The Nineties: When Surface was Depth

By foregrounding sexual confession, accounts of her own despair and the innermost secrets of her relationships with friends, lovers and family, Emin has slipped into the whole current cultural climate which puts forward soft-core sociology as a subtle form of authorized, and highly ambiguous pornography: the daytime-TV studio debates that cleverly mingle sex with violence, the broadsheet columnists who offer up every last detail of their private lives as insights into the way we live now, and the docu-soap television programmes that derive their power from zooming in on the breakdown of their subjects.

‘That’s the whole reason why I’m popular,’ she says. ‘It’s the way the psyche of the nation is right now. Ten years ago, in terms of art, there was no room for me anywhere. No galleries would show my work or listen to my ideas. They’d presume me to be pathetic, and self-indulgent …’

Then Emin gives another of those laughs, and makes a kind of ‘yes, I know what you’re thinking’, eyes-raised-to-Heaven expression of self-criticism, before adding, ‘And there’s a lot of people who still think that I am pathetic and self-indulgent …’ When you meet her, Emin seems fragile to the point of bird-like: a petite, slender woman wearing embroidered mules and an elegantly simple dress, with a pink cashmere cardigan loosely knotted around her waist. She looks much younger than her thirty-seven years. The force of her personality seems to reside in her almond-shaped, coffee-coloured eyes – the strongest evidence of her Turkish Cypriot background – which can shift their expression from mean suspicion to melting vulnerability from one second to the next. She seems too small for the large red sofa on which she is sitting, in her vast, top-floor studio loft in the heart of Whitechapel – the district of London’s East End that is enjoying renewed fashionability due to its increasing population of young artists, and their accompanying galleries and cafes.

‘During Thatcherism,’ Emin continues, ‘if you didn’t fit in with the crowd, you were on the outside, and if you were on the outside then you were a nobody. And that was the general feeling for everything, no matter what your place was in the hierarchy: you had to fucking fit in, and if you didn’t – forget it. And the whole culture was built on that. But get rid of Thatcherism, and everything was turned around. Then, it became the cult of the individual, the loser and the outsider – because those were the types who had been ignored for fifteen years.

‘So suddenly we’ve got everything from “The Jerry Springer Show” to Princess Diana’s confessions on TV, or Paula Yates saying all those things the other night that – well, I didn’t find them difficult to listen to, but I did find them surprising. That your husband died from this auto-wanking thing rather than committing suicide. But that’s how much things have changed: there’s an audience who want to listen to these things now, whereas before there wouldn’t have been. It’s like people want to watch “East-Enders” because they don’t want to think about their own lives; then you’ve got this other thing where you home in on real people’s tragedies, lives and stories. And people feel that they can relate to that.

‘But that’s also why a lot of people don’t like my work – they’re sick of me. But the fact that I’m there is because of the psyche of the way that people are thinking now. And of course, that’s all going to change – I know that. But I’ve always done self-portraits, anyway. It’s like I read Julie Burchill’s autobiography, I Knew that I was Right All Along, and I read her column, too, and there are loads of cross-over things with my work in that.’

Kneeling on the floor behind her, an assistant is working on one of Emin’s famous embroidered textiles: a large square montage of fabrics that shouts out its witty slogans (‘Planet Thanet’, for instance) in what look like letters made of fuzzy felt, as part of a vivid, visual cacophony of accusations, confessions and emblematic signage. At a glance, it looks like a multicoloured version of the graffiti in a bus shelter, but it is a strand of Emin’s work that is compelling, somehow managing to coerce the reader into studying every last centimetre of its public announcement of private feelings.

In terms of its artistic lineage, it brings to mind the feminist reinvention of embroidery samplers made by women artists in ‘The Subversive Stitch’ exhibition, or the ‘Fun City Bikini’ pieces made back in 1970 for the ‘Cunt Power’ issue of Oz magazine. Similarly, the famous poster campaign developed by the Madeley Young Women’s Group in the early 1980s, using slogans to educate boys in their social treatment of girls – ‘We hate you when you call girls slags’ for example, or, ‘What You Staring At?’ – rehearsed aspects of the sentiments and tactics that can be found in Emin’s embroideries.

