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‘Trying to make sense of everything’, as she says, is a fitful task. Grand-dad Emin had four wives; great-great-great-grand- father was a slave ‘in the Ottoman empire’. As for the great-great-great-grand-daughter herself, she inhabits an empire of the imagination broken down for editorial convenience into Traceyland, Motherland, Fatherland, Strangeland and Dreamland. In these parts she’s the focus of attention, of course, and never more so than when she came a close second to Paul, her twin brother. ‘When I was born, they thought I was dead.’
Between babyhood and adulthood came the setbacks that are taking the artist a lifetime to savour, with self-help manuals providing supportive vocabulary. ‘Like a wounded bird I began to rebuild myself, using the experience of failure as my foundation,’ she trills. Valentine’s Day 1988: the post arrives. ‘Nothing there for me — no love. No one loved me, I started to cry.’
This is the type of emotional fix that provokes Emin’s best work, her scratchy drawings of splayed legs and wishbone bodies, terse and sharp. Words fail her more. She keeps trying to be Andy Warhol the diarist but lacks his laconic tone. On holiday in Cyprus with her dad she has trouble with a fisherman and insects. ‘The flies were in love with me,’ she boasts, ‘They loved me like I was a piece of donkey shit. One night I counted over 60 bites.’ It’s the counting that’s significant; the figure is either made up or (sad to say) she actually did bother to tot them up.
Ego is all. In Norway, visiting the site of Munch’s ‘Scream’, she feels herself enwombed somehow. ‘I wanted to jump inside the picture and cradle the Scream in my arms. Another lost soul.’ Steady on, old girl, is the obvious response, but we must remember that this, like so much else related here, was a performance assignment. A cameraman and sound recordist were on hand taping her rendezvous with destiny.
Such base details are omitted, as are the routines of a busy professional life. We are not to know that at the Royal College she painted earnestly. Better, she assumes, for us to hear about that memorable night when she ripped off her microphone during a Turner Prize-related Channel Four live transmission and staggered away (‘pissed out of my brains … complete fucking horror’) bawling for her mum and leaving David Sylvester, Norman Rosenthal, and other worthies astounded at her upstaging of their ‘debate’. This exit propelled her immediately from D list to B list. ‘My gallery is inundated with requests for me to appear on chat-shows,’ she noted a day or two later. ‘My art’s selling like hot cakes.’
Emin reality dissolves all too readily into Emin dreams. When the anecdotes become too repetitive even for her she nods off and tells us about it:
Dreams don’t have time. Neither does sleep, nor death. That’s why it’s sometimes good to wear a watch. I always took my watch off when making love. Even if I kept all my clothes on. Even if it was outside in winter, I would always take my watch off.
‘Here I am, a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless beautiful woman. I never dreamed it would be like this.’
A Tracey Emin strength is the knack of producing work that looks unpremeditated. It protects her through would-be aphorism (‘One cannot live on vodka alone’) and gulps of affirmation (‘Deep in my soul I know the soul can endure’). But — another chapter, another pregnancy scare — she does overdo the artlessness. ‘I am relieved, relieved to know that at 37 years of age I am just a woman with a fucking good imagination.’ This imagination of hers is an asset worth coaxing into new prospects. She writes, using capital letters for extra loud emphasis, ‘DON’T BE AFRAID TO TAKE THE PAST HEAD ON.’ Fair enough, but why not go easy on all that baggage? Can’t the personality be given a rest? I guess not.
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