My Bed, 1998, Tracey Emin
My Bed, 1998, Tracey Emin
Mattress, linens, pillows, rope, various memorabilia
79 x 211 x 234 (31 x 83 x 92)
Saatchi Gallery, London
My Bed is an installation realized by Tracey Emin. Tracey Emin (born 3 July 1963) is an English artist of Turkish Cypriot origin. She uses in her art really different mediums: needlework and sculpture, drawing, video and installation, photography and painting. It is important to point out that the artist is a woman. Woolf (quoted in Isaak, 1996, p.225) explains women’s absence from history and from cultural production in terms of the metaphor of the mirror: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size”. The question that feminists on both sides of the mirror are now considering is what it would look like if women had to take power, women have perfected through centuries of service to men and turn it to reflect the figure of woman at just its natural size. This is quite close to the guerilla girls’ discourse. Really often, the Emin Tracy likes to be part of her artworks but for My Bed, there are no picture, no written note, no physical trace of herself. Anyway, Tracey Emin is at the same time present and absent of My Bed. For instance, the after pill may refer to the artist’s personal experience toward maternity because he had two abortions. In 1999, she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited My Bed. The bed refers to a place where people might be born and might die. It is a place that can be related to pleasure (la petite mort, the little death) or pain (la mort, death). The bed is often first associated with the idea of having a rest but here, the artist transforms it in a place of fear, pain and anguish. Body fluids have opposite meanings as well. For instance, menstrual blood has really powerful meanings. A woman who menstruate proves her ability to have children but in the same time it means that she is not pregnant at this time. Blood refers to life and death, health and disease. Since the modernity, we tend to hide the body functions. “The body is where the power bearing definitions of social and sexual normality are, literally, embodied, and is consequently the site of discipline and punishment for deviation of those norms” (Fiske 1987, p.248). People refuse the identity proposed by the dominant ideology and use the body as a material against morality, discipline and control. Tracey Emin choose subversion by displaying all these disturbing objects. This bed has an international resonance. The syncretism transcends the cosmological ceremonial from a factual approach. The viewer can feel that Tracey Emin has been influenced by people such as Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele. “Gender and sexual preference – together with nationality, ethnicity, politics, and religion – all seem to have some impact on the meaning of art” (Freeland, 2001, p.148). External facts, like internal facts, are important to understand this artwork. My Bed has a meaning grounded in both culture in general and in the specifics of this historical context. Jameson (1991, p.54) states that “the political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.” Mixing genre and using intertextuality can be seen as a new attempt to democratize art, where modernism has failed.
Focusing on the artwork makes some themes and symbols popping out. Brown (2006, p.100) writes that once, the artist has explained that this artwork looked like a “crime scene where someone had been fucked to death”. Signs of chaos coexist in a terrible jumble. Metaphysic themes are referred to, such as out of fashion themes. The bed is the punctuation of our lives. It is related to pleasant souvenirs such as tragical ones. It is the place where the viewer may had had his last relation with his or her partner, it can be the place where a member of the family is dead. On the opposite it can be the memory of a delectable nap or the birth of someone. The wooden bed surrounded by dirty clutter is a stylish artwork with a minimalist design, far from some other over-dramatic pieces of art of the artist. The sheets are stained with urine, a fluid used in many contemporary pieces of art like Piss Christ by Andres Serrano in 1989. But here the aesthetic of the fluid is negative since it is linked to incontinence and by extension, emotional troubles and psychological disorders. Several objects are lying on the floor, next to the bed: a toy, bottles of alcohol, bandages, used tissues, rotten food, cigarette ends. Several objects are linked to women; knickers soiled with menstrual blood, contraceptive pill, after pill, pregnancy test, bloodied condoms and tampons. The artwork has evolved since there were a few differences in the way the things were displayed, between two exhibitions.