But where the artistic precursors of Tracey Emin’s aesthetic were usually defining the political position of women’s collective experience, Emin articulates her personal experience as a wholly autobiographical, multimedia epic. Her drawings have an expressionistic intensity that has earned them comparisons with sexually charged and neurotically taut works by Egon Schiele.

Expressing the experience of loneliness and pain arising from violation – or a sense of having colluded with acts of violation – and the inevitable, accompanying self-hatred, Emin’s art could be seen as both a calling to account of the people who have shaped her life, and as a purgative ritual through which she attempts to regain her innocence. In this way, she claims her accounts of personal experience have a political validity.

And in this there is a kind of Napoleonic ambition. Emin presents herself through her art in grand, self-enshrining gestures, which somehow manage to mingle supreme arrogance with an endearing and courageous streak of pure heroism. Having presented her work in ‘The Tracey Emin Museum’, she then called her first one-person show, at Jay Jopling’s powerful White Cube gallery, ‘My Major Retrospective’ (on the grounds that she thought that this would be her first and last ‘proper’ exhibition). In one particular work, ‘Montenegro’ (1997) she has made a small army of tanks out of matchboxes and matches, each bearing a tiny flag with ‘Emin’ written on it, making their way across a classroom map of the world.

‘When I was at Maidstone College of Art, what I liked was that everything had a Marxist bent. So instead of just hearing lecturers, they’d get in the women from Greenham Common, or the striking miners. We even had a lecture from Sinn Fein, although they had to hold it after five o’clock, as opposed to within the college hours. But we were all interested to hear what they had to say. So people were bringing living history into the college, so we weren’t just studying in this little bubble of art school; they were trying to make us aware of what was happening politically and socially, and I’ll always be grateful for that. By going to Maidstone, I learned that art can be bigger and broader than just art.

‘There is a politics behind what I do, but that’s not my priority. So, for example, when I published a first-hand account of my abortion in a national newspaper, that was going to be pretty fucking political – particularly when you’ve got fucking Blair suddenly saying that he doesn’t really agree with abortion. So that’s going beyond art, that’s bigger than art. I got a load of letters from the Pro-Life, Pro-Choice people, and from women who had had a termination and felt that they’d made a mistake. They were people who felt that I’d actually said what it was like to have an abortion, rather than simply giving an opinion about it.’

While she was at Maidstone College of Art, prior to attending the Royal College of Art, Emin began to develop the personal and artistic stance for which she has become famous. The college’s social secretary for two years, she organized such events as the ‘Ideologically Unsound Talent Show’ – as a riposte to the Marxist leanings of the college – and also became something of a local legend. She recalls how a banner in the main hall, proclaiming ‘Smash Racism’, was doctored by a student to read ‘Smash Tracism’.

And there is an element in this anecdote that seems to hint at the darker side of her ambivalent yet addictive relationship to being known as a vivacious character. In her film and text, ‘Why I Never Became a Dancer’ (1995), she recounts how she ran out of a disco dancing competition in 1978 because what she thought were the cheers of a supportive crowd were in fact the jeers of a group of men – some of whom she had had casual sex with – chanting, ‘Slag, slag, slag’. Similarly, in her paintings of having anal sex, there is an ambiguous mingling of self-hatred, accusatory polemic and sensationalist shock tactic. There is a strong sense, conveyed by the memoirs related in her art, that in desperately wanting to be popular, or loved, Emin has either debased herself or been exploited. In one of her text pieces she writes, ‘Happy to die for love, that’s me and it’s sad.’

‘If I was comprised of lots of different people, and I had to list them, I know that Silly Cow would be one of the first on my list, and Spoiled Brat would be another. Then there would be, Compassionate and Caring, Loyal and Lap-dog. I’m like one of those dogs who would walk across a whole continent to see my master again. It’s a bit pathetic, but it’s true. A lot of my friends, who are quite critical of me, say that I have standards and that I get into trouble when I try to make them apply to other people. I don’t lie, for instance – try that one out – and I’m a faithful person. In fact, I have been unfaithful twice in my life – once was just a kiss with another person – but I wouldn’t go through that hell again.’

