Once More, With Feeling

Let's say it matters – that it's not just coincidence but communion or cosmic or kindred – that the British artist Tracey Emin was born the year that the American writer Sylvia Plath died. Not the same month, mind you: Plath (born 27 October, Scorpio) died on 11 February 1963, while Emin (born 3 July, Cancer) was ushered into the world five months later. Plath, who was born in Boston, died in an upstairs flat in Belsize Park, a far cry from the bald, wind-whipped sands of Emin’s birthplace of Margate, its stormy skies and fiery sunsets. Yet she would have appreciated its drama and extremity, and how a place can get inside you, shape your eyes and your sensibility, come to define home and childhood and dreaming and escape and return and pain and love; all the things that keep us going, no matter where we are, that make life life and art art: unwieldy, poetic, impossible, rewarding, revelatory.

Let’s say it matters, not just because of this uncanny proximity of time and place (though to some of us, these things are portentous), or because of what we might call overlaps in creative themes (death, rebirth, love, loss, fury, transcendence, female experience, the body, blood, poetry, art), but because both women have been termed, during their lifetimes (and for Plath, long after), ‘confessional’ artists, perhaps even confessional queens – the apex, the height of confessors, adept at pulling the inside out and raising it up for all to see. And while some (myself included) know this to be only the finest art, those who use the adjective frequently do not. So, let’s say it matters, most of all because it’s time – long overdue – to refashion a confessional canon in which women making art about their lives are considered not whisperers of unseemly personal secrets but anointed documenters of universal realities. As the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem about the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose stark prints show women and children living in violence and privation during the Second World War (shall we add these two women to our expanding canon?): ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.’

In Emin’s more than four decades-long oeuvre, art is that splitting open, that expression of the difficult truths of the self that will remain, in any case, complex and often ambiguous, without end: the questions and not the answers as the ongoing project of life. ‘I think art is a responsibility, because you’re putting things into the world,’ Emin tells Maria Balshaw in the catalogue that accompanies the 62-year-old artist’s exhibition at Tate Modern, her most comprehensive to date. ‘They’re going to be there forever, because that’s their intention.’ In the same conversation, she easily dismisses the ways in which her work was described in the past: ‘Back in the 90s, people used to say it was confessional art. It wasn’t. I wasn’t confessing anything at all to anybody. Nothing to confess. I was just trying to unravel everything and work out where it all came from, and why this was this, and why that was that. I wasn’t trying to shock anybody, either.’ Emin doesn’t say that this critique was deeply gendered, as well as classed, but she doesn’t really need to – it’s obvious, and anyway, what’s clear is that her work not only collapses but refuses the binaries that hold so many aesthetic (and moral, ideological, conceptual) categories in place: public, private, personal, political, internal, external, body, mind, micro, macro. For Emin, to make art with serious intent is to be, already, part of an ongoing history.

What does this look like? In no particular order: Hulking bronze sculptures, smooth and hard but somehow still fleshy and soft; a pair of legs; a body bent over; a woman lying on her back (we assume it’s a woman – although faceless, she is primal, like the Venus of Willendorf ). Smaller versions of the same, small enough to hold in your hand, which you want to do, as if you could keep them from being so exposed, even though that’s the point. A woman drawn, painted, embroidered – a form that becomes recognisable as the same woman each time: something about the long line of her limbs, the shape of her face, the texture of her hair, the curve of a shoulder, a slender arm or hand, although these parts of the body do not always connect. They are rendered in spare lines, which sometimes stretch or blur into the background and foreground of the image, blending with surroundings, such as a bed or an operating table, a pillow or a bathtub or an indeterminate ground, as if to say that her body – the female body in general – is so porous that it might, at any point, dissolve into its surroundings; or maybe her body, how it feels and what it has experienced, is so powerful that it overtakes her environment entirely, everything bleeds into the same rich hues.

A neon line, so like the line of the woman’s contours, that curves and swirls and loops in letters across walls, both outdoor and indoor, with exultant, longing phrases like – I whisper to My Past Do I have Another Choice, or Meet Me In Heaven I Will Wait For You, or It’s Not me Thats Crying it’s my Soul. An empty bed, sheets tangled, surrounded with the treasured items and detritus of a life, all placed on an equal scale: a bed, after all, is where every person begins and ends. Quilts peppered with dates and remembrances and exhortations, words that might shock but shouldn’t, and stories – painful, brash and honest vignettes – that are the same. (‘I wasn’t trying to shock anybody, either,’ she said, and, reading between the lines, we know, without too much trouble, that ‘shock’ is usually a result of people seeing things they don’t want to acknowledge.) A woman boxed into a room, nude, painting her last paintings ever. A woman dancing, with style and flair, smiling, twirling, free.

