Brutally honest or painfully simplistic? Tom Jeffreys on the Hayward Gallery's major new Tracey Emin survey show.
After several days of unsurprisingly intense media coverage, the much-hyped Tracey Emin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery has opened to the public. Part of the Festival of Britain, the exhibition – entitled Love is What You Want – is Emin's first major survey show here in London, and covers her entire career, from the early days in 1993 running the Shop with Sarah Lucas to representing Britain in the 2007 Venice Biennale and beyond. At the media view on Monday morning Emin called the show, “the biggest moment of my art career”.
On show are works across a whole range of media – hand-embroidered blankets, neon signs, monoprints, video, installation, and, controversially perhaps, the artist's own used tampons. Notable absences from the exhibition, however, are probably Emin's two most famous works, My Bed – shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 and currently owned by Charles Saatchi – and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 – the artist's aptly entitled appliquéd tent, destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004. Both works have been described, by Emin herself, as “seminal”.
If you're already a fan of Tracey Emin and her work – and many are – then you'll love this show. The usual themes of aggression, vulnerability, love, sex and gender are all very much to the fore – explored in Emin's characteristically direct style. Twelve blankets are embroidered with phrases such as “cum, pus, thoughts” or “vomit, tears, Barbies” and are replete with various typos, spelling and grammatical errors.
There's something of interest in the contradiction between the apparent rawness and spontaneity of Emin's language and the painstaking techniques used to disseminate it. This same contrast is also evident in Emin's neon works, to which an entire room at the Hayward is devoted. The words and slogans appear in Emin's own hurried handwriting, but of course they're then converted into glass tubes, filled with a combination of gases, wired up and hung on the gallery wall. The contrast between immediacy of sentiment and the time-consuming process of production is reminiscent, to some extent, of the Romantic poets, particularly as outlined in Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
There's humour here too, although it's limited to a couple of small works hidden outside on the Hayward terrace and Riding for a Fall, a video of Emin dressed as a raunchy cowgirl and trotting about on the beaches of Margate. In her much publicised interview with John Humphrys on on BBC Radio 4's Today programme prior to the show's opening, she declared, “I've got a sense of humour.” Sadly there's not enough evidence of it here – and it might be argued that there's something a little self-defeating about feeling the need to announce your own sense of humour.
In the final analysis, Emin's work comes down to a statement she herself makes in a letter to fellow YBA Gary Hume: “All that I say about ART – only really relates to me – it's my experience – in simple terms.” Evidently, many people identify with Emin and the issues she confronts in her work and the confrontational manner in which she does it. But personally, there's only so much Tracey Emin I can really take – this all feels so tiresomely adolescent.
Tracey Emin - Love is What You Want is at the Hayward Gallery until 29th August 2011.
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Photo credit: David Levene
www.southbankcentre.co.uk/tracey
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