Emin increasingly uses writing and text as the most direct means of communication within her work. She has given public readings of her work, and has self-published two collections of her writings, Always Glad to See You and Exploration of the Soul. Her style wanders between a stream-of-consciousness outpouring of her personal feelings, to a form of vernacular, anecdotal storytelling that reads rather like letters to herself or to the subject of the piece. In this, her literary ambitions follow in a tradition of female confessional writers, from Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, through to the writings of Kathy Acker. And, in many ways, she adapts the notion of confessional writing to that broader culture of confession that she sees as currently supporting her reputation.

Subsequent to her drunken appearance on a TV debate about the Turner Prize, Emin is turning to writing – or the idea of writing – more and more, as a retreat from what she regards as the mounting pressures of her celebrity. Most importantly, she wants to devote herself to writing a book, which her agent, Jay Jopling, is already proposing to publishers.

‘There haven’t been many people drunk on television: there was Oliver Reed, George Best and myself. I think that the nation likes it because it shows the vulnerability within us all. I mean everyone gets pissed and makes an arsehole of themselves, but not in front of four million people. I was told that the viewing figures for that programme went from one and a half million to four million in the time it took me to walk off.

‘I want my life to quieten down, and I have quite a few personal problems that I can’t sort out because I’m on the run all the time, in my head. I drink too much. I’ve cut down my drinking by sixty per cent, but I still have a very bad problem when I go out socially. If I do the book thing, it means that I can solve things by being peaceful and quiet. I could go on trains to places I haven’t been before. There are loads of Holiday Inns which are built on bypasses and things, and some of them have got swimming pools; I could go there and just write for four days.

‘When I start my book I’m going to be writing two thousand words a day, every day. That’ll take me a couple of hours. I write really fast, stream of consciousness, and while there might be a few things which don’t make any sense when I read them back, at least I’ve got the ideas down. It’ll be a book of short stories, and the fiction will come in where I change some names and places. I’ve written one book about my life from the moment of my conception to losing my virginity when I was thirteen; this’ll be the follow-up – my life from age thirteen to twenty-one.’

Ultimately, people’s opinion of Tracey Emin – as a current phenomenon – is based and divided on whether they perceive her brand of autobiographical art, and her promotion of it, to be a sincere and socially edifying act of personal catharsis or simply an exercise in self-publicity. And this is an argument that can run and run, without ever reaching a useful conclusion. For every critic who finds Emin’s art to be courageous and liberating, there will be another who denounces its provoking of controversy, or the questions that it raises about the role of fame within the constitution of contemporary art.

While it is easy to find people who might offer spiteful or envious comments about Emin, and even easier to find people who cannot sing her praises too loudly, she appears to possess the ability to discourage simple objective critique about her practice and the phenomenon of her current success. And if the direct polarization of opinion about an artist is a test of his or her significance, then Emin is clearly significant.

‘She is a very significant presence within Young British Art,’ says the critic and art historian, Richard Cork. ‘There is a strong sense of vulnerability in her work, and the feeling that the only way for her to proceed is to try and exorcize some trauma from her past. She doesn’t seem to exclude anything from this process of self-disclosure, and while this could quite easily degenerate into a fairly unbearable form of narcissism, she does get away with it. And I think that this is because she is not trying to raise herself above criticism or self-criticism; she is clearly trying to deal honestly with her past, but there is no suggestion that she has achieved serenity.’

‘I was talking to someone the other night, and why the hell should I still be an outsider when I’m sixty?’ says Emin, with regard to her position in the cultural establishment. ‘There’s no reason for it. I’d be like the really interesting, funny guy who you meet in the pub when you’re fifteen, and then when you’re thirty-six he’s still in there – only now he’s fifty-eight and still sitting in the same fucking pub in the same corner. I’m not interested in becoming like that. I haven’t had to change what I do; I haven’t had to bow down to the system. I mean I didn’t get any O-levels or A-levels, and people said, “You can’t go to art school.” So I just got my own form and filled it in.’

