In the winter of 1993, to prepare for her White Cube solo debut, Tracey Emin gathered up all the oil paintings she’d made at art school and fed them to a bonfire in her then-boyfriend Carl Freedman’s garden. She kept the ashes. Alongside polaroid evidence of each artwork, they would end up in the show, titled My Major Retrospective 1982–93. At the time, Emin was barely 30.
There’s that nerve. It came to define the Young British Artists (YBAs), who, between meals at The French House and commandeering The Groucho Club, launched a takeover of the stiff British art scene (inflaming the tabloids in the process). But Emin wasn’t being funny – nor attention-seeking if you were to listen to the press. She genuinely believed it would be her sole exhibition, hence the name. Only later would we learn through the short film How It Feels (1996) and performance piece Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996) that she was in the throes of an “emotional suicide” and estrangement from painting, triggered by a botched abortion and a paralysing crisis of faith.
It’s at this juncture that Emin’s second, sweeping retrospective at Tate Modern, A Second Life, begins. The name came to the artist a year and a half prior. Staged in a wing of the gallery normally reserved for old masters, the exhibition comprises eleven rooms with a fracture halfway to delineate between before and after. The walls are coated in Farrow & Ball’s inky Stiffkey Blue, which creates the sense that one has breached an inner sanctum. There’s the polaroids, the patchwork quilts, and a nine-page CV which lists in dot points, and importantly, Emin’s own words, all the major bits between the artist’s birth in Croydon, 10 minutes behind her twin brother Paul, and the making of Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With or ‘The Tent’, which prized intimacy over sex. (Why so many of her artworks have garnered nicknames isn’t just down to her proclivity for long titles, but a testament to their persistence and, perhaps, the Mandela Effect.)
“Being beyond categorisation is the point, and Emin has survived every attempt. In fact, she’s survived worse.”
If Emin’s first retrospective was underpinned by a spiritual death, the latest and largest ever survey of her work is prompted by an aggressive bladder cancer diagnosis in 2020 that very nearly killed her and the artist’s come-to-God moment afterwards. In this new chapter, the Dame lives with a stoma, without a bladder and much of the surrounding organs, in chronic pain but in the present, determined to commit whatever time is left to art-making. She relocated to her coastal hometown, Margate, after the surgeries and has since thrown her energy into funding an art school there, while contributing to the town’s cultural renaissance. All the while, painting (only now in acrylic) and casting seismic bronzes with the same gusto as her late friend and collaborator Louise Bourgeois.
Even without the artworks Emin torched (or say, ‘The Tent’, which was lost in the infamous 2004 Momart warehouse fire), Tate’s curators had almost five decades of work to sift through. Co-curator of the exhibit and Assistant Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, Jess Baxter, says they selected Why I Never Became A Dancer (1995) as a springboard to develop A Second Life. It contains “a little bit of everything in Tracey’s practice… The fuck you to men and misogyny, storytelling, and this sense of unease and discomfort”. Laid over grainy Super 8 footage of Margate’s sleazy golden mile, Emin steadily recounts her discovery of sex at 14. (Six months earlier she’d been sexually assaulted while walking home; in hindsight, she’s said this period of promiscuity was a bid for control.) It was instinctive, thrilling, and she did it often, with men sometimes double her age. When the pleasure waned, she found it again in dancing. A disco final was her golden ticket to London, away from her growing body count. On stage, jubilant and sure she would win, the clapping audience turned poisonous, and she was heckled off by the chant “slag, slag, slag”. The culprits? Take a guess.
The men should be on an offenders register. But I’ll settle for what happens next. In the shadowy gallery, Emin declares triumphantly: “I’m better than all of them. And I left Margate and I left those boys. Shane, Eddie, Tony, Doug, Richard; this one’s for you!” She bounds into vision, dressed in red and now an adult, whirling and swaying to Sylvester’s disco hit You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real). The middle finger is implicit.
If this film tackles the first wounds and humiliations of misogyny, the next two document the indignity of its contempt. Standing in a raffish pinstripe suit outside the clinic where it happened, Emin approaches the gruesome specifics of her first abortion with a matter-of-factness. In another room, on a tiny box telly, she sits at a kitchen table next to her Mum, Pamela Cashin, who admits she would see her daughter having a child as a failure, even now, as an adult. Emin digs her heels in. Is that because she thinks becoming a Mother limited her own potential? And why does Cashin not feel the same towards her brother, Paul? The conversation is bracing and honest.
