apoor Steve McQueen. In 1999, the then 30-year-old English artist was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize. It’s just a pity for McQueen that all the attention that year was not on him, but on one of the other nominees: Tracey Emin, six years his senior. And especially to Emin’s entry: her well-slept and sexed up bed that was smoking in one of the halls of London’s Tate Britain.
A riot was born. Because how did this Emin think of exhibiting a mattress with tossed sheets and unmade pillows, tissues, pulled-out pantyhose, slippers, pills, cigarette butts, empty vodka bottles, underwear with menstrual blood and used condoms in the equally prestigious Tate?
1999
The last year of the last century, now 25 years ago, is a year of great importance in pop cultural history. In an irregularly published series of articles late de Volkskrant see why we still refer back to 1999 so often. In part 3: The Young British Artists and Tracey Emin’s controversial My Bed.
The artist stated that this is what her bed had looked like after a ‘mini nervous breakdown’ lasting several days. And she thought: what if I show this in a white space, as art? ‘It looked fucking brilliant.’
The tabloids called it a shame. Emin was a ‘worthless con artist’ and ‘endlessly narcissistic’. British culture minister Chris Smith criticized the jury because, in his view, it had deliberately selected a shocking image that would give the country a bad name. Others would consider the bed as the worthy successor to Marcel Duchamp’s most famous readymade: his signed urinal, from 1917.
In any case, it was a sight to behold. My Bed, as the obvious, official title was, attracted no fewer than 140,000 visitors to the London museum. Emin’s name was established. She told the TV channel ITN that she would never be able to go downhill again with this work: ‘I will only go uphill!’
About the author
Rutger Pontzen is an art critic and writer de Volkskrant about old, modern and contemporary art.
Trammelt
Now Emin had a reputation to uphold when it comes to being troublesome. Two years earlier, she made TV history by appearing in a panel discussion drunk and with a shiny splinted ring finger. She argued with everyone, extricated herself from her microphone with a lot of noise and finally left the studio, leaving the viewers in complete bewilderment.
Emin said afterwards that he no longer remembers anything about that entire conversation: ‘I am completely insane, 35 years old, childless, anorectic, neurotic, psychotic. And every day I try to solve that.’
Nevertheless, Emin’s performance and in particular her bed fit exactly with what a new, young generation of English artists had in mind: a settlement with the existing art establishment as they believed it also existed in the United Kingdom.
The story: how the idiosyncratic academy student Damien Hirst, with a dozen fellow students, organized the Freeze exhibition in London’s Docklands on his own initiative in 1988. How he managed to interest collector Charles Saatchi and Tate Gallery director Nicolas Serota (he reportedly drove Serota to the exhibition himself, on the back of his bicycle).
Aggressive eye-catcher
How Hirst quickly gained media attention as the centerpiece of the group, with his eye-catcher that was as spectacular as he was aggressive The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, or his shark on strong water. How others, such as Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Mat Collishaw, Tracey Emin, Angus Fairhurst and the Wilson Twins, Jane and Louise, followed in the slipstream with images that were as powerful as they were raw.
How that combination of ambitious students (mostly from Goldsmiths College), a wealthy collector (Saatchi), an important museum director (Serota), a few smart galleries (including White Cube) and the new, hip art magazine Frieze developed in just under ten years into an explosive mixture, a critical mass from which, like a nuclear bomb, the YBA movement was born: Young British Artists.
Brit Art was suddenly on the map, just like London, the epicenter of a new kind of art: aggressive, mediagenic, full of young bravado. And all this in the era of Margaret Thatcher, the conservative prime minister who wanted to privatize companies and minimize arts subsidies.
Or perhaps because of Thatcher. Because her economic policy – she ‘subsidized’ the setting up of small, private companies – created a desire for personal initiative, self-motivation and self-reliance. Towards entrepreneurship and a do-it-yourself attitude. Also in the art circuit.
Thatcher’s grant enabled Rachel Whiteread to rent a studio and Jane and Louise Wilson to fund a film studio, while Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas opened their own art shop. The highlight was Hirst’s entrepreneurship, who, through his mother (!), enlisted the help of Frank Dunphy, manager of the then popular Coco the Clown.
Dunphy would more than live up to his name as a financial mastermind in the mid-1990s by also assisting other YBA members such as Emin, Whiteread and Jake and Dinos Chapman. It did the youngsters no harm. Success was no longer a dirty word. The money flowed in, if only because Dunphy was able to regularly negotiate a sales percentage of 80 to 90 percent for the artists from galleries, instead of the usual 50 percent (of which he himself received a tenth share).
Erection cucumber
Confirmation of the fresh, rebellious status of Brit Art was the 1997 retrospective exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. Title: Sensation. The bone of contention: the dolls with penis and anus faces by the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, the mattress with two melons and an erect cucumber by Sarah Lucas, and especially Marcus Harvey’s portrait of the child murderer Myra Hindley, painted by children’s hands.