Today, Emin’s detractors serve her cause to as great an effect as her supporters. Her former boyfriend, for instance, the poet and painter Billy Childish, has recently gained a good deal of reciprocal publicity off the back of his old flame by launching his ‘Stuckist’ movement – a loose-knit group of painters who have published a twenty-point manifesto, ‘Against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego-artist’. On the front of this manifesto is a quote from Tracey, supposedly made about Billy: ‘Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!’

‘Well, his paintings are stuck,’ says Emin, with disarming frankness, but genuine affection for Childish and his enterprise. ‘This is just one of Billy’s pamphlets – he’s done loads of them, and it’s a good, healthy thing – and a newspapers got hold of it and they know that it’ll make a good story.’

But when Childish published his stories and poems about his relationship with Emin, she found them ‘hateful and hurtful – particularly reading about all of his sexual conquests – it used to do my head in. But now I see that they’re not about me, they’re about him and his take on life, and he doesn’t come across as particularly admirable.’ And in this, perhaps, one can see the reverse side of Emin’s own artistic practice.

In a recent television documentary about Emin, the only critical voice in the programme – as the gents of the art world vied with one another to mingle faux-laddish candour with quasi-ironic hyperbole – came from her twin brother, Paul, who claimed to have lost his business contract in Margate because of the controversy generated by his sister’s work. ‘I want to use this occasion to state that I, Paul Emin, have no connection whatsoever with Tracey Emin’s art,’ he stated. And Emin herself, from her Whitechapel loft, admitted that her work back in Margate might find a reception very different from its current fashionability within the art world.

‘I would like to show some of my work down in Margate,’ she says, ‘but there isn’t really anywhere to show it. There’s the library I suppose. But it would mean hiring a space and organizing it, and I’m too busy to do that. But it would be interesting, because a lot of my work is about growing up in that locality, and it would be quite interesting to hear the responses from other people growing up there. But it wouldn’t really serve my purpose. What really serves my purpose is having a great big fuck-off show in New York. That’s what serves my purpose.’

Confession as public spectacle was woven in to the burgeoning obsession with any form of celebrity. As the decade progressed, it appeared that the values traditionally, and even sneeringly, ascribed solely to the tabloid press – voyeurism, sensationalism, knee-jerk morality – were becoming all-pervasive as the temper of the times.

Applied post-modernism as a sophisticated parlour game had authorized no end of super-whizzy look-Mum-no-hands ways of flirting with tabloid culture, but the principal readership of the endlessly cloning celebrity magazines – as much as the audiences of daytime confession ’n’ conflict TV ‘debates’ – seemed to be drawn, demographically, from the lower-income end of the scale. Thus, the new aristocrats of celebrity culture (as well as the old aristocrats who were just aristocrats, but still got loads of celebrity-space) were kept in place largely by a particular public need for a kind of epic, ongoing soap opera of people who seemed to have more teeth than them and nicer houses than theirs. The celebrities, perhaps, were just another of the Compensatory Pleasures (like extended credit facilities or deli-style sandwich fillings) that people in the Nineties needed to compensate for … living in the Nineties. But one fundamental result of the cultural equation between confession and celebrity would be that the poor, quite literally, were supporting the wealthy.

Ulrika Jonsson

Just type ‘Ulrika Jonsson’ into the subject window of your Internet search engine, and you’ll be sent back a lengthy list of sites, all of which promise ‘Ulrika Nude!’ Trawled up from the murkier depths of the web, these sites specialize in computer-manipulated images of celebrities. It’s a kind of cyber-harem that doubles as a somewhat sordid gauge of modern fame. You get the feeling that if you were a celebrity, checking out your virtual profile, you’d probably be pretty miffed to find yourself pornographically pixilated in this way. That said, when you saw the sheer number of people whom these sites have fiddled around with, you’d maybe feel strangely hurt if you weren’t included.

At thirty-two, Ulrika Jonsson was both defined and misrepresented as a sex symbol. Meeting her outside one of the smarter Windsor commuter stations, sitting behind the wheel of a soft-top Saab, dressed in casual black with Gucci sunglasses, she looks like any off-duty career woman. Neither her image, nor her voice – slightly ‘county’, with the odd dead-drop into New Labour Mockney – seems to hint at media celebrity and part-time wild child.

