
Show and tell
This article is more than 22 years oldLynn BarberHer tent, her bed, her lovers... more than with any other modern artist, it is impossible to separate Tracey Emin from her work. Here, Britain's supreme art exhibitionist talks to Lynn Barber about families, fear of failure and why one condom is never enoughEven in an interview, Tracey Emin wants to show you things, wants to spread her whole life out before you. Her studio in Brick Lane in London is anyway full of things to look at - the blankets she is making for her new White Cube show, the wedding dress she wears in her Beck’s Futures film, dozens of drawings on the floor waiting for the framers. But that is not enough for her, she wants to show you more, much more - and she has filing cabinets full, vast archives of her life. When I asked whether her twin brother Paul looked like her (‘No, he’s built like a brick house. Massive’), she had to show me a photograph to prove it; when she mentions the letters she used to write telling people they could invest in her creative potential for £10, she actually digs out the file.
It is as if all the time she needs proof - proof of her existence, or maybe proof that she’s telling the truth?
When we met the first time, she said it had to be at her studio because her house was off-limits to journalists. But the second time, she wanted to show me her new studio (she is moving to a new studio round the corner, next to Gary Hume’s), and somehow from there we gravitated to her house. It was surprisingly neat and smart and immaculate. Naturally, I wanted to see her bed to see if it was like My Bed, the one Charles Saatchi bought for £150,000, but she said I couldn’t because Mat (Collishaw, her boyfriend) was still asleep in it - it was five in the afternoon but they’d had a heavy night. So I was wandering rather disconsolately round this house thinking it was a bit characterless, a bit un-Tracey, until I noticed a white squidgy thing on the sofa. ‘Tracey!’ I squeaked, ‘there’s a used condom!’ ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I knew I should have tidied up.’
Now truly it is strange to find a used condom lying on the sofa in an otherwise immaculate house. I even wondered if she planted it, but then decided she couldn’t have because I was first into the room. What does it mean, Tracey, I nagged - was it because she couldn’t bear to throw good sperm away? No, she huffed, she just hadn’t got round to tidying up. But most people throw them away at the time, I told her in my new guise as expert on the nation’s condom habits. ‘Do they? Where?’ ‘Down the loo.’ ‘Well, I’m more the sort of person that will clean them all up in the morning. And like some people use just one condom, right? But we use tons.’
Next day, Tracey rang to say she needed to see me again. She’d had a dream in which she was a sparrow and I was a bumble bee and she was flying with one wing trying to show me something. Maybe the bed, I thought, or more details of her fascinating condom habits, but no, she wanted to meet in her local, the Golden Heart. I wondered what she could possibly show me in a pub, but the answer was waiting for me when I got there - her father, Enver Emin. He is 80 but totally compos mentis and still with a flash of the ladykiller he must once have been. But I was surprised to meet a Turkish Cypriot who looked so African. He explained that his father was jet black - he says there were lots of Sudanese slaves in the Ottoman Empire and he thinks his family must be descended from them.
Anyway, Mr Emin was sitting placidly in the pub nursing a cup of tea, waiting to collect his wife Rose from Tracey’s studio, where she was sewing blankets for Tracey’s new show. I asked what he thought of Tracey’s work and he said, ‘I love it, but I don’t understand it. She creates her own ideas, and it keeps her on her toes and keeps her happy.’ He particularly likes the appliqué pieces, like the blankets, because they remind him of his mother. He said he was off to Cyprus on Sunday to finalise the purchase of some land to build a holiday house for Tracey and his other children. ‘How many children have you got?’ I asked, but when he said five, Tracey jumped on him, ‘No, Dad, come on!’ Apparently, he usually admits to 11 children, but he once told Tracey 23 - they range in age from 18 to 63. Then she started arguing with him about his having two families, and I was once more pitched into the boiling high drama that is her life (and art).
Tracey and her twin brother Paul were Enver’s ‘second family’ in Margate. He already had a wife and family in London when he met Tracey’s mother Pam, but instead of divorcing, he simply maintained two households and commuted between them. Both sides knew about each other: ‘My late wife used to adore Tracey.’ When the twins were four, he drove them and their mother and aunt and grandmother across Europe to Turkey, installed them in a hotel on the Black Sea, then drove back to London to collect his other family, installed them in another hotel and spent two months shuttling between them.
