Introduction
Art has been defined in various ways and always about ‘expression’, deliberate or otherwise. As the material world grows in humongous ways, the forms of art also evolved and multiplied to encompass various mediums, ways, and means to exploit expression to the fullest.
This paper, looking at the work of two artists Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas will try to explore the issue of making images of the self, self-portraiture. It will discuss the works chosen as well as how and why these two artists use the medium of self-imaging and how making an image of the self differs from making a portrait of another individual.
Discussion
Historically, Lubell (1982, p 12) said that women pursued portraiture or self-portraiture because they could do so without the academic life that formal and systematized drawing and other training which has been denied of them due to gender. This was so until the 19th century. The lack of institutional training made many unable to paint the multi-figure altarpieces or commissions necessary for patronage and continued exercise, if not existence. In addition, domestic life and childbearing responsibilities added weight to travel for art study (Lubell, 1982).
Lubell, as early as 1982 has proposed that the changing definitions of art and art forms expanded the media and formats in which self-portraits are executed. Self-images become diverse depending on the artist’s perceptions of the “self”. Likewise, art movements have provided for images as common as the former standard three-quarter profile head and shoulder view, or as obscure and radical as photographs, photocopied pieces, body art, or even performances. The movements had influenced the forthright use of bodies, emotions, sexuality, and political consciousness as subjects of the self-image, or as Lubell (1982) put it, vehicles for autobiographical and commentating expression.
I have chosen two female British artists Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas as artists who use their bodies to visually represent their expression of art.
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin’s The Last Thing I Said to You was Don’t Leave Me Here II (2000) is one of the more personal and intimate images about the artist’s work as this is a photo showing her naked taken from behind while sitting in a squat position in a corner of a hut. The Tracey Emin website says that she was born in 1963 and is known as an English artist or one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) doing autobiographical art. She is considered second to Damien Hirst among the YBAs in terms of notoriety among the general public when her piece My Bed, a part of 1999’s Turner Prize exhibition that consisted of her unmade bed was complete with used condoms and blood-stained underwear. This brought her attention to the press.
Emin was born in London and brought up in Margate with twin brother Paul. Emin’s father, a hotel owner, was married to a woman other than her mother and the failure of his business led to a decline in their standard of living. This had been an event that has featured in several of Emin’s works. At the age of about 14, Emin said she was raped. She studied art in Maidstone describing it as one of the best experiences of her life. There, she met one great influenced Billy Childish. She then returned to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where she obtained an MA in painting. Emin claimed she was influenced by Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele. It was reported that she later destroyed all her paintings from this early period. Later, she studied philosophy at Birkbeck.
Emin opened a shop called simply The Shop in Bethnal Green with fellow artist Sarah Lucas in 1993. They sold their works that include t-shirts and ashtrays with Damien Hirst’s picture stuck to the bottom. Lucas was said to have paid Emin a wage to man the shop. She made extra money by agreeing to write letters for people. One of her clients was Jay Jopling who became her dealer. During this period, Emin also worked with the gallerist, Joshua Compston.
Her blatant display of items generally thought of as private has become one of Emin’s trademarks and this includes the photo I have mentioned earlier. In an interview with Beattie (2006), Emin gives a glimpse of her vulnerability, about her naivetĂ© or the lack of it as she delves into her feelings. “’Sometimes I feel all right about it, but sometimes I get really paranoid…Sometimes I don’t want people to see what I feel inside. A while ago I had to get on to an aeroplane, alone, and I was really crying. I didn’t want people to see I was crying so I wanted to put my sunglasses on to cover it up.”