Longtime creative director of Tracey Emin Studio, Harry Weller, helped steer the show. Some of Emin’s latest paintings are more abstracted, though in many you can spy a bed or her beloved cats, Teacup and Pancake. Weller, with his proximity to Tracey and her practice, would step in and point out important details, like the first time she painted her stoma bag, gesturing to a triangle on one of the figures. “All these details revealing themselves as we worked made deciding the placement of artworks really helpful,” Baxter shares.
Notably absent from the exhibit are long strips of wall text. Captions are kept brief. “Tracey believes the work must speak for itself,” says Baxter. What serves as an accessibility tool would’ve been jarring here, given how self-explanatory much of Emin’s art already is. Since she’s often describing her own experiences, “it would then feel weird for a museum to say ‘...and then Tracey had X Y Z happen to her,’” Baxter continues.
Even still, words swarm her work. Misspelled words, confessions, forthright recollections. There was a six-month period in the early 90s when Sarah Lucas and Emin had The Shop in Bethnal Green, and Emin would sit up all night tapping on a typewriter, flirting with the idea of becoming a writer instead. She did, in a way. With her blankets and neons. Her 2005 memoir Strangeland. The uncensored Instagram captions. I read she was once a pen pal to FKA Twigs.
Given the sheer amount of moving parts, it took three weeks to install A Second Life as opposed to Tate’s usual two. Baxter recalls crouching in the corner of the exhibit over her laptop, with all the tiny plastic bags of objects spread out like a crime scene. For Exorcism… (1996), Tate had to fly in a specialist from Rome because he was the only one who could recreate the room. It’s one of Baxter’s highlights from the show.
“Imagine being naked in a room where you can hear everyone but can’t see them,” she begins. For the original performance piece, fish-eye lenses were installed for visitors to peer in. In this rendition, a rectangle is cut from the box housing the showpiece and audiences have to queue for a glimpse. “I never asked Harry why it changed,” Baxter says. “I think it’s maybe easier to install.” But Emin’s instinct to lock herself away for three and a half weeks in a Stockholm gallery to reconcile her relationship with painting “feels so relatable to my own life”. Baxter explains how this was before Marina Abramovic was really toying with voyeurism, so it was trailblazing as performance art. In the current staging of Exorcism… (1996) “it’s as if she’s just left the room: the discarded orange peel, the CDs and empty wine bottles”.
To cross from one life to another, you must walk down a darkened corridor. On one side are lithe polaroids of Emin, circa 2001, in a black lace bra and gold necklace, her figure contorting before the flash. On the other side, iPhone photos of Emin as she is now, post-cancer, with her weeping stoma and ageing, albeit resolute body.
Like Emin, Baxter was also born in south London. She first heard about her in primary school. “I remember a teacher saying, ‘art can be anything, even a disgusting unmade bed.’” As a teen, she was attracted to the artist for her reputation as loud and unapologetic. “I thought she sounded cool”. The curator’s first encounter with My Bed (1998) was seeing it installed. “It was very theatrical and emotional for everyone,” she recalls. Tate conservators were “twitching with excitement” to begin but were under strict instruction to only prepare the wooden box for the bed frame and mattress. “Which is foul by the way,” laughs Baxter. “I know you see peeks of it under the sheets but there’s even bigger stains underneath.” The rest would be placed carefully by Emin.
Baxter describes the ceremonial hush that fell over the galleries. She watched Emin flick out the bedsheets with a practiced practicality, arranging each memento – “many of which hail from a different era of her life, which she no longer is part of,” remarks the curator. “She no longer needs the tampons because she doesn’t have periods. She no longer smokes, drinks, or eats sweets. Her life is so different now. It’s like a stranger was in that bed.”
“Whether it’s on the subject of abortion, rape, neglect, heartbreak, or illness, Emin is decidedly against internalising the shame – real or projected. Instead, she gives form to it, extracts it and forces us to sit with the messy aftermath. We can’t hoover, tidy up or pull a duvet over it all, only consider the pain. That she was vulnerable enough to invite us in has always been her edge.”