So it was all open and above board? Yes, he agrees, but Tracey butts in furiously: ‘It was never above board, Dad! It’s not above board to have two families, right?’ She obviously picks this fight every time she sees him, she won’t ever let things be. That is why her childhood pain is always so fresh and available to her art. If a wound shows any signs of healing, she’ll pick the scab until it starts bleeding again. This is an incredible strength in her art - the way she can call up old emotions, feel old pains - but it must be quite a drawback in her life.
With other artists, such as Rachel Whiteread, or Damien Hirst, you can hate the work and like the person, or vice versa, but with Tracey no such split is possible. Her art demands a sort of subservience to an Eminocentric vision of the world that feels like surrender. That is why, I think, people often resist her art for a long time and then suddenly fall for it, as Charles Saatchi did (and I did).
The best account of Tracey’s life is her video Curriculum Vitae in Tate Modern, which is so good I don’t want to spoil it. But the key facts are that she was born in Margate in 1963, and lived at first ‘like a princess’ - her parents ran the Hotel International and all the staff spoilt her rotten. But then the business crashed when she was seven, ‘And suddenly we had nothing, and we were squatting in a cottage which used to be the staff cottage’. At that point her parents split up - she recalls her mum shouting, ‘Oh go back and fuck your wife’ - and from then on the little princess was just one of Margate’s ordinary mob of deprived single-parent kids.
She had no front teeth (she lost them all to calcium deficiency, the result, she says, of being a twin - she has incredibly complicated bridgework now) and no boobs till she was 13 - ‘They grew really quickly. One minute I didn’t have any tits and the next I had the biggest tits in the world.’ At 13 she was raped. For the next six months she avoided boys, but then she became ‘a slag’ - her word - and started sleeping with half the boys in Margate. ‘It was a power trip, definitely. And also I had this kind of idea - why go to another country, why not just sleep with someone to get experience? In Margate, you see, underage sex was definitely the thing to do - breaking into girls. If you hadn’t lost it by the time you were 16 there was something wrong with you. It wasn’t like middle England. And also, being by the sea is brilliant because there’s loads of places to have sex!’
Her film Why I Never Became a Dancer - one of her three favourite pieces, along with her tent and her bed - recounts her going in for a dance competition as a teenager and all the boys shouting ‘Slag, slag!’ And so she resolved, ‘I’m out of here, I’m better than all of you.’ Despite having no O levels, she managed to get on a fashion diploma course and parlayed that into an art degree course at Maidstone. She got a first and went on to the Royal College - which she hated, but says it was her own fault for expecting too much of the college and not enough of herself.
Meanwhile, Tracey’s love life was a mess. At Maidstone she had a long affair with a fellow artist, Billy Childish, which ‘did her head in’. Then she had another bad affair, after the Royal College, which resulted in two abortions. Up till then she thought she couldn’t get pregnant because she’d had very bad gonorrhoea as a teenager and the doctor said she would be sterile. The first abortion, in 1990, was horrendously bodged because no one realised she was carrying twins: the second abortion, she says, was ‘revenge’ for the first.
At this point she destroyed all her work and gave up art. ‘I felt isolated, insecure, unloved, unwanted and pretty crazy, mad. I don’t think I felt mad because I’d had an abortion, I think I felt mad because I was angry, and because I was living on £12 a week.’ She got a job as a youth tutor for Southwark council and took a philosophy course at Birkbeck, ‘And suddenly my brain - it was like doing exercises in a gym and your muscles waking up. It was brilliant.’
But she spent two years making no art at all - it was Sarah Lucas who got her back into art. They met at Sarah’s City Racing show in 1992 and became instant friends. ‘It was wild, brilliant, really love without sex, but totally passionate - it was almost like how girls are at school, that inseparable kind of thing.’ Sarah said they should get a studio together, but Tracey said she wasn’t interested in making art. OK, said Sarah, they’d get a shop and make merchandise. It was an old shop in Bethnal Green Road, and they took it for six months and called themselves the Birds and made T-shirts saying things like ‘I’m so fucky’. ‘What was brilliant about the shop,’ Tracey recalls, ‘was it gave me a platform to find what I was good at - and what I was good at was ideas, and being un- precious about them and having an audience. Sarah was very encouraging in all this.’