In Emin’s The Last Thing, I Said to You is Don’t Leave Me Here, 1, 2000, she is naked wearing only a necklace and a bracelet, her hair in pigtails, eyes are closed, and crouched over (almost in a vertical fetal position). She is in a beaten-up beach hut, with sandblasted wooden panels, which exemplifies her origins in Margate. The “enclosed space [reinforces] the claustrophobic atmosphere [surrounding] her” (Rideal, 35). The color tones of the print are warm and peachy, which counters the environment she is in. The ambiguous and wordy title establishes the presence of her nudity, which is provocative and vulnerable (Rideal, 35)1, suggesting that she is a victim. The choice of clothing is essential in self-portraiture. It is a representation of wealth and status, as well as movements in fashion (Rideal 31). It sets up a platform for how the artist wants others to place them on the socio-economic ladder. Emin believes in relating to the ‘common people,’ which can explain her choice to be nude. In this photo, she touches on her general theme as an artist of relating herself to the ‘common people.’ She is completely vulnerable and undisguised from her audience. Everyone has to be nude at some point, but not everyone can afford to wear an elaborate silk garment. In her case, in 2000, Emin has gained some fame, so not straying from who she is in the moment she wears pieces of gold jewelry that may be showing her audience that she is not as ordinary as she used to be. This goes the same in her portrait I’ve Got It All, 2000, where she is sexually stuffing cash into her crotch, in a sense, displaying how money has gained her much pleasure in her new life. Her past still haunts her, but life must move on.
At the point when she talked about her book Strangeland, she defensively said, “It’s not a memoir […] It wasn’t diaries; it was writing I did over the past 25 years. I don’t know much about nature and animals, but I do know about me and my life, so that’s what I wrote about.”
Emin had her first solo show in 1994 at the White Cube gallery, one of the most significant galleries in London. Called “My Major Retrospective”, it was autobiographical, consisting of personal photographs, and photos of her now-destroyed early paintings as well as items which people would not consider showing in public, such as a packet of cigarettes her uncle was holding when decapitated in a car crash. Her piece Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95 was included in the group exhibition Minky Manky at the South London Gallery in 1995 organized by her then-boyfriend Carl Friedman.
Emin’s works include Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95 considered as one of her best which is a tent with the names of everyone she has slept with sewn onto it touted as a shameless exhibition of her sexual conquests, many suggest of it as a piece about intimacy in a more general sense; the film CV Cunt Vernacular (1997) which is a biography where Emin narrates her story from her childhood in Margate, through her student years, her abortions and destruction of her early works, as well as her later successful works; film Top Spot (2004), named after a youth centre in Margate, draws heavily on her teenage experiences; You Forgot To Kiss My Soul consisting of those words in neon inside a neon heart-shape; The Last Thing I Said Is Don’t Leave Me Here; The Hut; autobiographical book Exploration of the Soul; My Bed; a special neon piece George Loves Kenny (2007); monoprint unique drawings depicting events from the past Poor Love (1999), From The Week Of Hell ’94 (1995) and Ripped Up (1995), which relate to a traumatic experience after an abortion or other personal events as seen in Fuck You Eddy (1995) and Sad Shower in New York (1995); the watercolor Every Part Of Me’s Bleeding; ten Purple Virgin works; How I Think I Feel 1 and 2; Rose Virgin (2007); photographic works photographic works Monument Valley (Grand Scale) (1995-97), I’ve Got It All (2000) and Sometimes I Feel Beautiful (2000), two self portraits taken inside her famous beach hut, The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don’t Leave Me Here I (2000) and The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don’t Leave Me Here II (2000) depicting a naked Emin on her knees inside her beach hut sculpture The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don’t Leave Me Here (The Hut) (1999) (Duncan, 2007).
In the website provided for her, the following was written, “The work itself is not as interesting as the effect it has upon the public. Our prurient juices might flow, arousing entanglements of distance, desire and voyeurism. We might dismiss it outright, incredulous that such a base and brazen display gets attention as Art. We might see the work as the necessary weapon of an heroic victim, the bloodied sword of a warrior in the sex and gender wars. We might stand aside as it incites the critics to criticize and the media to mediate, thereby establishing a market value for itself. Finally, the idea of meeting her at a party might make us nervous,” on her My Cunt is Wet with Fear 1998, neon 10×55 in. edition of three.
As observed by many, most of the works of Emin are founded on her experiences, mostly negative and ugly, especially the earlier ones. These are not easily acceptable to the public but somehow provided insight and connection by patrons so that later commissioned works to become celebratory. Nevertheless, as Emin emerge as the total artist who has started to have confidence in herself, she always returns to her self-expression forms of art that relieve her of the baggage she talked about frequently (Beattie, 2006) being unloaded little by little, one by one, through her quilted patchwork, photographs, films, neon lights, and other installation arts.
