Tracey Emin: 20 Years
Until November 9; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

In 1993 Tracey Emin held her first solo exhibition, entitled Tracey Emin: My Major Retrospective 1963 – 1993. The dates referred not to her life’s work, but to her life so far – an early clue that her life and her work would never be separable. The world knows in graphic detail about her childhood rape, her sexual exploits, her two abortions, and her recent qualms about remaining childless.

Now Emin is really having her first major retrospective, and again the dates are quirky: 20 years ago the artist was half way through a course at the Royal College of Art which was to undermine her confidence and cause her to destroy all her paintings. The first room offers a glimpse of what she smashed and trashed – around 200 miniature copies of her early paintings, impressive essays in the style of the German Expressionists, Picasso and Schiele.

Next, we are offered Emin’s CV. A blanket is collaged with text cut from the artist’s clothes, describing private family stories. Many more such blankets appear in the show, shouting at you from the walls with profanities embroidered in bright floral prints, or in tasteful cream. Assembled with the help of her friends, they evoke a social history of communal, feminine craft, but like Emin herself, femininity accompanies its feral opposite.

Also running through Emin’s career are the urgent, scratchy monoprints. This spontaneous print-making technique requires speed and produces nervous, imperfect lines. The artist would fire herself up with alcohol and music, to see what emerged: often images of herself, naked, legs splayed; vulnerable and aggressive.

That naked body is the unspoken subject of Emin’s notorious unmade bed, its dirty condoms and stained underwear unpacked, after years in storage, by the gallery’s lucky conservation department. It may seem like the ultimate statement of anti-art, but My Bed has a logical place in art history. Three years ago, in these very rooms, old bed frames featured in works by Arte Povera legend Jannis Kounellis. Like Emin, he was hinting at the presence of the people who lay in them, but while Kounellis’s were deliberately anonymous, Emin’s bed is a frank self-portrait.

Amongst the nasty debris around the bed sits a fluffy toy pup with a red ribbon around its neck. This sentimental side of Emin, not conveyed by the mass media, comes through strongly in the show. The Perfect Place to Grow is a loving homage to the artist’s father, and mementos of all periods of her life, nice and nasty, are preserved in glass cases.

Emin has a lot in common with Louise Bourgeois. The New York artist’s intensely personal work, often based on childhood traumas, and often sewn, is at once vulnerable, vicious, and sexually charged. Even at 96, Bourgeois boils over with rage and passion. That should give Emin another 50 years to get things out of her system.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 10.08.08