Tracey Emin @ the Hayward

This month I visited the Tracey Emin retrospective 'Love Is What You Want' at the Hayward Gallery in the Southbank Centre in London.




I am interested in Emin's ideas but I have never really been a huge fan of her work.  Things that I do like about her work are the crossovers between art and craft; and how daring she is to display her life to the public.  However, the 'diy' nature of her work has never really appealed to me.

Seeing the retrospective gave me a much better appreciation for her whole perspective and how her work connects so directly to her own experiences and that in some regards her 'diy' approach is important so that the work feels like it is coming from an individual and that it is handmade.  I was particularly taken with the room on her life and family.  The dynamics, influence and relationship with friends and family are crucial to Emin's work - particularly her relationship with her father.

One other thing that struck me while touring the exhibition is how closely associated her work (below left) is with that of conceptual artists like Mary Kelly (below right) who created her series of works titled 'Post Partum Document' in the 1970s.

         

In seeing these two works side by side the connections between Emin's work and that of conceptual artists like Mary Kelly is more than apparent.  The idea of creating work that is autobiographical is by no means new and Emin is drawing on a vast history of artists who develop their work based on their own experiences in life.  What makes Emin more popular today, perhaps, is our fascination with watching other people's live that has developed out of 'reality television' and the voyeurism which is now inherent in Western cultures.  As a result, we are more and more fascinated by Tracey Emin's documentation of her life and her openness about events that have made her in to the artist that she is.