Saab lend her the car in exchange for the occasional personal appearance. She wants the estate version so there’ll be room for her five-year-old son’s bike in the back. ‘I drove a Fiat Panda until a couple of years ago,’ she explains, as a dashboard slightly more complicated than the flightdeck of the Starship Enterprise winks lazily into life. And this little fact says a lot about the woman: Ulrika embodies the point where tabloid-hounded TV personality – flashy cars, the Met bar and lots of foreign holidays – meets Home Counties mum: the school run, early nights and swimming lessons.

On the one hand, you could say that Ulrika’s entire career as a TV presenter and national pin-up has been driven by the juggernaut of her sex appeal. On the other, she has never promoted herself as anything other than ‘ordinary’. The trouble is, Ulrika emits that particular kind of ordinariness that many people also find sexy. She is probably the only prime-time television star to have been photographed wearing an Agent Provocateur négligée while leaning at a jaunty angle against the extension hose of an Electrolux dust-buster. She shares with Felicity Kendal – the star of the terminally domestic Seventies sit-com, The Good Life – the fact that she has been voted ‘Rear of The Year’ in a national poll.

Ulrika uses the word ‘ordinary’ to describe herself, as though it is the one card in her hand that can’t be beaten. ‘People like me because … Well, they like me, if they like me at all, because I’m ordinary. I suppose that when I started out, nearly twelve years ago, there weren’t a lot of young female presenters. There wasn’t the amount of satellite channels that there are now, and even Sky was only just starting. Now, there are millions of young girls who are TV presenters and they’re on the cover of just about everything. But I do think that I’m just ordinary. And I don’t mind laughing at myself. So maybe I just make people feel comfortable. People don’t really know what pigeon-hole to put me in, because I keep changing my course and I don’t seem to fit into any pattern.

‘I’m not quite sure how it all happened for me. I didn’t mind messing around in a crowd, but if there was a serious audience I’d probably walk the other way. Even now, when I do stand on a stage, I tend to be very self-deprecating and take the piss out of myself. Because I feel that I’m almost not worthy to be there, I think that if they can see me laughing at myself, then they won’t laugh at me. We can just laugh at me together.’

Even as she’s saying this, in the wholly ordinary surroundings of a National Trust tea room in the Home Counties, on a perfectly straightforward Thursday afternoon, another nice woman (middle-aged, mumsy, terribly polite) comes up and asks her for a pair of autographs. ‘We’ve been having a debate,’ the woman explains, ‘and we want to know if you’re Ulrika Jonsson?’ ‘I was this morning,’ Ulrika replies, signing the proffered menus, and then she’s worrying whether the recipients of these autographs will spot that she’s written ‘lots of love’ on one of them and only ‘love’ on the other.

And that’s another thing that you begin to notice about Ulrika – she seems as though she is constantly having to monitor her every slightest move, as though anything that she says or does, however trivial, could be seized upon and used against her. Again, she seems to use her ordinariness as both weapon and shield in her constant fight with what she sees as her misrepresentation within the press. It’s as if she’s trying to shy away from something, these days, even as she’s still on the celebrity roller-coaster.

But with the media feeding frenzy that attended the ‘discovery’ that Ulrika is pregnant with her second child, you begin to see the reasoning behind her paranoia. Despite the fact that, by her own admission, she has taken a deliberate step back from the limelight, taking on very little new work, the news of her pregnancy dominated no fewer than five newspaper covers over a weekend when there were plenty of other important news stories – the little matter of major rioting in central London, for instance.

‘The pregnancy was never announced – it didn’t come from me or from any of the people who work with me. But I’ve been forced to admit it, unhappily, when I’m just a woman who has become pregnant and would like to be enjoying the pregnancy. I can’t describe the feeling of panic which all this attention and prying has caused for me. Not least because I’m only just pregnant, and any woman will tell you that the first three months of a pregnancy can be very problematic. This ridiculous media circus doesn’t make me feel important, it makes me feel ridiculous. None of it has any relevance to my job, or what I’m known for, and the stress is enormous.’