Then they went to Geneva together - ‘our Swiss convalescence’ - and made loads more stuff and Jay Jopling offered Tracey an exhibition at White Cube. ‘I thought it would be my one and only exhibition so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective. Two weeks before the show, Jay came to my tiny flat in Waterloo and apparently he left going ‘Ohmigod, what have I done’, because all I could show him was this crap, smelly old ancient things like my old passport or bits of fabric from my sofa when I was three years old. There was nothing that looked like an exhibition, so Jay left thinking he’d made a big mistake.’ But anyway it was a success, and 400 people turned up for the opening.
After Sarah Lucas, her next big influence was Carl Freedman, an art curator she went out with for three years. He said if she wanted to be in his 1995 mixed show Minky Manky she had to produce something big - up till then she’d only done small - and so she produced her famous tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95 . Then she had a big solo exhibition at the South London Gallery called I Need Art Like I Need God, and, ‘On the opening night there were a couple of thousand people and three television crews. And I walked in and thought, “Ohmigod, I’ve arrived!’ Her arrival was confirmed by her notorious appearance on a Channel 4 debate at the 1997 Turner Prize, pissed out of her mind and terribly funny - afterwards, she said, she didn’t even know she’d been on television, she thought she was round at some boring dinner party. And then her friend Vivienne Westwood started dressing her, which gave her a whole new audience in the fashion magazines. Westwood actually doesn’t think much of Emin’s art (but then she doesn’t like any modern art), but she admires her style. And as Tracey says, the collaboration works to their mutual advantage, ‘It’s symbiotic. And it’s fantastic for a woman of my age, 37, to be like this muse and this glamour thing - we’re having fun with it.’
In 1999, Tracey hogged all the publicity for the Turner Prize with her notorious bed, and then she didn’t win. She thinks it was a plot, she thinks the Tate just used her for publicity and never seriously considered giving her the prize. She is quite bitter about it, still. When I said I’d forgotten who did win, she crowed, ‘Exactly! People don’t remember - it was Steve McQueen. But all the papers had my photograph, not his. Revenge is sweet.’ She forced herself to keep smiling at the time, but she cried bitterly afterwards. And she blames that disappointment for the kidney infection which put her in hospital a few months later. Her health has always been precarious - one of the first things she did when she started making money was to take out private health insurance. ‘I’m sickly and I get run down and I have very bad herpes, and I like knowing that the doctor’s there.’
Of course, in the past, her sickliness was exacerbated by her non-stop drinking, progressing from beer to wine to brandy through the day. ‘When I went out, I had a brilliant bag that could hold four beers, half a bottle of brandy and cigarettes all the way round, and also I was sponsored by Bombay Sapphire Gin, so I used to always take a bottle of gin as well. And even when I didn’t go out, I’d be sitting round drinking.’ Why this abuse? ‘I don’t think it was abuse. It was more like rock’n’roll !’ she cackles. Her drinking got so bad about three years ago, she had constant diarrhoea and her weight went down to six-and-half stone. She also got really boringly aggressive at parties, till finally Mat and her friends said pack it in or they’d leave her. So in September 1999, she gave up spirits - she still drinks wine and gets pissed at parties, but not to the same annihilating degree.
Nowadays, she says, she looks after herself - she goes to the gym and is learning to box. And she has a good solid relationship with her fellow artist Mat Collishaw, now in its fourth year. Moreover, she is faithful - ‘but of course I think probably no one else is!’ She and Mat could afford to have children but she says she’s too old and also, ‘We have a really good life, we like it the way it is. If I keep fit and healthy, and in shape, I do actually have a few good years.’
But clearly the question of having children is preying on her mind - she’s just made a film with her mother which is ‘basically me asking her why she won’t let me have children. My mum has never wanted me to have children. She thinks I would be destroying my life, even now. I asked, “Is it because she thinks I’m so mentally unstable she’d be frightened for me?” and she said, “Yes, that’s one of the reasons”. The fact that I’ve got over so much, she wouldn’t want anything to come into my life that would make me fragile again.’
