Confessing My Sins

Why I Love Tracey Emin

There is a messier version of this on my old Wordpress blog, from June 2021, when I finally got to see the Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch exhibition at the Royal Academy. I wanted to revisit it because I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot more of Emin’s paintings since then and I have thoughts I wanted to capture.

People can be quick to dismiss Emin’s work as crude, attention seeking. Her work is frequently called confessional in that critical way so often used to demolish the work of marginal groups, women in particular.

I don’t see Francis Bacon described as confessional, although I’d argue up and down that he is. I don’t see Basquiat, with his layered, scrawling works described as crude, although he often is. Or maybe I would if I looked hard enough, but what I mean is that it isn’t used as a pejorative with men, only with women. If men do it, there’s always a fabulous, meta-reason why they do it. With women it’s shorthand for crappy.

This dismissal assumes that confessional art is bad art. It assumes that crude art is crude because the artist is too stupid or unskilled to do anything else. I’d argue that this reductionist thinking shows a poverty of imagination on the part of the viewer, not the artist.

I’m so tired of that kind of criticism. With the exception of those who make art for a solely commercial purpose, I would argue that all art is confessional. It’s only that the art you don’t understand doesn’t appear to confess anything. That’s because you’re not speaking the same language and you choose to dismiss it rather than taking the time to learn.

Art is made to be looked at, just like music is composed to be heard. Art engenders conversation and comparison. It comes to life in the space between what the artist makes and means and what the viewer sees and thinks. Art is a verb. It’s a verb in every sense of the word, at every point of its making and consumption. I am never more aware of this than when I look at work by Emin.

I would say that even if you hate Emin’s work, it’s successful, because it isn’t a nothing. I don’t know anyone who looks at it and doesn’t feel something, whether it’s disgust or delight, whether it’s recognition or alienation.

Her work is confessional. That doesn’t make it bad. In fact, for me, it’s one of the greatest things about it. She makes raw, passionate art full of emotion that speaks directly to me.

Her work is the difference between taking your medicine orally or having it injected straight into the blood stream. With Emin, it’s in my blood immediately. It bypasses the thinking I do when confronted with say, a Picasso. When I look at her work, I connect with it at a primal level. I feel first and have to work out what I think later on. It talks to me about my own life. It connects me to difficult, complex emotions I struggle to put into words.

Seeing her work makes me feel seen. That’s a powerful gift to offer with the generosity she does.

This exhibition, small though it was, brought me to my knees.

Emin, it is fair to say, worships Munch, and his work has influenced her style in so many ways. Here, the paintings she chose from his archive formed a painted conversation between her canvases and his. It was like stepping inside a series of love letters. It felt like you were lucky enough to be invited into something deeply private and personal.

Her painting was on a huge scale. All but one of the canvases are vast. Her figures loomed over you as you looked at them. You became a part of the painting because it was almost impossible to take in all at once. You were compelled to step into each work. The body’s lines twined around you as you walked the map of it with your eyes. You had to get up close and personal.

This immersion meant that the paintings had a peculiar intimacy, despite their size. We are used to thinking of intimacy as a small, tender gesture, where you can touch all the sides. This was a wide, generous, intimacy that allowed you in and still gave you room to breathe and the space to find yourself.

The work was full of passion and pain that coexisted and seemed not to be able to function without one other. There was so much blood here. Living and dying are a messy business. The paint dripped and pooled. It splattered and moved. Sometimes it looked like it was still running. This was pain/t that moved and is moving - in every sense. In places it was applied in what looked like raised welts it was so physical. There is so much beauty in the damage though. There was a three dimensionality to these paintings that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

It’s her loss, her pain, her response to a body that made her a woman but did it so imperfectly she was torn apart by it and has been made and made again, not by a lover or a child but by the redemptive act of making herself over through her art. It is the tender pain of a woman who has taken something brutal and rendered it beautiful without diminishing the brutality. At times it was so visceral an experience that you felt surprised when you looked around and she wasn’t there, standing next to you.

Of course, there was sex because it goes hand in hand with death and art. There is never not a making and an unmaking. Creation and destruction happen simultaneously across these works. You could argue, if you saw the interviews around this exhibition that this was more about the failures of her body through illness, but I beg to differ. The pain of what her illness has forced her to endure is undoubtedly there, but to think that’s all there is does this exhibition and these paintings a great disservice.

