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It feels as if you’re intruding. Walking into Tate Modern’s huge Tracey Emin retrospective is like walking in on her crying, naked, sobbing and snotty, as if you have stumbled into something painfully private.
That’s not an easy thing to pull off in the cavernous spaces of our leading contemporary art institution, but that’s what makes Tracey – it doesn’t feel right calling her Emin, she pulls you so close it’s like you know her, it’s Tracey isn’t it? – such a special, important, era-defining artist.
She is an icon, the most famous artist in Britain. She shaped a generation, shocked a nation, changed what art could be. Since the early 1990s, she has been making art so raw, so visceral, so emotionally honest that she forces you to feel what she feels.
Tracey symbolises the height of the 90s, its sex, drugs and booze, successes and excesses, but this show isn’t about that. It’s about how she has put her life out there, laid herself bare – and pushed us all to come to terms with our own emotions in the process.
This isn’t a big, cold, white-walled celebration of her work, it’s way more intimate, dark and claustrophobic. In the brutal, harrowing 1995 film Why I Never Became a Dancer, Tracey talks about leaving school at 13, having demeaning, abusive sex with older men, walking around Margate as boys chanted “slag” at her. But by the end, she turns all this pain into something joyful. “Shane, Eddie, Tony, Doug, Richard, this one’s for you,” she says, and dances to Sylvester’s disco anthem (You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real. That’s our Trace – she lives, she feels, she loves and she suffers, and then she turns it all into art.
It’s a simple equation repeated over and over in different ways throughout her career. She turns cruel jibes into quilts, heartbreak into paintings, slurs shouted at her mum – because she married a Turkish Cypriot man – into poetry.
An abortion the artist had in the early 1990s casts a huge shadow. In one film she talks about the misery she endured, and the way people treated her afterwards. In the next room there’s a shelf with her hospital wristband and a little bottle of pain-relieving mefenamic acid next to a display of children’s shoes. It’s almost too much, too agonising.
Yet the abortion was her “emotional suicide”, a seismic moment that changed everything. She destroyed all her art school paintings, locked herself in a studio for three-and-a-half weeks, and started from scratch. That studio is recreated here, covered in scrawled paintings, empty cans of European lager and dirty laundry.
My Bed is here too, how could it not be? But for something so iconic, it doesn’t feel monumental, or grandiose, or like a piece that has dominated popular art discourse for decades. It just feels like being let in, like being given access to another private moment of pain. It was never meant to make headlines or change the world, it was just the truth – the reality of someone living their life.
Living that life has got harder recently. She was diagnosed with bladder cancer not long ago, and a dark corridor here is filled with photos of her bleeding stoma. There are no boundaries with Tracey, you get all of her, no matter what. Her recovery from cancer marks the second life of the show’s title, a rebirth.
The quilts, films and installations are the most famous works here, but the show is full of paintings, too. Rough, chaotic self-portraits in black, red and grey – Tracey’s body is splayed and bleeding, lying broken in bed or standing fragile and ghostly on the verge of collapse. Lots of them are covered in diaristic half-poetry. They’re not all great paintings, but they’re affecting in all their messy, tempestuous rawness.
What is really not great is her sculptural work. Every bronze looks like a badly made metallic turd plopped around the gallery. And I could happily go the rest of my life without ever seeing another of her neons, all of which look as if they are destined for the lobbies of the worst hotels on Earth.
But even when she is bad, at least she is real and heartfelt. Parts of this show left me in bits. The painting of her carrying her mum’s ashes totally broke me and left me missing my own mum, who died just before the pandemic. I was a teary wreck, it was overwhelming. It must be exhausting being Tracey. I couldn’t feel this intensely all the time, I’ve got to function and send emails and go to Tesco.
Don’t come here looking for a good time – you won’t find it. But come looking for pure, unapologetic, undiluted, full-frontal love, grief, heartache and sadness, and you will end up feeling more feelings than you’ve probably felt for years.