The context gives to the viewer some important keys to understand the artwork. This installation was first shown in 1998 in Tokyo’s Sagacho Exhibition Space. Although these early events caused Tracey Emin to be well known in art circles, she was largely unknown by the public until she appeared on a Channel 4 television program in 1997. It was an ostensibly serious debate show about that year’s Turner Prize, and the artist appeared completely drunk, swearing, insulting the other panel members and saying that she wanted to go home to her mum. Two years later, in 1999, Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize herself and exhibited My Bed at the Tate Gallery. There was considerable media furore about this, particularly as the sheets of the bed were stained yellow, and the floor surrounding it had items from her room such as condoms, empty cigarette packets, a pair of knickers with menstrual stains and other detritus including a pair of slippers. The bed was presented as it had been when she had stayed in it for several days feeling suicidal because of relationship difficulties. It is important to precise that two performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, jumped one day on the bed with bare torsos in order to “improve” the work, which they thought had not gone far enough. They called their performance Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey’s Bed. The men also had a pillow fight on the bed for around fifteen minutes, to applause from the crowd, before being removed by security guards. The artists were detained but no further action was taken. My Bed was bought by Charles Saatchi for £150,000 and displayed as part of the first exhibition when the Saatchi Gallery opened its new premises at County Hall, London. Saatchi also installed the bed in a dedicated room in his own home. Neal (2006, p.97) points out that this installation reminds the viewer of other different works of the artist: “These include the reassembled beach hut The Last Thing I Said to You was Don’t Leave me Here (The Hut) 1999; once used for holidays with Sarah Lucas, and also destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire); the helter-skelter Self Portrait 2001, a seaside pier Knowing My Enemy 2002; a fairground roller-coaster It’s Not the Way I Want to Die 2005; and Salem 2005” because they are made from wood and refer to the threat of collapse. Tracey Emin had as well used the topic of the bed with her sleeping Tent or her text Always Glad to See You. Artworks by other artists can be point out as well since the topic of the bed had previously been an inspiration for Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, J.M.W. Turner, Edvard Munch or Eugène Delacroix. Because of intertextuality and cannibalization of the past, the viewer can come across some issues such as sensation of déjà-vu, vacuity or nostalgia. This installation is the one for what Tracey Emin is the most famous even if she did not win the Turner Prize in 1999 when it was exhibited in The Tate gallery. Craig Brown wrote a satirical piece about My Bed for Private Eye entitled My Turd. Emin’s former boyfriend, Stuckist artist Billy Childish, stated that he also had an old bed of hers in the shed which he would make available for £20,000. Tracey Emin is not the first artist to exhibit an installation so the public already know this kind of art and is not totally shocked.
Art would not be art if there was no observer. This bed reminds me of mine. This object has an big importance in my life because it is the place where I am born, where dream, sleep, have a rest and have sex. But in the same time, it is as well the place where I stay when I am ill (like in a Virginia Wool’s novel On Being Ill), when I feel lonely and maybe it is where I will die. We live in a world of signs and our enjoyment of art comes from other knowledge that we have but all the people do not have these knowledge so it can be wondered if sometimes, postmodernism is not a bit elitist. On the other side, postmodernism expresses the idea that each person has something interesting to say. And each of us can have his own sensibility, his own approach and understanding. It is all about emotion – the emotion coming from art, not from reality. “Lyotard’s sublime is a self-consciously post-modern mode in which all striving for correspondence between real and concept is abandoned: the aesthetic is to be preserved in the form of a non-utilitarian autonomy.” (Waugh 1992, p.115). And it is dangerous to try to do an academic rank of art; each attempt to create is an inscription in a mode of representation. “As Deleuze argues with respect to Plato, the attempt to distinguish between good and bad copies of reality may be seen to found a system of moral defense against the principle of simulation which governs all forms or representation” (Zurbrugg 1997, p.129). The issue goes further than the own taste of the viewer. Habermas (cited in Huyssen 1987, p.206) argues that “postmodernism is not so much a question of style as it is a question of politics and culture at large”. Winterson (as quoted in Freedman, 2006, p.6) states that: “Arguments that begin, But is is art? miss the point. The point is that Tracey Emin has done more for public awareness of art, both as a force in its own right and as necessary part of life, than any other living artist”. At first sight, the viewer can associate this bed with other well-known ready made such as Wahrol’s Brillo box or Duchamp’s Fontaine. But this is more