Emin in Edinburgh

I had intended to write in praise of Tracey Emin; a riposte to the naysayers who dub Emin all that is wrong with British art or who hold her accountable for the degeneracy of female youth with her used condoms and botched abortions. I was all set to put my head above the parapet and declare myself a fan of Emin with her patchwork, cross-stitched, Women’s Institute materials and her skinny, scraggly draughtsmanship. I was going to put her detractors in their place and condemn them for their timid, narrow-minded, suburban understanding of contemporary British art. And then I saw the exhibition.


20 years of Tracey Emin at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art certainly fulfilled the promise of its title. Two decades seemed to have passed by the time I emerged from the final gallery. I felt old before my time. Disillusioned. The retrospective is vast, interminable, and unrelieved by any hint of charm, beauty or subtlety. Her art is not one that breathes its import gently or that requires reflection; its an art that cries ‘Look at me! Pity me!’ like a petulant toddler unwillingly on the weekly supermarket shop. Ten, eleven, twelve rooms which wallow in self-pity are too much for even the most charitable and forbearing of souls to bear. If by room four you are not mentally chastising ‘Stiff-upper lip,’ ‘Make do and mend,’ and ‘Get over it!’ then you are a  patient soul.


But why the change of heart? How could a stalwart champion of the artist, who had always fought Emin’s corner when dinner party philistines called her crud or chavvy, suddenly find herself tutting and irritated by Emin’s attention seeking antics? It’s a question of scale. In the past, an etching here, a drawing there, a blanket at the Tate, a mono-print in a private collection, had been enough to convince me that Emin was an artist of insight and nuance. Emin’s skinny limbed figures in their self-conscious poses express with lyrical economy all the awkwardness and sexual clumsiness of youth while her blankets with their bold messages of anguish, hurt and disappointment are heartbreaking; the child’s security blanket emblazoned with all the betrayals of lost innocence. But room after room of Emin is another matter altogether.

Viwed en masse, her oeuvre descends into a morass of piteous misfortune; a solipsistic Grand Tour through Emin’s childhood traumas, her adolescent traumas, the traumas of her twenties, her thirties and so on. Lest we be unconvinced of the many traumas of her life we have a brief digression into the various traumas Emin imagines she suffers in the womb. It is a life unrelieved by sun-shine, optimism, joy or indeed any sense of proportion. Cunt Vernacular, a video diary detailing Emin’s miseries and sexual misadventures charts in horrible detail, month by month, year by year, the sexual abuses, physical sufferings and psychological privations of a seemingly attractive, successful, and financially independent woman.


This is not to make light of Emin’s experiences: sexual abuse, nervous breakdown, a tendency towards self-destruction, all of these are curses which can mar and destroy lives. But to pursue these themes, to devote one’s entire working life to recreating them in paint, or ink, or clay, to assemble them into a retrospective, well, the whole enterprise descends into solipsistic self-regard. No lessons are learnt, Emin replaces one abusive boyfriend with another, seeks out another sexually aggressive partner: it’s all grist to the artistic mill.

Emin is mistress of that most self-obsessed of idioms; the diary entry of the fourteen year old girl who believes that no one ever has or ever will suffer like she suffers. Most girls of fourteen grow up and live to be embarrassed by their self-centred ramblings. Emin has never grown up and hers are the vernacular and pictograms of the teenage diarist, fascinated by her periods, by boys and the sinister mechanics of sex. Like the poet U.A. Fanthorpe, Emin cannot help but smear, whether literally or figuratively, every facet of her creative output with her own bodily secretions: blood, sweat, shit and tears all flowing from the splay-legged creature Emin conjures to represent herself.


Rave reviews are no good to Emin. She thrives on abuses and insults; her art relies on her being a victim. So, at the risk of being a facilitator, an enabler, a purveyor of further scars on Emin’s already lashed back, I pronounce the show a failure, a self-centred, ugly, prolix catalogue of the unwanted and self-inflicted wounds of a joyless life.

The Fires of Hell - The Chapman Brothers at the White Cube

In the aftermath of the 2004 MOMART fire, the national press wallowed in schadenfreude, warming its hands over the embers of Britart and the charred remains of Tracey Emin’s tent, Damien Hirst’s Charity, and the Chapman Brothers’ Hell. ‘Didn’t millions cheer as this ‘rubbish’ went up in flames?’ crowed the Daily Mail while the letters pages were filled with the Pooterish response of Middle England: the disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells brigade who saw the immolation of the scatological excesses of the YBAs as a fitting bonfire of the vanities.

Four years on from the immolation of Hell, and the Chapman Brothers are back with a new version of the inferno, vaster and more horrible than the first. This time round it’s Fucking Hell; a two-fingered salute to the pre-Raphaelite loving middle-class. This is no mere exercise in juvenile obscenity-mongering, but a relentless and seemingly infinite pandemonium of evil and suffering. Nine glass vitrines stand in the shape of a swastika, once an emblem of eternal life and now, since the Nazis, a symbol of inhumanity. Each is filled with a monstrous regiment of toy soldiers, their uniforms emblazoned with swastikas, their features and bodies contorted as they heap atrocities on one another. Here, a phalanx of soldiers assembles with spears embedded in their eyes; there, severed heads are savagely tossed in the back of a Jeep. Score upon score of soldiers form rank, racked and bent double beneath the weight of physical and psychological tortures. Spliced creatures with two heads and Catherine-wheel arms career across cratered battlefields, while in one gut-churning Golgotha of a case, dismembered corpses lie six deep in a slurry of blood and sewage.

The violence is nauseating. Forget the bums-on-seats sadism of Torture Porn and Grindhouse cinema, this is the stuff of nightmares. The emaciated G.I.s and Wehrmacht troops recall the cavorting, grinning skeletons of the danse macabre and the Black Death carnival. In one diorama, troops converge on the ruins of a Greek temple whose pediment is filled, not with gracious muses, but with a frieze of maimed and mutilated infantry.

Plastic vultures hover expectantly over each grisly vignette, their bloodshot eyes feasting on the mass graves and scenes of genocidal fury. The day I visited, a lone housefly buzzed above the vitrines like some vengeful spitfire, a pestilential presence sucked in from the street by the stench of carrion rising from the White Cube killing fields. Spend too long in this charnel house, this claustrophobic basement, amongst so many unholy martyrdoms, and a creeping sickness sets in, leaving you reeling, polluted and ashamed.

The adjoining exhibition of landscape watercolours ought to be a breath of fresh air; but the thirteen twee landscapes, the preserve of the lady watercolourist, are the work of Adolf Hitler. How do you reconcile these mediocre daubs with the orchestrator of the Holocaust? We want our villains to be monsters and it is a source of endless disconcertment that the great dictator, the creator of a Fucking Hell on earth, had a fondness for saccharine views of the German countryside.

Hitler’s watercolour idylls have been covered by the Chapmans with Crayola rainbows, butterflies and love hearts, and other faux-naive scribbling of the nursery school. ‘If Hitler had been a hippy, how happy would we be?’ asks the exhibition title. Their detractors call the Chapmans ‘puerile’ or ‘adolescent,’ likening the language of Fucking Hell to that of a Warhammer set or Airfix model, or comparing the defacing of the watercolours to schoolboy graffiti. But these Brothers Grimm are no pedlars of teenage fantasies, theirs is not the wet dream of the high school killer or video game assassin, theirs is a vision of hell to compete with Virgil, Dante, Bosch or Rodin, a chilling rendering of apocalypses past and still to come.