“I followed you to the end”, Tracey Ermin installation at the White Cube, London. Image: White Cube.
Often the success of a painting today is measured in terms of how much it sells for and not how much it may or may not affect us. Everything we hold dear has become monetized. I was wondering about this in the context of the new Tracey Emin exhibition at White Cube near London Bridge. Before starting work in her studio, the artist was registering an interest in seeing this, though one look at the wall of rain outside meant sifting through a well-known photo and video networking service instead, the light on the artist’s screen reflected on her mouth and cheeks. I was remembering when slides were the way people showed their work. In the early Eighties, though prohibitively expensive, larger color transparencies were even better. Today, most artists look at, show, or send work through phones, often via the above well-known networking service, and we do not always know what is real or what is not anymore.
The artist was mentoring a fellow female artist last week. The venue, a converted space south of the river near Elephant and Castle, was real enough. It was a building on an old council estate that had just been broken into. It seemed a particular kind of nastiness to steal from artists. Not so much snatching candy as snuffing out an only candle. Especially with the art market in the doldrums and London a capital of commercial catastrophe. Naturally, people still remain in denial about Brexit, though never Covid or Ukraine, refusing forevermore to grasp the concept of cultural consequence. (On the edge of our psyches are these under-reported screams.) Philistinism is to blame for much of the denial, and these giant post-Brexit funding holes nobody’s fault but our own. It is just that some of our bean counters did not know anything about the need to soak the beans first. Today, rich people are leaving for tax reasons, though they conveniently blame this on the government, while the young are leaving primarily because of Brexit. The young are on a creative high in continental Europe.
I have just resumed contact with a New York friend on a Greek island where he now lives a humble existence and makes olive oil while writing haikus. I sent fresh images of the artist’s new work to him and he came back describing it as ‘stunning, delightful, freeing, witty, beautiful, confounding, lovely.’ I loved reporting this response. There was a time when I was often AWOL and it is a boon to be this close.
After several more two-hour stints at the rock-face, the artist exits her studio and slumps down on the slate grey sofa for yet another ten-minute tea break. Someone I know spent time once with writer Isabelle Allende. He said she had a candle which she burned and would only stop writing when the candle burned out. I am amazed at the amount of work done by the artist without burn-out on this new piece. It comes on the back of a series of a dozen similarly sized abstract paintings rendered in extraordinary detail with acrylic ink on museum paper. What differentiates this is that it is landscape not portrait in orientation and goes right to the edge.
It goes right to the edge in other ways too. The artist in the past had a long period of intense coloured landscapes, people often believing that they knew where they were with them. The detail in these new works is tantalising, the colours fetching, but what we find ourselves looking at is sufficiently nonconcrete to leave us feeling exposed, marooned even. This high-risk strategy is the essence of this work. Keep going, is all I can say. Don’t stop. You will know in your gut how much longer it must take. Only the paint on the brush is splitting hairs.
To get to the Tracey Emin exhibition, we cut through old-fashioned banks of Sherlock Holmes-style fog. On the bullet-like Tube train, the artist sits beneath a Raymond Carver poem serving as part of the Poems of the Underground series. (‘And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so?’) In a shop, I am thinking few sounds are more contemporary than shop assistants in stores full of self-checkouts sighing because they have to serve someone.
We are nearing Emin’s gallery, its owner Yorkshireman Jay Jopling who as a junior art baron attended a play of mine in New York. For what it is worth, Emin herself likes to insist I was the first person to write about her in a national newspaper. More importantly, Emin was a guest on a podcast this week in which she said male artists after the age of 40 like Damien Hirst were less of a force these days, unlike female artists Emin says carry on forever, including Louise Bourgeois who famously worked until she died aged 98.
I walk through the vast White Cube gallery space behind the artist, quietly remembering her own show in Austria where pensioners in electric wheelchairs motored about in the freezing cold eating ice creams of all things. In the hotel after the opening there, five barmen stood to attention when the artist walked in, playing ‘God Save the Queen’. The next day in Austria, we retired to the shores of the nearby lake where I watched as the artist drew on countless pebbles presented later in a small woollen sock as a gift to the show’s curator.
I can tell the artist is deep in thought. Perhaps it is the work. Perhaps it is the close family friend’s funeral we must attend. Death, I am thinking, pervades much great art anyway, though in Emin’s case on this one strange day it feels like a cosmic bystander. In many of the pieces is the thinly painted outline of a female form on a bed. Admirably, Emin fought cancer and won. This was and is a remarkable victory. But the new work feels oddly lifeless. Perhaps it is us. Of writer Rod Dreher last week, journalist Tim Stanley argued that humans were made to be spiritual but are slipping into apathy. At least when Emin sold a painting at Christie’s two years ago for £1.9m ($2.5m), the proceeds went to a new art centre in Margate in Kent. As I said, so often the success of a painting these days is measured in terms of how much it can sell for. At least in this instance this was done for the benefit of others.