When the same exhibition visited New York two years later, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the response to the Hindley portrait was mild, but all hell broke loose over Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary. Reason: the painting showed a black Madonna, covered with pornographic photos of women’s buttocks and presented on elephant turds.
The museum had warned that the exhibition could cause ‘vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria and fear’. According to New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Ofili’s painting was ‘sick’ and ‘disgusting’. He threatened to stop subsidies for the museum.
The importance of Emin’s bed in this revival of British art, after Pop Art in the swinging sixties, cannot be neglected. It was perhaps the confirmation of the fame that the YBA members suddenly enjoyed.
Okay, as an icon of the YBA, Emin’s bed faced stiff competition from Hirst’s ‘swimming’ tiger shark: it is a stronger image, possesses more Thatcherite aggression and more eternal value, even if the fish has now been replaced by a less wrinkled one.
Shameless
Yet Emin’s ensemble of dirty sheets, condoms, underwear and empty liquor bottles fits better into the commotion that Brit Art caused in the 1990s. Emin had found a new tone. Rawer, more daring and above all: more shameless. Hirst displayed a shark; Emin herself. Besides her bed, her private life was also in the museum – on the street.
It has become her trademark. Or always has been. Emin doesn’t know shyness. Failed crushes, abortions, major operations, sexual abuse, humiliation, revenge on ex-lovers, Emin has never made a secret of the fact that her life has been shaped by them. Her tent, from 1996, is famous, the inside of which is covered with the 102 names of everyone – including her grandmother – with whom she has slept.
It is shocking that with the presentation of the bed, as the pinnacle of new British art, the artists themselves were also at their peak. That after 1999 Young British Art entered a second phase is not the case. Not everyone of the artists who took the lead in the 1990s has survived in the 21st century.
The low point was the suicide of Angus Fairhurst in 2008. Others slowly disappeared from the radar, such as the Wilson Twins and Marcus Harvey. It proved difficult to continue to live up to the high expectations of the rebellious YBA years.
Skull with bullet hole
Mat Collishaw, known for his photo of a skull with a bullet hole, focused on nature. Marc Quinn, who made a frozen replica of his head with four liters of drained blood, has since taken a liking to classical sculpture.
Some persisted in their controversial work. Two years ago, the Chapman brothers made the press with their advertising photos for fashion brand Balenciaga, of toddlers with cuddly toys in fishnet shirts, leather harnesses and other bondage clothing. Provocative work that was not appreciated by everyone – the campaign was stopped – but, according to the two brothers, showed how prudish society has become.
What it also shows: that the Thatcherite desire for artistic success has its downside. That independent artists employed by a major fashion brand are not as independent as assumed. Even though the artists are famous YBA members.
Seafood restaurant
Damien Hirst remained most in the picture. The initiator of the legendary Freeze exhibition still manages to attract attention. Less with his work than with the commerce surrounding it. As early as 1997, he founded his own restaurant, Pharmacy, which closed seven years later, followed by a seafood restaurant and Pharmacy 2. He is currently restoring the immense country house Toddington Manor in South West England to house his own collection.
His plan in 2008 was spectacular to have 223 new works of art auctioned directly at Sotheby’s, without involving his gallery owners (proceeds: 140 million euros). Also spectacular: the recent revelation that Hirst presented works of art created in 2017 as works of art from the 1990s.
And Tracey Emin? Her latest public work is a nine-meter-high bronze sculpture, The Mother, which was unveiled in 2022 on the museum island in front of the new Munch Museum in Oslo. Emin now lives and works partly in Margate, where she grew up. She has found a home there and set up an artist’s residence.
Has not changed a bit
In her drawings and texts she is still as personal as before. In a ‘Letter from Margate’, in the Evening Standard, Emin candidly described last year how she tried to give someone a blow job, out of gratitude that he had taken care of her leg, which she had injured after swimming. She was 10 at the time. Emin hasn’t changed a bit.
Her bed behavior has changed: ‘I no longer smoke, don’t have sex, don’t use contraceptives, don’t menstruate anymore. (…) If there are already stains in my sheets, I will have them washed immediately.’
PS: Things turned out well for Steve McQueen after all. The lull surrounding the 1999 Turner Prize winner was short-lived. Thanks to his successful film career and Oscar for Twelve Years a Slave McQueen is now more internationally known than Tracey Emin.
It is controversial and much discussed My Bed by Tracey Emin, centerpiece of the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition, was purchased a year later by Charles Saatchi for 173,000 euros. The collector himself exhibited the bed in his Saatchi Gallery, the former London town hall on the Thames, and in his own home. Fourteen years later it was auctioned at Christie’s for almost 3 million euros; the new owner, the German industrialist and collector Christian Dürckheim, has loaned the artwork to the Tate Gallery until the end of this year.
Tags: sleptin sexedup bed Tracey Emin Young British Artists toppled art establishment
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