Jane Rye

Nevertheless, the real thing

issue 21 October 2006

It’s difficult not to warm to Mad Tracey from Margate (‘I like Tracey … I landed on my feet with that name’), the inventor of the Rothko Comfort Blanket for Private Views, however reluctant one may be to have one’s nose rubbed in other people’s bodily fluids and spiritual excretions. She famously staggered out of a solemn television debate saying, ‘I want my mum’, and loves her old Nan so much (as she memorably describes in one of the conversations recorded here) that when Nan dies she visits her in the funeral parlour to pluck her whiskers and do her nails as she used to when she was alive, and gets locked in, to inexplicable strains of ‘The Sun has Got his Hat On’. Titivating Nan in the Chapel of Rest suggests a Mediterranean earthiness and intimacy between the generations; warm-hearted, picturesque, unreliable, enviably stylish and uninhibited but given to unfortunate emotional outbursts and insanitary habits, Emin — exotic product of Turkey and a British seaside resort — surely represents everything that the English used nervously, disapprovingly but also a little wistfully, to admire about ‘foreigners’.

This excellent selection of Emin’s works (1963, her birth date, to the present: Tracey’s life and her work are deemed to be indivisible), chosen in collaboration with the artist, includes drawings and monoprints, paintings, sculptures, video stills and transcripts, appliqués, embroideries and neons, illuminated by converstions with ‘gallerist’ and former lover Carl Freedman.

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