All up, it took Emin only an hour or two to assemble. At the original Turner Prize presentation of My Bed, two female performers staged a pillow fight on the bed, causing one of the pillows to split down the middle. In the past, Emin had hidden the evidence. For this presentation, she placed the pillow face up. Baxter suggests it’s a sign that Emin has forgiven the women. Or maybe she just wanted to be truthful about the sculpture’s scars.
The sculpture is what most people imagine when they think of Emin. We all anticipate it as we wander through the exhibition, it’s on A Second Life’s posters after all. The room is sparse. A bronze crucifix hangs on the wall. Beside it, a sky-blue neon reads: “It’s not me that’s crying. It’s my soul.” In a corner, two vintage suitcases are packed, waiting. “Tracey’s not overtly religious at all,” Baxter prefaces. “But she’s very spiritual and she wanted the room to become more about ascension and the body as a temporary place.”
One can’t help but consider the 35-year-old who bared so much to a buttoned-up public. The scene is neither scandalous nor sordid, as all the headlines first insisted. Baxter admits that she’d expected something “far worse” too. “But when I saw it, all of the objects were so familiar to me as a woman and none of them were horrible.” A nest of bloodied undies and rumpled sheets, a bedside stool cluttered in melted candles, tubs of sauce, paracetamol sheets, polaroids, and cigarette butts which could’ve easily been cups of curdled tea. A room that was of service to you and not the other way around. A place to retreat and lick your wounds. The objects themselves are relics now, newspapers, dirty slippers, an untouched Orangina bottle. Yet, to the generation that coined ‘bed-rotting’, the scene is strikingly contemporary.
“So, you would’ve thought that we’d put it in the first life, because it was so adamantly of that time,” says Baxter. “But we wanted to reframe it.” What is a bed when the person who owns it is older, sick, and living with a disability? “My Bed has always been a universal work but it’s no longer a place of heartbreak,” Baxter explains. “It’s now a place someone has come to because their body has broken down and the bed is the only place they can be held. It’s a different emotional charge.”
Sadness once permeated this bed. Originally, Emin had included a noose among the detritus, but this, as she decided last minute, would’ve been overkill. Now, under the reframing, recovery is the baseline. Still, women suffer in private. Her critics, it seems, would prefer it this way. Whether it’s on the subject of abortion, rape, neglect, heartbreak, or illness, Emin is decidedly against internalising the shame – real or projected. Instead, she gives form to it, extracts it and forces us to sit with the messy aftermath. We can’t hoover, tidy up or pull a duvet over it all, only consider the pain. That she was vulnerable enough to invite us in has always been her edge.
The final rooms are filled with paintings created in the years following her brush with death. “Tracey thinks of them like tarot cards,” Baxter offers. “Harry always says she’s divining the truth about the future or her past from the canvases.”
I am nosy and decide to flick through the guestbook at the end of the exhibition. Overwhelmingly, it’s filled with congratulations and encouragement. But I spy a cruel comment, and it stings. Did we both experience the same show? But it strikes me how, like her artwork, Emin is a person who is not easily drawn. She grew up working class but now has property in London and Provence. She left school at 13, but has an MA from the Royal Academy of Arts. Her Mum has Romanichal heritage; her dad was a Turkish Cypriot. Formerly a lifelong Labour voter, she did elect the Tories twice (for the next general election she’s considering the Green Party). She’s loved women and men. She’s had two abortions. People remember her for being mouthy and “laddettish”, a dyed-in-the-wool party girl, but she’s sober now. Once a swimmer, a cyclist, a dancer, her body is mercurial and requires constant care. Maybe this causes confusion. People don’t know what to make of Emin and her art, the two so intrinsically linked, even all these years later. Enjoy its confessional nature but ask if it shifts the needle? Or worse, choose to wilfully misread it. But being beyond categorisation is the point, and Emin has survived every attempt. In fact, she’s survived worse.
Weeks later, on Instagram I see a video of school kids climbing the contours of her mammoth bronze I Followed You Until The End (2024) in Tate Modern’s grassy forecourt. The same fate awaits us all. But in art, at least, you are reborn a third, fourth, fifth time, in ways unimagined and new.
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Feature image: Tracey Emin A Second Life at Tate Modern installation view. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan).
