A couple of weeks back I was listening to an interview with Tracy Emin on Radio 4 "Woman’s Hour" . I like Tracy Emin, I like her work and I like what she has to say and how she says it. 
She gets so much stick from the nauseating pretentious world of the art critic. The usual scenario where people cannot stand anyone that does not adhere to their standards or kow tow to their demands. The kind that want to keep you down, push you against the wall especially if you are female and challenge the status quo – don’t give a fuck. Her response to one critic who said her work got stuck in the back of their throat was "great I hope you throw up. I hope you are retching with your head stuck in the toilet". We all have "snakes in the grass" as my friend Vic calls them (some of you may remember the cockroaches and rats post). She has also been criticized by the feminist academia accusing her of "uncritical commodification of women" and of being a "dedicated media tart and headline junkie". Sounds like sour grapes rather than constructive criticism.
For me her work is inclusive and speaks to everyday experiences especially those of women. I can relate to it
because much of it is gendered such as in "My Bed Work". I feel much of the criticism of the piece was because it was so essentially female, personal and in many ways confessional as opposed to the distant and impersonal nature of traditonal and much contemporary art. Add to that the fact that she is a working class female that is not afraid to speak out in a class conscious Britain.
I like the bed piece. Beds are so
personal. Sometimes solitary sometimes communal but they can be a safe and warm place. Beds are where you sleep and dream – solitary activities.
They are a space in which you can make love, read, listen to the radio, watch a
dvd, eat your breakfast or night snacks. My bed is a special place -
its huge and on any given day might contain books, papers, pens,
highlighers, my asthma inhaler, glasses, a cup, dish spoon, my laptop,
dvd and whatever else has accumlated there over the a few days. For women beds are often communal spaces where we gather and engage in female play and chat. But they can also be sights of brutality where women are raped and beaten, a place where nightmares scream out and we are engulfed in pain. Is your bed a just a place to sleep or does it have more meaning and use then just sleeping?
My Bed Work was shorted listed for the Turner Prize in 1999 and consisted of "her own unmade dirty bed with used condoms and blood-stained underwear"…."Yet My Bed in all its variations is a thoughtfully composed assemblage of items arranged around a central object of a bed base which invites ambivalent and contradictory responses. The linen is both rumpled and smoothed, bright white and stained; beside the soiled items are pristine objects such as the glistening clear glass of the vodka bottles."
In " Everyone I have ever slept with" , Emin wrote the names of everyone she had ever slept with including relatives and lovers and two aborted children. 
Yes again this is highly personal and exhibitionist but so is this post and much of what is written on blogs everyday. A brilliant idea to name all those you have slept with from your
parents as a baby, your siblings as a child, friends, lovers, kids and for
some even their cats and dogs. How many of us have sat and counted all the people we have slept with? My tent would have the names in various
sizes according to their relationship to me and how much I still love or like
those people today. So my family would be large then my friends (havent slept with that many friends anyway). Lovers would be hierachical starting with
my present lover (of course). Now heres a question. Would you put the love of your life or your present lover first? that is if they are not one and the same? The names would get smaller as the memories become less vivid or those that need to be forgotten for whatever reason. Right down at the bottom in the tinyest writing would be the name(s) of the ones you would like to see lying down in a field of rotting tomatoes.
The one comment that really struck me was that she spends at least three hours a day doing nothing but thinking. This goes back to the TIME piece – what is it and where does it go – not sure what it is but it disappears pretty fast and we need lots more of it to spend THINKING.
Tags: Tracy Emin