Sarah Lucas
Sarah Lucas Self Portrait with Fried Eggs (1996) is a photo depicting a robust-bodied woman sitting on a single-seater sofa. What is arresting about this photo is the use of sunny-side-up fried eggs on top of the shirt where the woman’s breast should be. This is typical of Sarah Lucas who studied art at The Working Men’s College, London College of Printing, and Goldsmith’s College. She graduated in 1987 and was subsequently included in the ground-breaking group exhibition Freeze the following year. She was featured with contemporaries including Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, and Gary Hume. She has become one of the major Young British Artists during the 1990s with highly provocative work. By the early 1990s, she began using furniture as a substitute for the human body.
The Whole Joke and Penis Nailed to a Board was her first two solo exhibitions in 1992. For six months in 1993, Sarah Lucas and fellow artist Tracey Emin rented a retail space in east London called The Shop where they made and sold artworks, ranging from printed mugs to T-shirts with slogans.
Lucas’s artistic career is characterized by appropriating everyday materials to make works that use humor, visual puns, and sexual metaphor discussing sex, death, Englishness, and gender. This is depicted in her Self Portrait with Fried Eggs (1996) that has eggs on her breasts. The use of everyday stuff like the sofa, herself in her usual get-up, food, and other ordinary things is extraordinary if the representational context is a sign she has developed effectively. Another sample is her works Bitch (1995) of the table, t-shirt, melons, vacuum-packed smoked fish merges low-life misogynist tabloid culture with the economy of the ready-made. She had the intention of confronting sexual stereotyping. In another earlier work, she displayed enlarged pages from the Sunday Sport newspaper to attack stereotyping on its ground using a base language. It was given critical viability by its affinity to previous movements such as Situationism and Surrealism.
Lucas is also known for her confrontational self-portraits. One such work is the Human Toilet Revisited (1998; London, Tate). It is a colored photograph in which she sits on a toilet smoking a cigarette. In her solo exhibition “The Fag Show” (London, Sadie Coles, 2000), her obsession with cigarettes as a material for art was explored. The works suggested the connection between smoking and sexually obsessive activity. Self-portrait with Cigarettes (2000) connects the obsessive, introverted activities of smoking and drawing.
In Lucas’s Self Portrait with Skull, 1997, one of twelve ‘unfeminine’ photographs exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery, she is seated, and legs spread on a wooden floor with a skull placed directly in front of her crotch, almost suggesting a sexual innuendo. She is wearing dark clothing with sneakers, looking unkempt, pale, and androgynous. As Lucas said to an interviewer commenting on her art, ‘I’m saying nothing…just think what you like’ (Stallabrass, 96).2 An interpretation of this self-portrait is that she could be emphasizing the lack of vanity with her physical look, but in tradition, the skull represents Vanitas, a Latin word for a genre of still-life painting that was fashionable in the Netherlands in the 16th century.
The genre showed people in dialogue with Death portrayed as a skeleton. This type of still-life painting dealt with the fragility of life, with symbols such as skulls, butterflies, and guttering candles representing the transience of earthly achievements and pleasures (Rideal, 13).
Self Portrait With Skull, 1997 with the treatment of memento mori (an object that serves as a reminder of our human mortality), forces the viewer to consider one of the oldest and most personal preoccupations and mysteries of life: death
The morbidity and provocative nature of Lucas’ works often elicited comparisons with Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst. Her androgynous occupation of the masculine low-life domain gave her work much of its critical character. In 1996, Sarah Lucas became the subject of the BBC documentary, Two Melons, and a Stinking Fish.
Lucas had major one-person museum exhibitions at Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, at Portikus in Frankfurt, at The Ludwig Museum in Cologne and a recent survey exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich, Kunstverein am Hamburg, and Tate Liverpool. In between are less conventional spaces such as the empty office building for The Law in 1997, an unused postal depot in Berlin for the exhibition “Beautiness” in 1999; and an installation at the Freud Museum called Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 2000.
Lucas’s work was included in major surveys of new British art in the last decade including “Brilliant!” – New Art From London at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1995, “Sensation” – Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy in 1997, and the “Intelligence” – New British Art 2000 at Tate Britain. Lucas participated in the 50th International Biennale of Art in Venice and Outlook: Contemporary Art in Athens in 2003; “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”, a three-person exhibition for Tate Britain with Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst in 2004. Tate Liverpool presented the first survey exhibition of Sarah Lucas’s work from October 2005 to January 2006.