This to me, seemed like a reflection on everything that has gone before. It was an homage to the artist that inspired her to begin, a summary of every phase of what her body has experienced and her art has mapped and a possible elegy moving forwards. This is what lends a kind of fractal transcendence to the work. It is all the aspects, all at once because this pain engenders this pain, because this work creates this work, because art does not exist separately of time or physicality. This is art that moves through time as well as the emotional plane.

She has scribbled over or slabbed out her face in so many of these paintings because you don’t need to say what you can so clearly see. Writing about it, I am never more aware of the poverty of the language I use compared to a painting I am trying to describe. I also think she finds words inadequate and sometimes damaging, best not to say anything at all. For what she feels there are often no suitable words anyway.

The mouth is removed. What is left is the hymn of the body and the paint and the movement and destination of the line - and this is what she comes back to time and time again. It feels like she is literally holding the line against her own mortality and bearing witness to it at one and the same time. We say, so often these days that the body keeps the score. For Emin, it was ever thus. This is quite literally her body of work. A body ravaged by illness and made whole by paint.

The vagina, so often painted by her is open, like a mouth, giving and receiving both pleasure and pain. And for everything else, there is the paint. Sometimes, the elements of the body seem to float apart from each other. It’s hard to see where a body begins and ends. It felt like a dissolving and coming back together through pleasure and through pain. The body is remade over and over again through what happens to it, good and bad, self-inflicted or imposed by others, by ill-health by a surgeons knife, by the vicissitudes of time.

I was also fascinated by how many of the paintings don’t show her hands. The hands that made this art seem powerless to move against or towards what is happening to her body.

Since I saw this exhibition I have thought a great deal about this. It could be that I, as the viewer of the art erased the hands because I was blurring the boundaries between what Emin showed me and what I felt I saw. I can’t remember now, but I did, months later, make myself a note on my phone that just said; ‘Tracey Emin’s hands,’ it bothered me that much.

I had begun to believe that while Emin has been habitually fine with showing vaginas and breasts, and of depicting sex in a way that frightens a lot of people who consider these things taboo (unless they’re painted by old, white men from history and look nice on a tote bag), it is the hands which are taboo here.

Emin’s abortions and struggles with her reproductive body are well documented by her (and a large part of why her work speaks so viscerally to me). She takes what is traditionally unspoken and creates works that force you to look and think and talk about the forbidden. She gives voice to the unspeakable and says the unsayable, but this wellspring of creativity comes from a place of lack. She is not a mother. She cannot inhabit the role of maker of humans, which is traditionally one of the very few arts open to women.

At this point I want to digress and talk about her early quilts and the role of craft as a stepping stone from the female, permitted role of making and how she smashes it up against the activist art of banners and protest art and uses it as a bridge across to the forbidden, male art of painting - but that will have to wait.

What I feel is that for Emin, her hands are her greatest means of creation. They are the thing that allow her to feel as whole as a person can be. They are sacred. To show them with the same freedom she shows the rest of her body is something that would require the vulnerability the rest of us feel in the nakedness she is entirely comfortable with. The hands are the last taboo. A hidden power that is seen rarely and largely through the results of what they make, maybe?

Much later, I listened to Emin talking to Katy Hessel on The Great Women Artists podcast. I was so excited to hear Emin talking about the news that archaeologists who have been studying ancient cave art have found that most of the handprints in the cave paintings actually belong to women.

Women, it transpires, have known about the power of their hands and worshipped, documented and used that power covertly for thousands of years. It has been buried, like much of women’s contribution to art. Now though, it feels like we are moving into a time of change, where what was once so hidden can finally be seen.

For Emin, it may be in the creation of her legacy. The renewal of her bonds with Margate and the creation of an archive, a studio and a school shaped by the fruit of her hands.

For now, let’s finish back at the exhibition and my favourite painting.

The most striking painting of the whole exhibition was a full length portrait where she is enrobed in black. Her face has been obliterated by what looks like a fabric square or veil. It looks like something she has chosen, rather than in the other paintings, something which has happened despite herself.

It may conjure up images of mourning and that may be an element in play here, but she appears to me like a Voodoo priestess or the High Priestess of the Tarot deck. She knows her own power and has conjured up all these other selves and sent them spinning around the room like the spell of herself. In that room we are caught in the warp and weft of it.

It feels like the age old power of the hag. This is the knowledge of age and wisdom and what a woman can do when she stands exactly within herself, apologising to nobody. It was incredible. It was powerful. It was a painting that hit me right in the chest and pulled something open in me, something that has only widened with time. It felt like permission.