I Love Tracey Emin

The following day in the pits of depression I watched The South Bank Show documentary on Tracey Emin with Carol. I loved the documentary and so did Carol who then spent the following two days reading every book related to Emin in my library. The Documentary was released at the end of January 2005, but I only decided to watched it a year later. I had had an immense love/hate interest in Emin for nearly ten years. In some ways our work was similar or came from a similar need to express private 'truths' in our art. In an art world awash with professionals of the most boring kind, Emin stood out because of her extrovert personality and guts to create the art her psyche demanded without censorship. In fact it was this rawness, lack of irony, and lack of professional calculation which made her work stand out from the sea of machine made, impersonal and utterly academic theory bound art of my day. There were literally hundreds of thousands of artists making this kind of academic art that was utterly lifeless, over designed and pompously blown up with ill digested theory - but there was only one Tracey Emin. To attack her for not being able to paint or draw (which even I thought she was hopeless at) or for being too personal and too much of a celebrity was to miss the point entirely. You could have put a camera in front of 90% of contemporary artists and just send people to sleep or reaching for their remote controls. Tracey on the other hand was real, raw, untutored, honest and had the common touch. As a person and as an artist she connected with people on a level that was never condescending or obscure. Damien Hirst was without doubt a better artist - but he just acted the drunken bore droning on humourlessly about death. Whereas Tracey's conversation had many levels; serious, funny, rude, sad, or pathetic. Identity art had been around for nearly twenty years, but it had mostly been made by people with no identity worth knowing. In many respects Tracey's art was very feminine, and much of the abuse she had received had been because of the preconceptions/ prejudices people unconsciously had about women. Her work taunted the viewers to expose their bigotry, and invariably she succeeded. Tracey's earthy commonness exposed the art world for the snobbish, elitist and bigoted world it actual was. Most artists, curators and collectors live mundane lives the main thrust of which is social climbing. Artists have for centuries used art to social climb, they follow strict rules of etiquette laid down by the upper classes and they manage their careers with all the cunning of a reader of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Tracey's art and life were a spit in the face of such narrow minded uncreative pompous bores. She was right when she said - she was her own best creation. In fact it was Tracey the person, not really Tracey the artist who beguiled me so much. In an art world run by bureaucrats, accountants, knaves, lick arses, and actors - she was real. It is true that many of the formal aspects of her work was derived by from artists like Munch, Kahlo, Beuys, Basquiat, Nauman, and Lucas to just name a few of her influences. But her sheer force of personality made these influences her own, and in many cases make her influences look like pale imitations. I loved Tracey, just for being Tracey.                                                                                                   

Tracey Emin The Feminist Capitalist

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"

Sigmund Freud

In mid March 2006, I watched What Price Art on channel 4, in which Tracey Emin explored the issue of the prices fetched by women artists in comparison to male artists. In the 1970s courses like Women's Studies propagated endless thesis and later biographies on neglected female artists. Those artists it highlighted Artemisia Gentileschi, Gwen John, Modersohn-Becker, and Frida Kahlo were good third-rate artists but not geniuses - you could easily pick a hundred forgotten male artists just as good if not better. It is a cold fact that the history of art is 99.999% dominated by dead white male western artists. This fact is a subject of intense outrage by people less interested in art and more interested in the gender, race, and religion of artists than in the actual quality of the art they make. In The Obstacle Race Germane Greer studied the history of female artists and concluded that while art history was full of female child prodigies - they never lived up to their early promise. The 1970s and 1980s saw a spate of women only exhibitions, which only further ghettoized women, and since most of the art exhibited was rubbish it did nothing to promote the cause of respect for women artists. Camille Paglia famously declared in Sexual Persona that there would never be a female genius like Mozart because there were not blood-lust killers like Jake the Ripper. Genius like psychopathic blood-lust killing she claimed was a peculiarly male phenomenon. Paglia claimed that feminist excuses for a lack of geniuses - like social neglect, prejudice or motherhood - were irrelevant because many great male artists faced prejudice, neglect, poverty and derision. I thought it was far too early in female emancipation to agree with this. And already many strong female artists had emerged like Louise Bourgeois and Paula Rego. But what really annoyed me about Tracey's utterly self serving and self-obsessed documentary  - was its reduction of art to money  - spawned as it was by her own anger that the likes of Damien Hirst's work sold for higher prices than her own. However, to me it was self evident that Hirst was an infinitely better artist than Emin and more importantly he was a far greater curator and promoter of the London Art scene. As far as I could tell, Emin had done nothing but promote herself and her art relentlessly for the past twenty years. Hirst on the other hand had worked in collaboration with others artists, and began his life as a curator of others artists work. Hirst along with Saatchi and Joplin made the London sense - Tracey just crashed it and screamed for attention.