than a non-art object placed in a fine-art context even if it looks like conceptual art. Our way of seeing can shift to a traditionally, like a mordant Dutch still life. Many transformations have occurred and the bed is not displayed like the artist bought it in IKEA. Rather than “beauty”, the emotion that people may feel is more disgust. The purpose is not a canon of ideal nor an object of desire. If according to Kant, beauty is immanent, one must say that this artwork is not “beautiful” but in the same time the viewer may feel other emotions that are as valuable. This artwork does not display any text from the author, while other works of Emin do. So, the viewer is free to has his or her own reading of the installation. This artwork reminds us of our potential decay, through the consumption of drugs, lack of hygiene, risky behaviors. It talks to the viewer, wherever he or she comes from: there are some foreign coins lying on the table, the health warning of the cigarette packet is written in Polish and the candle holder is labelled with a price in dollars. The idea of separation and travel is symbolized as well by the suitcases. This artwork makes sense in a globalized world. But maybe “internationalization” would be more appropriate than “globalization”, because the last word has a negative echo (Abedini, 2008). The bed experience for the body can be linked to a microcosm of the universe. The making of art is then close to a spiritual content. There is a cosmological dimension to her work although she as a unique experience was the starting point. Morgan (quoted in Robertson and McDaniel, 2006, p.208) states that “the potential for artwork to manifest some form of mystical communication that transcends our ordinary reality is great. Abstraction lends itself naturally to this goal, since many of the concepts of spirituality are by nature abstract (such as ‘infinity’). As a conceptual piece of art, I think that it is really important for the viewer to be aware of the theory behind it in order to really appreciate My Bed. When I watch it, I experience something unique. It is important for me because it raises my perspective in life. Tracey Emin might have expressed different things from what I actually perceive but I appreciate the possibility of this unique experience. I regret not to have seen the real “bed”. It is a bit sad that I can only see this installation through a medium which is photography.
References
• Abedini, R and Hughes, P. (4 December 2008). Open lecture: The Necessity of a Multiculturally focused Graphic Design (The international seminar diversity through the arts). Den Haag: The Hague University.
• Alvarado, Manuel; Buscombe, Edward; Collins, Richard; (2000); Representation and Photography: A screen education reader; Palgrave Macmillan
• Barthes, Roland; (1993); A Roland Barthes Reader; Vintage edition
• Benjamin, Walter; (1932); “A Short History of Photography”; in Selected Writings 2
• Bolton, Richard; (1989); The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press
• Bourdieu, P and Darbel, A. (1969). The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public. Traslated by Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman. Cambridge: Polity press.
• Brown, N. (2006). Tracey Emin. London: Tate Publishing.
• Büchler, Pavel(2000); Ghost Stories; Pavel Bücher and Proboscis
• Buchloh, B. (1981). Figures of authorithy, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art.
• Edwards, Steve; (2007); Photography: A Very Short Introduction; Oxford University Press
• Elliot, Patrick and Schnabel, Julian. Tracey Emin: Twenty Years (National Galleries of Scotland, 2008) ISBN 978-1906270087
• Emin, Tracey. Borrowed Light: the British Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2007 (London: British Council, 2007) ISBN 0863555896
• Emin, Tracey. Tracey Emin: Works 1963 – 2006 (London: Rizzoli, 2006) ISBN 0-8478-2877-8
• Emin, Tracey. Strangeland (London: Scepter, 2005) ISBN 0-3407-6944-0
• Emin, Tracey. I Can Feel Your Smile (New York: Lehmann Maupin, 2005)
• Emin, Tracey. The Is Another Place (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Limited edition, 2002) ISBN 1-9013-5215-3
• Emin, Tracey, Brown, Neal and Kent, Sarah and Collings, Matthew. Tracey Emin (London: Jay Jopling/White Cube, 1998) ISBN 0-9522-6902-3
• Fiske, J. 1987. Television Culture. London: Routledge
• Frascina, F and Harris, J (eds.). (1992). Art in modern culture: an anthology of critical texts. London: The Open University.
• Freedman, C. (2006). Tracey Emin. New-York: Rizzoli.
• Freeland, C. (2001). But is it art? New-York: Oxford University Press.
• Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logique of Late Capitalism. London: Verso.
• Harrison, C. 1997. Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hughes, R. 1980. The Shock of the New. London: Thames and Hudson.
• Isaak, J.A. (1996). Feminism and contemporary art: The revolutionary power of women’s laughter. London: Routledge.
• Robertson, J and McDaniel, C. (2005). Themes of Contemporary Art. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Sontag, Susan; (1979); On Photography; Penguin Books
• Strinati, D. 1995. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. Routledge: London.
• Waugh, P. (ed) 1992. Postmodernism: a Reader. London: Edward Arnold.
• Zurbrugg, N. 2000. Cultural Vices: the Myths of Postmodern Theory. Amsterdam: G and B Arts International Print.
• Zurbrugg, N. 1997. Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact. London: Sage.