Tracey Emin Why I Never Became a Dancer

Tracey Emin transforms rape, drugs, anorexia into puns. The title of her exhibitions seem like lines of poems: Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, No New Thing Under the Sun, From Army to Armani, It’s not me that’s crying it’s my soul, I Think it’s in my head, Praying To A Different God, Why I Never Became a Dancer,…

Emin shows herself, her hurtful moments and tainted thoughts in a very direct and exhibitionistic way. Along the way she created an impressive amount of commercial traces of consciousnes. The sentences she uses in her work are often tragic and funny at the same time. Tracey Emin uses painful situations and transforms them to art. She is a storyteller and vice versa often uses the conext of the art market to purposefully mould artificial situations of pain.

1974 Joseph Beuys made a performance that he called “I Love America and America Loves me”. He lived in an art gallery with wild coyotes. This was supposed to be a reconciliation with wild life. 1966 Tracey Emin locked herself in an art gallery for 2 weeks. She had nothing there except empty canvases and art materials – she wanted to make peace with herself and her art. There were lenses in the wall for the audience to ba able to watch her. This 14 day session began with artworks of artists she admired (e.g. Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Yves Klein) and resulted in a vast amount of autobiographic material.

In her autobiography “Strangeland” Tracey Emin talks about her life. She tells of a non-abortion that her life began with and an abortion that started her career as a successful artist. The mother wanted to abort her and her bother Paul. The father was a hotel-owner, married to another woman. The mother did not manage to abort, so Paul her twin brother and Tracey were born. The lover became an absent dad.

“When I was born they thought I was dead”, says Tracey about her birth. Her first cry came late. This delay and the morbidity that lies therein she interprets as a theme for her life. Her recipe for success is the humorous way and shifted context of peace-making with her terrifying past: her memories of child abuse, not eating until her teeth became stomps, bed wetting, shame, rape, followed by a phase of intensive promiscuity, depression, alcoholism, being made fun of. Her unmade bed (that almost but didn’t win the Turner prize in 1999) is almost as famous as is the shark of Damien Hirst.

Image credits: Saatchi Gallery.
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