How fragile is she? She seems cheerful and robust at present, but she has had plenty of brushes with madness in the past and at least one suicide attempt, when she threw herself off a cliff, aged 20 - ‘But I’m a really good swimmer!’ There was another very bad patch around her abortion in 1990, and one three years ago - perhaps the period of self-neglect commemorated in My Bed . When she goes down, she says, it’s like a spiral in which one failure reminds her of every other failure in her life - that’s why she could never face taking her driving test, because if she failed it would be like failing to win the Turner Prize and every other failure before that. But now she is determined to take her driving test and keep on taking it till she passes.
At least now she seems to have got out of the habit of destructive relationships that was such a feature of her teens and twenties. In those days, she says, she was so nihilistic she thought, ‘I am shit, and that is why I am treated like shit.’ Was success as good as she expected? ‘Better! I’m happier. I look after myself more. I’m kinder to myself. I’ve got a nice house. And if I didn’t want to work for a couple of years I wouldn’t have to - it’s a great feeling, to know I’m doing it because I want to do it. The downside is I get terrible stress and my mind goes blank and I lose concentration because there are people on my case all the time for all kinds of shit. People try constantly to use me and I hate it’
I must say that her life, what I saw of it, is incredibly pressured. The phone in her studio rings non-stop, and although she has a brilliant PA, Gemma, she has to keep making decisions. While I was there, she was having a great row with the ICA about the Beck’s Futures exhibition because they were planning to show her new film in the bar and she wanted it in the cinema. She told Gemma to relay the news that she wouldn’t be attending the opening party after all - and suddenly the director of the ICA was on the phone grovelling, saying of course she could have the cinema. ‘The wheel that squeaks gets the oil!’ she crowed as she put the phone down.
I was amazed to see that a fortnight before her White Cube opening, half the work was still incomplete. Her stepmother was busy sewing the blankets, her assistant was building the 17ft tower, Helter Skelter , which will be the centrepiece of the show, but she hadn’t even started the four paintings she had promised to make. All this, I’d have thought, was panic enough, but she had also agreed to appear on Have I Got News For You and said she ought to try and read the newspapers - though her main preparation would be choosing her lowest-cleavage outfit to frighten Ian Hislop.
She is also supposed to be writing a novel - she says it will have to be a novel rather than an autobiography because ‘one thing that success has taught me is censorship’. But why does she want to write? Are there things she can’t say in her art? ‘Yes, because - I should be careful what I say here, but I don’t think I’m visually the best artist in the world, right? I’ve got to be honest about this. But when it comes to words, I have a uniqueness that I find almost impossible in terms of art - and it’s my words that actually make my art quite unique.’
Aha! This used to be my own theory about Tracey, that she was a great writer and a merely so-so artist. If you see her drawings or her blankets from a distance, without reading the words, you think pretty but not much more. It is the words that give them their edge. That is why My Bed was such a breakthrough, because it didn’t rely on words - but I suspect it relied on our knowing stuff about her history which we only knew from her previous words. But I’ve now revised my theory because there is a piece of hers in the Tate that is only words, For Joseph Samuels, 1981 , and although it is vividly written, it is pretty tame by her standards. So she needs both - the fierceness of the words playing off the delicacy of the art - to really make her point.
Finally, I asked about this habit of hoarding things, the way she keeps archives of her life, never lets the past go. ‘Perhaps it’s because I never grew up.’ Or is it because she needs proof - as a teenager, did people call her a liar? ‘ Yes . And not just as a teenage girl but even as a woman. That’s a good theory, I like that. And maybe I don’t believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing... it’s like with my work, people say, “Oh, the honesty and the truth behind it” - but it’s all edited, it’s all calculated, it’s all decided. I decide to show this or that part of the truth, which isn’t necessarily the whole story, it’s just what I decide to give you.’ So with this interview - honest as far as it goes, I hope, but only a fragment of the whole Tracey.
Tracey Emin’s show, You Forgot to Kiss My Soul, is at White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 from 27 April.
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