Emin’s oeuvre is immense, varied, and entirely singular – that line, you can spot it a mile away, and it’s the same with that particular phrasing, the way her language twists and turns, rose and thorns all at once, poetry with a sting like saltwater in your eyes. Her work also inaugurates a vital continuum of voices that speaks in similar terms about the power of subjectivity, how it transforms, like alchemy, if you fire it hot enough, into something that can split the world open. I hear echoes of confessional bedfellow Plath, who said ‘I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying – like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience … with an informed and intelligent mind. I think that personal experience … should be relevant and relevant to the larger things.’ By ‘larger things’, the poet – who also wrote ‘the blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it’ and ‘I am, I am, I am’ and ‘I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again’ and used the word ‘mad’ as fearlessly as Emin does – means the world outside the self, of which the self is always, anyway, a symptom. To regard personal experience with respect and rigour is to transform it into something not only communal but eternal.

‘Art is always emotional,’ says the American writer Wayne Koestenbaum, and Emin’s work, as well as how she works in the studio, is not just about how the art looks but how it feels. And not just how it feels to look at it, what it might express – to her or to any viewer – but how it feels to make it: that moment of release (we could say catharsis, exorcism, revelation, resurrection – more on that later), because things really do get stuck inside and need to come out, cannot otherwise find form and expression. Of her exhibition at Tate Modern, Emin notes that throughout its internal rhythms and passage of autobiographical time, heartbreak is a constant, for better and for worse. ‘That’s what binds me, that’s what keeps me, that’s the glue of me, knowing that things hurt, and being able to feel that,’ she reflects. ‘I think the worst thing in the world is to be numb.’

More echoes, but this time it’s Virginia Woolf, no stranger to the many heartbreaks of life (she suffered incestuous sexual abuse and domestic tyranny in her childhood, chronic depression, and numerous breakdowns in adulthood, dying by suicide in 1941), who writes, in ‘Sketch of the Past’ – a long autobiographical essay written in secret during the Blitz and published only posthumously – of ‘the shock-receiving capacity’ that makes her a writer: ‘I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it … I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.’

There’s that word again, ‘shock’, but here, as in Emin’s work, it means something different; and the idea of pain into pleasure is likewise complex. A ‘shock’ could be the bright detail of life noticed on any given day, but it can also be something imposed from without, unwanted, unchosen, that has the power to make the self feel torn, riven, split in two: the life before and the life after the thing (we might also use the word ‘trauma’) that revealed an unbearable quality to living (we might say living as a ‘woman’).

For example, rape, abuse, botched abortions, psychological distress, serious illness. Emin has suffered each, and at each turn, made it into art not only for herself to understand ‘why this was this and why that was that’, but so that others might understand the same of their own lives that inevitably include similar experiences (we might, again, say living as a ‘woman’).

The artist’s works about abortion and pregnancy are perhaps the most direct in this vein – for instance, her 1996 video How it feels, which chronicles an abortion gone wrong and the terrible health services provided before and after, and the large 2002 quilt The Last of the Gold, which instructs women what to do, immediately, if they know they want to terminate a pregnancy. It might, however, also be said of her later works: her vast canvases dripping with red and pink and blue, which show her, post bladder-cancer, in states of recovery, heartbreak, sexual abandon, love, despair; and, too, of her unflinching photographic series made 20 years later, Self-Portraits 2020–5. In these, we see a hand outstretched, intravenous tubes snaking around its wrist; a pile of bloodied gauze; a foot on a bathroom floor covered in white towels splotched bright red; a toilet with telltale pinkish water; a stoma from different angles, like an uncanny third nipple but instead a wound; and the artist, covering her bare breasts, using her iPhone to photograph herself in a hospital mirror, post-surgery, two bags extending from her lower abdomen, her face calm and focused, as if to say: here is the evidence: I survived, in spite of all odds, again. (I am, I am, I am.)

‘The peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to see // Them unwrap me hand and foot – / The big strip tease,’ Plath writes in ‘Lady Lazarus’, one of her most famous poems, a work of art about a woman who has been resurrected three times, a walking miracle of resolve, although it was written five months before she did not manage to continue her own life. Some critics have read it as a distasteful, suicidal dirge, but I think it is about how women touched by trauma are so often put on show, seen as alien, when in reality, it is their greatest power: to come out the other side. ‘Beware / Beware,’ she writes, ‘Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.’

Let’s say it matters, that there are so many women in so-called confessional arms when, 62 years after Plath’s death, which is 62 years after Emin’s birth, Emin is having A Second Life. ‘It’s about having the ability to change things and do things,’ she says, of the shift she has felt after her near-death from cancer. ‘And in my second life, I’ve found that strength to do that, that I didn’t have in the first life. A second life is what I’m going through now, and not many people have that chance.’ We should all be so lucky. Maybe we are.