Mick Hartley

Every gallery wants her work and she is invited to all the best parties. So why, wonders Tracey Emin, does no man want to give her babies?

That is, I assume, a rhetorical question. 

Emin has never had children although she was pregnant twice in her twenties, which came as a shock considering the doctors told her the gonorrhoea infection that she’d contracted in her teens had left her infertile. Both times the pregnancies terminated in messy abortions, which exacerbated an intense period of instability and self-loathing that provoked Emin to destroy everything that she’d ever made. Much of her subsequent work is based on those experiences and one hates to think what would have happened to those feelings had she not been able to channel them into her art.

Even now she has difficulties with her moods, but for the opposite reason. She’s been depressed for months pondering her life, the “children thing”, she tells me, again and again. It’s getting to her. Where are they? Why doesn’t she have any? Will she ever? “I’ll tell you what else!” she says on the cusp of another one of the revelations that litter all her conversations and pitch her headfirst into either euphoria or a sulk, “I’m in between my periods and this is my good moment. Come next week I might come crashing down again. I just noticed that as I get older I become a real victim of my PMT, which I just hate, I really hate. It’s enough that I try to plan around it.” There are a lot of people out there, art critics included, who publicly wish that Emin would just shut up about the abortions and other personal stuff such as everyone she’s ever slept with, being raped at 13 and her ongoing bouts of depression: “women’s issues” that makes her work victimy and therefore beyond the reach of criticism. I’m not sure what these people expect her to make her work about given that the whole point of Tracey Emin is to use herself as a subject with which she can touch the lives of others and provoke debate, but the general tenor is they think she should “Grow Up”. The tent, the £150,000 bed, the fire that destroyed the tent, the stumbling out of a Channel 4 studio halfway through a live arts programme wailing “I want to be with my friends. I’m drunk. I want to phone my mum”, they’re still the things that the words Tracey Emin conjure up in most people’s minds.

Well there you go: victimy.

Anyone who knows anything about Tracey Emin knows her art is all about herself. But then we get this:

Emin finds it annoying when people criticise her work for being self-obsessed: “Why aren’t they saying it about Picasso, Van Gogh, Egon Schiele? Picasso made work about women – all the women he had sex with! It was his women, his collection of women. Or you’ve got great artists such as Matisse who actually shook hands with the Nazis, hung out with the Vichy regime and painted beautiful interiors. So what do people want?”

Well yes, true enough: Picasso made work about women. He didn’t just scrawl their names across a canvas, though, or glue used condoms onto a board. He actually made great art.

She wants it all ways. Her art is all about herself, but she objects when someone points that out. She wants to be confrontational, to offend, but she has a puppy-dog longing to be loved. And her excuse is always that she’s a woman: that people don’t treat her fairly because of her sex. Brian Sewell’s recent comment, “Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness…Maybe it’s something to do with bearing children”, is brought up to emphasise the great misogynist barrier that she’s up against, as though that’s got any relevance. She just isn’t very good. For various reasons to do with the state of the British art scene and Charles Saatchi, she got lucky. The extent of her self-delusion is clear when she talks about Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, as though she’s in their company.

I don’t think this kind of woman to woman stuff is doing her, or us, any favours. It’d be different if she was just someone going through a bad time who could use a bit of sympathy, but this is her whole schtick: it’s all there is. Other artists might publicise a forthcoming show by talking about how their work’s developed, or what they were trying to achieve, but for Emin it can only ever be about her personal problems, because that’s what her art is. She really shouldn’t be encouraged.