Ultimately, people’s opinion of Tracey Emin – as a current phenomenon – is based and divided on whether they perceive her brand of autobiographical art, and her promotion of it, to be a sincere and socially edifying act of personal catharsis or simply an exercise in self-publicity. And this is an argument that can run and run, without ever reaching a useful conclusion. For every critic who finds Emin’s art to be courageous and liberating, there will be another who denounces its provoking of controversy, or the questions that it raises about the role of fame within the constitution of contemporary art.
While it is easy to find people who might offer spiteful or envious comments about Emin, and even easier to find people who cannot sing her praises too loudly, she appears to possess the ability to discourage simple objective critique about her practice and the phenomenon of her current success. And if the direct polarization of opinion about an artist is a test of his or her significance, then Emin is clearly significant.
‘She is a very significant presence within Young British Art,’ says the critic and art historian, Richard Cork. ‘There is a strong sense of vulnerability in her work, and the feeling that the only way for her to proceed is to try and exorcize some trauma from her past. She doesn’t seem to exclude anything from this process of self-disclosure, and while this could quite easily degenerate into a fairly unbearable form of narcissism, she does get away with it. And I think that this is because she is not trying to raise herself above criticism or self-criticism; she is clearly trying to deal honestly with her past, but there is no suggestion that she has achieved serenity.’
‘I was talking to someone the other night, and why the hell should I still be an outsider when I’m sixty?’ says Emin, with regard to her position in the cultural establishment. ‘There’s no reason for it. I’d be like the really interesting, funny guy who you meet in the pub when you’re fifteen, and then when you’re thirty-six he’s still in there – only now he’s fifty-eight and still sitting in the same fucking pub in the same corner. I’m not interested in becoming like that. I haven’t had to change what I do; I haven’t had to bow down to the system. I mean I didn’t get any O-levels or A-levels, and people said, “You can’t go to art school.” So I just got my own form and filled it in.’
Today, Emin’s detractors serve her cause to as great an effect as her supporters. Her former boyfriend, for instance, the poet and painter Billy Childish, has recently gained a good deal of reciprocal publicity off the back of his old flame by launching his ‘Stuckist’ movement – a loose-knit group of painters who have published a twenty-point manifesto, ‘Against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego-artist’. On the front of this manifesto is a quote from Tracey, supposedly made about Billy: ‘Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!’
‘Well, his paintings are stuck,’ says Emin, with disarming frankness, but genuine affection for Childish and his enterprise. ‘This is just one of Billy’s pamphlets – he’s done loads of them, and it’s a good, healthy thing – and a newspapers got hold of it and they know that it’ll make a good story.’
But when Childish published his stories and poems about his relationship with Emin, she found them ‘hateful and hurtful – particularly reading about all of his sexual conquests – it used to do my head in. But now I see that they’re not about me, they’re about him and his take on life, and he doesn’t come across as particularly admirable.’ And in this, perhaps, one can see the reverse side of Emin’s own artistic practice.
In a recent television documentary about Emin, the only critical voice in the programme – as the gents of the art world vied with one another to mingle faux-laddish candour with quasi-ironic hyperbole – came from her twin brother, Paul, who claimed to have lost his business contract in Margate because of the controversy generated by his sister’s work. ‘I want to use this occasion to state that I, Paul Emin, have no connection whatsoever with Tracey Emin’s art,’ he stated. And Emin herself, from her Whitechapel loft, admitted that her work back in Margate might find a reception very different from its current fashionability within the art world.
‘I would like to show some of my work down in Margate,’ she says, ‘but there isn’t really anywhere to show it. There’s the library I suppose. But it would mean hiring a space and organizing it, and I’m too busy to do that. But it would be interesting, because a lot of my work is about growing up in that locality, and it would be quite interesting to hear the responses from other people growing up there. But it wouldn’t really serve my purpose. What really serves my purpose is having a great big fuck-off show in New York. That’s what serves my purpose.’
Confession as public spectacle was woven in to the burgeoning obsession with any form of celebrity. As the decade progressed, it appeared that the values traditionally, and even sneeringly, ascribed solely to the tabloid press – voyeurism, sensationalism, knee-jerk morality – were becoming all-pervasive as the temper of the times.
Applied post-modernism as a sophisticated parlour game had authorized no end of super-whizzy look-Mum-no-hands ways of flirting with tabloid culture, but the principal readership of the endlessly cloning celebrity magazines – as much as the audiences of daytime confession ’n’ conflict TV ‘debates’ – seemed to be drawn, demographically, from the lower-income end of the scale. Thus, the new aristocrats of celebrity culture (as well as the old aristocrats who were just aristocrats, but still got loads of celebrity-space) were kept in place largely by a particular public need for a kind of epic, ongoing soap opera of people who seemed to have more teeth than them and nicer houses than theirs. The celebrities, perhaps, were just another of the Compensatory Pleasures (like extended credit facilities or deli-style sandwich fillings) that people in the Nineties needed to compensate for … living in the Nineties. But one fundamental result of the cultural equation between confession and celebrity would be that the poor, quite literally, were supporting the wealthy.
Ulrika Jonsson
Just type ‘Ulrika Jonsson’ into the subject window of your Internet search engine, and you’ll be sent back a lengthy list of sites, all of which promise ‘Ulrika Nude!’ Trawled up from the murkier depths of the web, these sites specialize in computer-manipulated images of celebrities. It’s a kind of cyber-harem that doubles as a somewhat sordid gauge of modern fame. You get the feeling that if you were a celebrity, checking out your virtual profile, you’d probably be pretty miffed to find yourself pornographically pixilated in this way. That said, when you saw the sheer number of people whom these sites have fiddled around with, you’d maybe feel strangely hurt if you weren’t included.
At thirty-two, Ulrika Jonsson was both defined and misrepresented as a sex symbol. Meeting her outside one of the smarter Windsor commuter stations, sitting behind the wheel of a soft-top Saab, dressed in casual black with Gucci sunglasses, she looks like any off-duty career woman. Neither her image, nor her voice – slightly ‘county’, with the odd dead-drop into New Labour Mockney – seems to hint at media celebrity and part-time wild child.
Saab lend her the car in exchange for the occasional personal appearance. She wants the estate version so there’ll be room for her five-year-old son’s bike in the back. ‘I drove a Fiat Panda until a couple of years ago,’ she explains, as a dashboard slightly more complicated than the flightdeck of the Starship Enterprise winks lazily into life. And this little fact says a lot about the woman: Ulrika embodies the point where tabloid-hounded TV personality – flashy cars, the Met bar and lots of foreign holidays – meets Home Counties mum: the school run, early nights and swimming lessons.
On the one hand, you could say that Ulrika’s entire career as a TV presenter and national pin-up has been driven by the juggernaut of her sex appeal. On the other, she has never promoted herself as anything other than ‘ordinary’. The trouble is, Ulrika emits that particular kind of ordinariness that many people also find sexy. She is probably the only prime-time television star to have been photographed wearing an Agent Provocateur négligée while leaning at a jaunty angle against the extension hose of an Electrolux dust-buster. She shares with Felicity Kendal – the star of the terminally domestic Seventies sit-com, The Good Life – the fact that