Tracey Emin: Excess all areas
By Adrian Searle
Tracey Emin's confessional, confrontational art is hard to take in large doses. For some, even a small, homeopathic dose is too much – but the cumulative effect is extremely powerful. It is also confusing. Her work churns you up, and leaves you with more than ambivalence. At its best, it touches a sense of abjection; at its worst, it is abject for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes it's hard to work out which is which.
Love Is What You Want, at the Hayward Gallery in London, is Emin's biggest show to date. It's all here: Emin masturbating in a jerky hand-drawn 2009 animation; the artist spreading her legs; the artist with her head in a fire and lonely under the shower. Emin dancing, Emin on all fours, Emin's abortions, her burnt offerings, her neon curses and jibes, her embroidered desires. There's even her death mask, although she's very much alive. It's a risky show, but Emin is all about risk: the risk of self-indulgence as well as self-exposure.
The Hayward's double-height first gallery always invites a grab-you-by-the-lapels opening. And here we have Knowing My Enemy, a beach hut dedicated to her father and his admonitions that she lead a simpler, more wholesome life. The 2002 hut, a sort of refuge, teeters high at the end of an impassable pier. The walls around are hung with her banners. Helter Fucking Skelter, they read, Pysco Slut, Rot in Hell, I Hate Women Like You. Of course, they say far more, with their little sewn inserts, the jammed-together misspelt phrases. Vomit Tears Babies. Eggs Shit Teath. Teath? Strident, appealing, appalling, the words hector and whisper. What is one to do with this sea of insistent visual and verbal noise?
Excess is part of the point of Emin's work. Female excess, the female body, attention-seeking narcissism: these are things Emin has been accused of – and aren't these what women have always been accused of? Emin's art can be touching and surprising. It can irritate and annoy. Her art can be seedy, tawdry and celebratory. It can be self-serving and self-revealing. It can be angry and sentimental. That you have to get up close to her handwritten texts matters: you have to get too close. It's like someone whispering in your ear. Backing off feels like rejection. But Emin insists. It's embarrassing, yet embarrassment – and the lack of it – is also one of her themes. She is, it seems, thoroughly unembarrassed and unapologetic in her art, which has a far greater range of tempos and registers of feeling than we might expect.
Neon phrases glow across the walls of a darkened cave on the mezzanine: desperate, dirty writing. Fuck Off and Die You Slag. Is Anal Sex Legal? Is Legal Sex Anal? And here's a neon outline of Edvard Munch's The Scream. Is it homage or self-portrait? It looks like a weirdly glowing, discarded condom. Upstairs is another neon: My Cunt Is Wet With Fear, the white writing glowing on the white wall. It is a tremendous, awful line, clinically bright, that leaves you imagining its opposite: a wet, dark body with animal nerves.
Emin has seen a lot of humiliation, public and private. To say that she has at times brought it on herself is to say that she deserves it. "I paint because I am a dirty woman," the artist Marlene Dumas once wrote. Emin does more than paint – and for me her paintings are the weakest thing here. Somehow, they're not dirty enough. But what does it mean to be a dirty woman? To be sexual? To wank, to menstruate? There is a great deal about menstruation, including withered, bloodied tampons in a vitrine, and Emin's writing on the subject.
"Slag, slag, slag," the boys shouted when Emin was a teenager, dancing in Margate, trying to win a competition that would be her ticket out. Her 1995 film Why I Never Became a Dancer details the humiliation, her teenage sexual adventures, her tales of use and abuse. The film ends with Emin dancing in her studio to Sylvester's Mighty Real. She looks joyous, ecstatic. It's her best defence.
The fame and the flak
What happens when Emin fills the entire Hayward? It's complicated. So is the artist, whom it is sometimes difficult to separate from what she does. The public Emin and the private, the one who reveals all and the one who writes to herself: finding the differences between the two is a problem for the artist as well as for the audience. It was ever thus. (Blame Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists started it all.) Artists now are ever more obliged to be public personas of an extreme sort. Turning them into objects of fun, prurient interest and derision, is a way of not dealing with what they do. The trick is either to stay inaccessible and private, or deal with it head-on: accept the fame and take the flak.
What Emin has done is no mean feat. She has transformed her experience into art. Not always very good art, but that's part of the deal she has made with herself and the world. Everything returns to Emin's childhood and youth in Margate. She has not left childish things behind, but dragged them with her into adulthood, along with all her mistakes, her sexuality, her sentiments, her family relations, her abortions, her losses and her fame, as an artist and as a public personality.
Like others of her generation of British artists who had early success, Emin has had to develop in public. One of the difficulties is that much of what she does is a kind of performance, one she has had to work out as she goes along. This is true for all of us in our multifarious ways. Life is performative – but Emin has turned it into her art.
Up on the top floor of the Hayward is a more recent sculpture, Salem, from 2005. It looks like a pyre, or a ramshackle scaffold, or an erect cock of scrap wood. A thin white neon tube rises through it, like a spear of pain. Emin's recent sculptures attempt something more austere and less obvious than her earlier work; they are as much about form as families or figures, with their rhyming shapes and rhythms. One outdoor sculpture court appears to be just a windswept stretch of concrete, until you discover the painted bronze infant's shoe, the teddy bear and the sock scattered on the ground. A missing child, in other words. There's an indelible sense of abandonment, a silent sense of loss.