Lucas one-person publications are: the artist’s catalog raisonnĂ© (1989-2005) an accompaniment of the survey exhibition in 2005, and the recent artist’s book, GOD IS DAD, along with monographs by Tate Publishing in 2002, Tecla Sala, Barcelona in 2000 and Boyman’s van-Beuningen in 1994.
Lubell (1982) have noted how artists converted the self-image into themes that are symbolic but not necessarily representative including dream imagery, scenario photographs, abstract symbolic mode, sculpture suggestive of female forms, depicting expressiveness than objective projection, the emphasis of environment and the artists’ involvement with their surroundings, exploration, and experimentations for the sense of self.
Conclusion
While Lubell provided a sweeping observation of the movement of artists that are to emerge in the 1990s such as British Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin, it is to be noted that the use of medium and ways have also grown into decadence and liberal ways that include intimate personal stuff people would rather throw to the nearest wastebasket or hidden inside the bedroom.
As such, there is the progression of female artists’ expression on their self-image and works from what can be physically perceived such as nude body, or its forms, to their actual experiences such as depiction of a female sexual organ during or after a sexual act as seen or expressed in the installation art of Tracey’s Bed series, and of Lucas’ works at the Fag Show.
These two women portray themselves in their art quite different. Tracey Emin’s persona is a poor girl who has become a victim of her past, as Sarah Lucas’s persona has come out as the rebellious bad-girl, protecting her femininity through her androgyny. Both portray themselves as empowered sexual creatures. The evolution of self-portraiture has come a long way since the Renaissance. Once artists would want to be remembered as intellects and experts in their field:
For these artists, it was not only the immortality of their superficial appearance that concerned them but the very particular way they wanted to be remembered. They wished to establish their social context and to present themselves as embodying a powerful presence that would be encountered by generations of future beholders (Bond, 31).
It has become popular for [British] contemporary artists to want to be remembered as people who have established a voice for others in our modern culture. As revolutions are less rare, and there is a burgeoning group of young artists wanting to break into the scene, they are looking for a new way to create a unique persona that no one else has revealed to the public yet.
Works of art have always been considered cathartic and this is notable especially to these two women artists Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin who now afford to laugh at their own experiences as manifested in their creations. While Lucas may be the more reserved between the two and Emin the more vocal and explicit in words and visuals, both have shown hilarity in either their works or through interpretations of their works as they provide the basis for perception to the viewing public.
Creating and providing visual images for other people provides a depth of knowledge and sensitivity to rather passive existence so that there most often appear a characteristic that could be previously unknown or unpopular before the presentation of the done image to a viewer or the public in general.
As Emin and Lucas may prove, the production of self-images is always subjective, at one point an exorcism of an ugly experience or past, at others a celebration of the self. In the end, self-expression may be revolting to an audience but helpful for the soul of the artist. Art for these two progressive women is then sourced from within, using their self and there is a minimal need for the outside subject.
References
Beattie, Geoffrey (2006). “On the couch with Tracey Emin.” The Observer Sunday.
The Burlington Magazine (1992) Reviewed Work(s): British Contemporary Art 1910-1990. Eighty Years of Collecting by The Contemporary Art Society;. Vol. 134, No. 1071, p. 393
Bond, Anthony and Joanna Woodall. Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2005.
Collings, Matthew (2002). Sarah Lucas. London: Tate Publishing
Duncan, Allistair (2007). “Wearing Her heart on her sleeve.” Voyager magazine October.
Dziewior, Yilmaz & Beatrix Ruf (2005). Sarah Lucas: Exhibitions and Catalogue Raisonné 1989 – 2000. Osfildern-Ruit/ London: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Tate Publishing
Lubell, Ellen (1982). “Women Artists: Self Image.” Woman’s Art Journal 3 (1) 12-13
Rideal, Liz. National Portrait Gallery Insights: Self-portraits. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2005.
Tracey Emin.co. (2007). “Tracey Emin”.
Footnotes
- This is from the section, Dress, and Disguise.
- Lucas in an interview with Marcelo Spinelli, in Walker Art Center, ‘Brilliant’ New Art from London, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 1995, p. 65. (found in Stallabrass)