my bed

source: saatchigallery

A consummate storyteller, Tracey Emin engages the viewer with her candid exploration of universal emotions. Well-known for her confessional art, Tracey Emin reveals intimate details from her life to engage the viewer with her expressions of universal emotions. Her ability to integrate her work and personal life enables Emin to establish an intimacy with the viewer.

Tracey shows us her own bed, in all its embarrassing glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts, stained sheets, worn panties: the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown. By presenting her bed as art, Tracey Emin shares her most personal space, revealing she’s as insecure and imperfect as the rest of the world.
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source: aleteiaorg

“My Bed” is a ‘work of art’ by Brititsh artist Tracey Emin. It was shortlisted for the coveted Turner Prize and although it did not win, the notoriety of the work shot the artist to fame almost overnight. She claimed that the bed was in the same state that it had been for quite a while in her bedroom at home due to her depression.

The bed was in an unmade state and included sheets stained with human secretion while the floor around it was littered with her used knickers (stained with menstrual blood), used condoms and various items of litter as well as her used bedroom slippers all placed upon a piece of her bedroom carpet.

Although the shocking nature of the piece may raise a plethora of questions and remarks, there are two points that seem to stand out from the others:

Can this seriously be classed as art?

How can such a work be displayed in a museum or gallery (let alone someone’s home) given the decaying nature of some of the items.

In answer to the first point there are two elements to consider. Firstly, is a work of art really art when the same ‘item’ is found in various degrees of disorder in every home in the country. John Paul II in his Letter to Artists, describes the artist as having beauty as his or her vocation, and that “artistic talent” is the gift that has been bestowed upon the artist which serves the common good. Only the artist can create a work of art, therefore Emin’s unmade bed which is exactly like John Smith’s unmade bed cannot seriously be called a work of art.

However, there is another element to consider here. One could argue that such a wrok is really just a logical progression from the abstract mania of the 20th century. We live in an age that craves sensationalism as well as individualism and “uniqueness”. Once abstract art had become the established art of the day there seemed to be nowhere else to go that had not already been done before. So artists started experimenting with other forms like kinetic art (art that moves, i.e., sculptures, mainly abstract, that had moving parts), performance art (wherein the artist, and others who made up moving parts, became the work itself through movement and action) and various forms of environmental art (the artist uses elements from the surrounding environment to create an area that the viewer could walk around and be a part of. Emin’s work is really an evolution of an art form that becomes more bizarre as artists, desperate for individuality, seek for something that is recognisably theirs, in other words, everyone will recognise an Emin.

Our second point is very much connected to the first, in that, how does one exhibit such a piece long term in a gallery and how is it possible to mass produce the work commercially? Some argue that the whole point of the piece is its ‘anti-commercial’ nature. However, one can buy a print of “My Bed” on-line, albeit as a photograph, so commercialism is still part and parcel of the artist intention here. It is quite incredible that the work sold for £150,000 to Charles Saatchi to display in the Saatchi gallery, London. If we are to accept Emin’s work in the great tradition of art, then the imagination boggles at how the organic elements may be “restored’ over the ravages of time.
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source: traceyeminstudio

BIOGRAPHY
Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both tragic and humorous.
Emin’s work has an immediacy and often sexually provocative attitude that firmly locates her oeuvre within the tradition of feminist discourse. By re-appropriating conventional handicraft techniques – or ‘women’s work’ – for radical intentions, Emin’s work resonates with the feminist tenets of the ‘personal as political’. In Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With, Emin used the process of appliqué to inscribe the names of lovers, friends and family within a small tent, into which the viewer had to crawl inside, becoming both voyeur and confidante. Her interest in the work of Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele particularly inform Emin’s paintings, monoprints and drawings, which explore complex personal states and ideas of self-representation through manifestly expressionist styles and themes.
Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963, and studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She has exhibited extensively internationally including solo and group exhibitions in Holland, Germany, Japan, Australia and America. In 2007 Emin represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, was made a Royal Academician and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London, and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent and Doctor of Philosophy from London Metropolitan University. During the Edinburgh Festival in 2008, Emin’s survey exhibition ’20 Years’ opened at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and then toured on to Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain and the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (March 19th – June 21st 2009). In May 2011, Emin had a major solo exhibition at the Hayward, London. Emin currently lives and works in London.
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source: artnet

British artist Tracey Emin (1963) is a member of the Young British Artists, best known for her evocative autobiographical installations and multimedia works. Born in London, Emin studied at the Maidstone College of Art and at the Royal College of Art in her home city. Alongside artist Sarah Lucas (British, b.1962) in 1993, Emin opened The Shop, where she and Lucas exhibited and sold their work. The next year, Emin held her first solo exhibition, brazenly titled My Major Retrospective, and exhibited her work in the next few years in a gallery called The Tracey Emin Museum.

Emin’s work and her public presentation are frequently provocative and self-referential; in works ranging from installations of neon phrases to painting, photography, film, performance, and hand-embroidered tapestries, she consistently illustrates her own experiences and emotions in intense, intimate engagements with the viewer. Emin’s piece Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963–1995, chronicles every person she ever literally slept next to, from lovers and family to her own unborn children. A similar work titled My Bed, is an installation of her bed, covered in condoms, stains, and cigarettes as it appeared during a time of emotional trauma, evoking the most essential and universal of human emotions. While she has received significant critical attention for her work, Emin’s unabashed presentations of her work as well as her public persona evoke both positive and negative attention from the general public. In 1999, she was nominated for the Turner Prize, and represented Britain in 2004 at the Venice Biennale. Emin currently lives and works in London.