In other areas of cultural practice, the cult of the personal and the autobiographical had replaced Style Watching as the mainspring of self-expression and self-promotion. Never had there been a better time to declare yourself a one-person Bloomsbury Group. But where had this obsession with the personal, the confessional and a kind of omni-vision voyeurism actually come from? One answer might be that this was a generational neurasthenia, picking up on the Flaubertian notion (as picked up by his posthumous analyst-biographer Sartre) of art and creativity being the result of ‘the ever hidden wound’. So did we all feel wounded in some way?
Another answer to the question, though, might be boredom and a craving for one-shot celebrity, prompting a culture of ‘to the max’, which was spun to keep raising the pitch of its own superlatives. (‘Ultimate Terror! Ultimate Destruction! Look-at-those-dinosaurs!’)
From the early to late 1990s, across the temper of the times, the ‘ever hidden wound’ was being exposed, and made public. Could this disarm its artistic effect? For rather than undergoing the translation into a (Flaubertian – or even Warholian) model of art and creativity, in which the presence of the artist was converted wholly into art itself, the wound was being offered up, raw and direct, as a kind of celebration or cult of actuality in relation to the personal. Just what would people be prepared to do to get their little nugget of celebrity – to do their circuit of the dinosaur park? Throughout the second half of the 1990s, the answer to this – not surprisingly, perhaps – would be ‘absolutely anything’.
From the mutation and conflation of confessional culture and mediated ‘real life’ had emerged the broader trend of the barbarism of the self-reflecting sign – every bit as threatening, in its own way, as the gradually mutating dinosaurs unleashed by the founder of Jurassic Park’s blasphemous fiddling about with natural evolution. Shame on such grandiosity! We should have remembered the testament of Pee Wee Herman, returning from Texas with his beloved bicycle: ‘I’ve learned something on the road, you know – Humility!’
Tracey Emin
Sitting with the posture of an obedient child, Tracey Emin lights another Marlboro, inhales deeply, ponders for a few more seconds, and then pronounces: ‘Fundamentally fucked, but ideologically sound, that’s me.’ She concludes this definition of herself with one of those laughs you usually hear coming out of a phone box when three teenage girls are in there daring one another to ring up boys. And somehow this laugh speaks volumes about the woman.
For in her rapid ascent from the legions of Young British Art to being nominated for the Turner Prize, the whole point about Tracey Emin has been the fact that she expresses herself as the original precinct kid and disco girl: ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’ – as she described herself on a banner being towed behind a plane above the seafront of her home town.
As an example of myth-making within the history of art, you could say that Emin has used her perceived ‘ordinariness’ to much the same effect that Salvador Dali used his eccentricity, converting herself into a modern icon. In Britain, the yobs and the snobs have always had a soft spot for one another, and even the street-trader twang of Mad Tracey’s Thames Estuary accent has caused a shiver of delight down the spines of the male metropolitan gentry who tend to be in charge of the art world. For within the marble halls of the cultural establishment, a woman like Tracey Emin is wholly exotic.
But now Emin’s fame has splashed way over the edges of the enclosed, confusing world of contemporary art. In Tracey Emin – and the woman and her work are completely indistinguishable – the zeitgeist surfers of the late 1990s have identified the perfect mascot for contemporary Britain’s twin obsessions with real-life drama and public confession. Her art is entirely autobiographical, presenting only Tracey Emin’s highly visceral account of Tracey Emin, across a whole range of media from films and neon sculptures to writing and embroidery. And as it is a depressing fact that most women experience verbal abuse from male strangers, so much of Emin’s art is a direct response to all of the men who have called her a slut or a slag. Similarly, she explores her own relationship with those degrading labels, using a kind of child-like sincerity as her torch to see by.
Emin’s source material for the agony, confession and sexual memoirs that comprise the written pronouncements in her art begin with her birth. She describes the conception of herself and her twin brother, Paul, to be the result of a passionate affair ‘when my Mum and Dad got a crate of gin and a crate of scotch and fucked on the carpet in front of the fire – that’s how we came about’. With her distinguishing frankness, Emin has made no secret of the fact that her Turkish Cypriot father, a chef, was maintaining one household in London and another, with her mother, in Margate. Tragically, at the age of thirteen, Tracey was raped. Subsequent to this, she became sexually promiscuous ‘between the ages of thirteen and fifteen’, and more or less gave up attending school. Next stop would be art college.
By foregrounding sexual confession, accounts of her own despair and the innermost secrets of her relationships with friends, lovers and family, Emin has slipped into the whole current cultural climate which puts forward soft-core sociology as a subtle form of authorized, and highly ambiguous pornography: the daytime-TV studio debates that cleverly mingle sex with violence, the broadsheet columnists who offer up every last detail of their private lives as insights into the way we live now, and the docu-soap television programmes that derive their power from zooming in on the breakdown of their subjects.
‘That’s the whole reason why I’m popular,’ she says. ‘It’s the way the psyche of the nation is right now. Ten years ago, in terms of art, there was no room for me anywhere. No galleries would show my work or listen to my ideas. They’d presume me to be pathetic, and self-indulgent …’
Then Emin gives another of those laughs, and makes a kind of ‘yes, I know what you’re thinking’, eyes-raised-to-Heaven expression of self-criticism, before adding, ‘And there’s a lot of people who still think that I am pathetic and self-indulgent …’ When you meet her, Emin seems fragile to the point of bird-like: a petite, slender woman wearing embroidered mules and an elegantly simple dress, with a pink cashmere cardigan loosely knotted around her waist. She looks much younger than her thirty-seven years. The force of her personality seems to reside in her almond-shaped, coffee-coloured eyes – the strongest evidence of her Turkish Cypriot background – which can shift their expression from mean suspicion to melting vulnerability from one second to the next. She seems too small for the large red sofa on which she is sitting, in her vast, top-floor studio loft in the heart of Whitechapel – the district of London’s East End that is enjoying renewed fashionability due to its increasing population of young artists, and their accompanying galleries and cafes.
‘During Thatcherism,’ Emin continues, ‘if you didn’t fit in with the crowd, you were on the outside, and if you were on the outside then you were a nobody. And that was the general feeling for everything, no matter what your place was in the hierarchy: you had to fucking fit in, and if you didn’t – forget it. And the whole culture was built on that. But get rid of Thatcherism, and everything was turned around. Then, it became the cult of the individual, the loser and the outsider – because those were the types who had been ignored for fifteen years.
‘So suddenly we’ve got everything from “The Jerry Springer Show” to Princess Diana’s confessions on TV, or Paula Yates saying all those things the other night that – well, I didn’t find them difficult to listen to, but I did find them surprising. That your husband died from this auto-wanking thing rather than committing suicide. But that’s how much things have changed: there’s an audience who want to listen to these things now, whereas before there wouldn’t have been. It’s like people want to watch “East-Enders” because they don’t want to think about their own lives; then you’ve got this other thing where you home in on real people’s tragedies, lives and stories. And people feel that they can relate to that.
‘But that’s also