into two halves, the first and second lives that followed the artist’s public battle with bladder cancer and the radical surgery performed in 2020 that removed the bladder, uterus, urethra, parts of the intestines, the lymphatic system, and half of the vagina. Emin encourages these details to be remembered, even when discussing the first half of the exhibition, the centerpiece of which are two very personal installations. First there Exorcism is the last painting I ever painted (1996), which records the three weeks a curator spent locked inside a gallery in Stockholm, working nude, trying to come to terms with painting six years after her rejection following a miscarriage experience. Contains plates, easel, bottles, and bed. You can read it as evidence of collapse, but let’s remember that the resulting work was by no means the last painting I ever painted.
Then there clinical (1998), the Turner Prize-nominated installation consisting of a messy mattress complete with pantyhose, cigarettes and condoms. When it first appeared in the tabloids, it affected all sorts of moral panic about drinking and casual sex, but now that it’s become a seminal work of British art, you can see what it’s really about: the simple pleasures and major 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 says: “It’s not me that cries, it’s my soul” and a bronze of a one-limbed female torso. Emin’s post-1990s 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 dividing line, which can be seen as the healthy influence Emin has had on herself.
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