Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want (Hayward Gallery) By Polly Allen

Showing series of appliquéd blankets (various dates) photo: David Levene

Possibly the most Marmite artist of our time (you either love her or hate her, much like the famous spread), Emin’s retrospective was always going to turn heads. Try dropping her name into casual conversation and you’ll see what I mean.

On a personal note, I’m unashamedly biased towards her, having admired her textual art and used it as the basis for my undergraduate dissertation. However, in the case of this review, I am going to try and greet all five huge rooms of this viscerally honest exhibition with new eyes. Welcome to Planet Tracey.

With so much to take in, thankfully the space has been divided into sections for each of the different projects that Emin has undertaken over the years, from appliquéd blankets to sculpture. This sense of order really helps when trying to understand each category and its individual merits or failures, as some of the titles can prove to be confusing until you really engage with the piece. Responding to me during the Hayward’s Text Tracey Tuesdays event, Emin explained that ‘I always jokingly say I have the title before I do the drawing. I write very fast… I think even faster’. This is an artist for whom the textual significance can be as important as the content of an artwork, despite the often slapdash-looking end result. Many visitors who know the artist for her headline-grabbing installations may be unaware that she even uses film or paint as a medium, but here we see everything treated with equal significance. Of course some of her most controversial works were lost in a 2004 art warehouse fire, including Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a.k.a The Tent, but there is more than enough content on show to demonstrate her urgent need to create art.

Showing series of neons (various dates) Photo: David Levene

Beginning with her blankets and moving into neon lights, we are instantly given a no-holds-barred look inside Emin’s head (don’t bring your children if you’re worried they’ll start parroting her expletive-laden sentences). The first textile piece she made, Hotel International, was a direct response to being asked for her CV – it certainly offers a potential employer something radical. Carefully appliquéd letters speak of Margate, of KFC and of Tracey’s unorthodox skill set: ‘You’re good in bed’. Handwritten notes and spelling mistakes (particularly in Helter Fucking Skelter, 2001) make these like embroidered personal diaries, as if she has decided to make the Bayeux Tapestry of her life using threads and text. Other blankets lament the brutality of war, or the complexities of love, which is echoed in the title of this retrospective. Ultimately Emin is seeking the same thing we all are: the reciprocated love of friends, family and partners. The frailty of this feeling is the driving force behind the majority of the pieces on display here, in some shape or form, whether it be self-loathing due to the words of others, or a plea for companionship.

Agony and distress are also frequently flagged up in this exhibition, which is perhaps best illustrated by the illuminated neon of The Scream. Emin has reinvented Munch’s emblematic painting with this minimalist imagery, stripping back the head and body to mere lines without facial or clothing detail. In removing the recognisable features and identification of the person screaming, there is a horror that remains: we know from the title that someone is in distress, but it has been completely censored. The viewer is left to envisage the actual scream for themselves, just as Emin’s textual blankets leave them imagining the scenarios she spells out. This gives a strong sense of involvement between the artist and the onlooker. Further examples of such a relationship are found in There’s a lot of Money in Chairs, which is a piece of furniture from her grandmother, embroidered as Emin toured America to give public readings with an autobiographical text, Exploration of the Soul.

Short films are also a notable part of this exhibition, drawing on themes of family, tradition and the stereotypical scenes of cinema (Westerns, horseriding through the desert and beach resorts), all given the Emin twist. The seaside is not a place for glamorous sunbathers or couples holding hands: this is Margate’s shoddy Golden Mile, where we hear Tracey’s poignant narration in 1995’s Why I Never Became a Dancer. Discussing underage sex, she talks over shots of arcade slot machines and the metallic grabbers of plush children’s toys, which makes the actual topic of conversation all the more shocking. Describing the men that she associated with, we learn that they were ‘less than human, pathetic… I was the innocent’. Her emancipation from Margate came when she realised ‘I’m better than all of that’ and began to see dance as an escape, where ‘my soul truly flew’, despite the abuse she received from her angry former bedfellows. The video ends with her dancing wildly and expressively in an empty room, proclaiming: ‘Shane, Eddie, Tony, Doug, Richard – this one’s for you’. I found this video footage to be a key example of how Emin differs from other artists, for whom the medium of dance might have been a pretentious hobby or the result of training at an elite dance school. On Planet Tracey it is the greatest tool she had for freeing herself from sexual abuse, and it is an empowering sight.

Showing series of appliquéd blankets (various dates) and Knowing My Enemy (2002) Photo: David Levene

So what can be said to counter the assumptions that Tracey Emin is self-obsessed? It’s true that she is her own inspiration, which cannot be denied, but many artists through the ages have prolifically produced self-portraits and depicted their own love stories – the difference being that we saw their muse in a frame rather than a frank account of the overall affair. By far the most self-obsessed parts of this show are those focusing on the Tracey Emin Museum and its pre-cursors, the entrepreneurial projects that she undertook from 1992 to secure funding. Emin would provide original correspondence for a small fee, usually involving letters or drawings. The Museum was perhaps a natural conclusion for someone so clearly reliant on documenting her life through her art, and who was interested in history on a personal, familial and global level. A very premature retrospective in 1993 at the White Cube Gallery (then, just recently opened) gave a taste of her enthusiasm for self-promotion, as well as highlighting her professional relationship with Sarah Lucas – the two were both part of the YBA movement, or Young British Artists. Even today, in the promotional image for the exhibition, we see Tracey’s naked rear profile as she runs along a London street enveloped by a Union Jack flag, that emblem being a recurring image in her work as well as nudity itself. Her art will always be about ‘Tracey Emin’ because she will never tire of drudging through her past, present and future for material (or even creating her own death mask, which can be found in this show); yes, it does make her a comfortable living, but that is because there will always be somebody wanting to dip further into her world. Is she selling out? That’s up to you to decide. Whether it’s the torrid tale of an abortion (for which you may need to exercise some caution, as it’s brutally honest) or the fear of the menopause and the ‘dry redundant bag’ of the womb, Tracey’s body – to paraphrase the artist Barbara Kruger – is a battleground, ready to be reported on. It’s shameless and it’s overwhelming, but it’s also hard to ignore.

There is still so much of the exhibition that I have not had time to discuss, but I will leave the rest up to the discerning visitor. I would urge sceptics to consider seeing this retrospective because it really does prove that we have a multi-disciplinary talent in our midst. I can almost guarantee that you won’t like everything here, and there may be pieces that upset or disturb you, but there will also be some that make you respect Tracey Emin that little bit more. Please don’t be dismissive about this unique British artist.

A Quick Guide to Love Is What You Want

For those of you keen to focus on the more ‘respectable’ and overtly positive side of Emin, I would recommend the following:

1. I Can Feel Your Smile (2005, neon).
2. Sometimes the dress is worth more money than the money (2000-2001, video).
3. Monument Valley, Grand Scale (1995-1997, photographic print).

For a specific interest, I would recommend:

Textiles – It’s the Way We Think (2004).

Printmaking – Sad Shower in New York (1995).

Textual art – The History of Painting, Part 1 (1999).

Modern art – The Tracey Emin Museum pieces and The Shop.

Sculpture – Baby Things (2008).

Hayward Gallery

Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London
SE1 8XX

Opening hours:

Open daily 10am – 6pm

Late nights Thursdays and Fridays until 8pm