Bodies on beds

Four years ago Tracey Emin was diagnosed with a cancer so aggressive that survival beyond six months seemed the least likely outcome. Her response was to paint – as much as possible – and the results convey not just her horror of the disease, but also her anger at her own body, as well as resentment of the past lovers who abused it. There are forty-three works in this show: forty paintings, two sculptures and one film. Its subject is vulnerability, but its mood is defiance. The growing weakness of Emin’s body is chronicled, with her physical strength ebbing in inverse proportion to the power of her spirit – which is clearly indomitable. The titles of the works often take the form of a direct address to the ex-lover, expressing reproach, anger, desperation, disbelief: “You Did This to Me”, “Fuck You”, “I Did Nothing Wrong”, “Don’t Go”. They are like an inaudible soundtrack, recording her anguish and anger. But the paintings are the outcome of a steely determination not to spare any of the details in a forensic survey of collapsing bodily functions. You might think the result is generically close to an autopsy, except that its subject is furiously taking back control, if not of her somatic crisis, then of the emotional histories to which it is bound.

Sometimes these painted bodies seem barely held together. In “I Watched You Die”, we are shown the naked upper body of a female figure whose lower half seems to have been consigned already to a body bag. In “My Dead Body – A Trace of Life”, a background resembling a ruined city rhymes visually with the derelict state of the female body in the foreground. Often Emin uses the palest of pink washes to indicate the merest presence of the female body, as if to assign herself to a spectral existence. In one canvas the woman is shown lying in bed with her cat at the precise moment when the latter slips away from her side. The inertness of the female figure and the stealth of the cat imply the soul departing from the body. In another variant the woman’s body is simultaneously present and absent in the form of a sketchy outline drawn in blue on white. These trace elements of the female form reflect Emin’s alienation from the state of her own corporeality. Yet her sense of self has been so insistently tied to her sexual relations, and so insistently untied by the failure of those relationships, that the only consistent means of securing an identity has come from the body of her own work.

What is most astonishing about this show is its tunnel vision. Practically all you see is bodies on beds – but such is the emotional concentration behind this obsessive focus, it is nearly impossible to look away. Martin Gayford’s essay for the catalogue foregrounds the role of beds in the rites of passage found in every human culture: childbirth, coupling, death. On the face of it Emin is concerned with only one of these: lovemaking. But such is the spectrum of feeling she is drawing on and projecting, the viewer is bound to conjure up associations with the other two and to ask, what exactly are the after-effects of her intimate encounters – do they give birth to anything but anger and despair? Do they bury once and for all the hope of a lasting, fulfilling relationship? Many possible futures are projected by those who share a bed. Desolation, disbelief and resentment are all present in these works, but so are resilience and triumph of a kind – in Emin’s genuine mastery of the power of expression.

I intend that to mean visual expression. At the same time there is a great deal of language in this show – both written on the canvases and in the titles of the individual works. The latter often come in the form of direct address to a silent interlocutor: “Don’t Ask Me to Be Like You”; “Take Me to Heaven”; “I Wanted Love”. They mix longing with recrimination, pleading with contempt. They are also relatively commonplace in form, even clichéd – just as several of the visual representations are deliberately cartoonish. Yet this formal stereotyping is imbued with genuine power. The verbal language is vehement and the visual language strikingly expressive: perhaps Emin can be thought of as a late expressionist.

She is first and foremost a painter; of the forty canvases here, the majority are on a large scale. It is a titanic output. But there are also two extraordinary sculptures in patinated bronze. The first is male, and gigantic. Like many classical sculptures it is incomplete. The extremities are missing, leaving only the torso and upper legs. Grotesquely muscled, it has been placed head downwards (although there is no head). It looks like the mutilated remains of a fallen angel that has broken up in flight or on impact, its crash landing an apt punishment for hubris. Its colossal scale, fragmentation and decisive modelling make it strongly reminiscent of William Tucker’s late style and magnified figuration. The title of this anthropomorphic crash site is “I Followed You to the End” – which happens to be the title of the whole show, suggesting that the grounding of this and all the other failed relationships was a necessary prelude to the revisionary process of transformation through art.

The second sculpture is also fragmentary, but delicate and agile despite its reduced condition. It is headless and limbless, apart from a left leg springing forward, but there is no mistaking its overall vitality. While the male sculpture looks as if it has been dumped on the gallery floor, this graceful counterpart is wall-mounted: it is in the ascendant. The one remaining knee is raised, leading the way in an upward-aspiring movement. We don’t really need the title – “Ascension” – but this underlines the ability of the sculpture to persuade us, with its freedom of movement, that there is another dimension of meaning beyond that of earthly entanglement.

The term “ascension” obviously has religious connotations. But for Emin it is probably the making of art that guarantees the transformation of bitter experience into a means of regaining possession of a worthwhile sense of self. These works are extravagant in gesture, but restrained in scope. They are morbid, stagey and gobby – yet laser-focused.

Against all the odds it seems that Tracey Emin and her art are impossibly, and determinedly, self-renewing. In a sense she is doing what she has always done – regaining possession of her own life by means of her art. She is discharging the debt of love, care and respect she was owed by consigning all her debtors to a state of suspense in her words and images. This is art as purgatory, where those who have been judged and found wanting are confined to the lasting spectacle of their imperfections. White Cube Bermondsey is a large space, but it is currently crowded with forty-three versions of the same story, all of which bear reading and re-reading.

Rod Mengham’s most recent book is Midnight in the Kant Hotel: Art in present times, 2021

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