I had the pleasure of interviewing Dame Tracey Emin back in 2013, when I was a cub reporter with this outlet. The event was to be a gallery show, a PR-pushing promoter inspired to help sell the bronze, neon and body-focused drip paintings that recently came to define his mid-career career. I didn’t know much about his work My Bed (1998), but my liking was enough to make me want to talk to him. This was the era of high Tumblr and I couldn’t believe that someone could make something so personal and out of touch. He looked at me as I sat down at our table in the Standard restaurant under the High Line. “I’m a much better influence than, say, Sylvia Plath,” she told me, of her legacy. “I’m fine.”
This sui generis personality takes center stage in Emin’s major survey, which has just opened at Tate Modern. Its title, “Second Life,” mainly refers to what art has given him, and it is possible that when passing through the exhibition one can recognize him as if he had met him in person. The exhibition was conceived in close collaboration with the artist, and includes more than a hundred works across painting, video, fabric, neon, sculpture and installation—spanning four decades, from miniatures of destroyed art school paintings to recent canvases and bronzes exhibited for the first time.
But the exhibition is divided into two halves, the first and second life that followed the artist’s battle with bladder cancer and the major surgery in 2020 that removed the bladder, uterus, urethra, parts of her intestines and lymphatic system, and part of the female genitalia. Emin will encourage the remembrance of these details, even when discussing the first part of the exhibition, the essence of which is two personal installations. First there is The Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), documenting the three weeks Emin spent locked inside a Stockholm gallery, working in the nude, trying to come to terms with painting after six years of rejecting it after an abortion experience. It has canvases, an easel, bottles, and a bed. You can read it as evidence of a crack, but let’s remember that the resulting work was by no means the last painting he ever made.
And then there is My Bed (1998), a Turner Prize-nominated installation featuring a dirty mattress filled with pantyhose, cigarettes, condoms. When it first released the tabloids touched on all kinds of moral panics about drinking and casual sex, but now that the male work of British art you can see what it really is: a little fun and big worries that come with having a body. The absence of a body is made more present by the Tate’s nearby installation, a neon sign that reads, “It’s not me that cries, it’s my soul” and a bronze of a one-legged female body. Emin’s post-90s work has been more compelling than that of other Young British Artists, and the Tate has done a good job of showing us the line, which can be seen as a healthy influence that Emin had on him.
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