Plinth

Emin has told this tragedy before of course. At the Tate Britain, in the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition, she became an art world cause célèbre with the staging of ‘My Bed’. The now-notorious story of this notorious work is that Emin emerged from a prolonged, bedridden depression following heartbreak and examined the nest she had created as if from outside herself. The stained sheets, condoms, cigarette butts, empty vodka bottles and barbecue sauce sachets were not just the detritus of a personal breakdown, but readymades articulating a raw truth of contemporary human experience. Emin’s bed is the site of sex and death, sleep and a kind of sadness indistinguishable from madness – ‘the place we make love’ the same as ‘the place we might die in.’

In Emin’s last solo exhibition at White Cube – 2019’s ‘A Fortnight of Tears’ – the bed was also a tragic presence. In South Gallery I, fifty self-portraits confronted viewers at an aggressive scale. In each discomfitingly close-up selfie, Emin is in bed. The series was an ongoing one, capturing her insomnia – the place where we sleep becoming the place where we think ourselves mad. This ‘tragic furniture’ also haunted the exhibition elsewhere, hovering at the edge of Emin’s works considering the physical trauma of abortion, and her mother’s death. Two decades after ‘My Bed’, in this show too, sex fell ‘so quickly’ into death; sleep into sadness; the sickbed into the grave.

Five years on, in ‘I followed you to the end’, there is a prevailing sense of Emin turning herself inside out. Now, her themes return aslant; twisted like intestines. As in ‘My Bed’, these works spin around bedridden heartbreak. In an echo of ‘How it Feels’ (Emin’s 1995 film where she describes her experience of a botched abortion, which featured in White Cube’s 2019 exhibition), here another brutal, bloody film plays, but now, rather than abortion, bodily trauma stems from invasive surgery. Here too, death is close by, but this time it is not Emin’s mother’s, it is her own. ‘I don’t want to have sex because my body feels dead,’ screams one painting – the horizon line of which extends into a second where a female figure thrusts her pelvis upwards, as her head and limbs sink beneath a frenzied scarlet tide. What was ‘A Fortnight of Tears’ is now an unending vista of tears and piss and blood.

As in all Emin’s works, the starting point is a painful truth. Following a kidney reflux, Emin’s bladder stopped working. She self-catheterized for five years, before a biopsy in 2020 revealed her insides were riddled with cancer. Just 13 days later, she underwent what she has described as ‘really radical surgery’, to have ‘everything’ removed: ‘my bladder, a full hysterectomy, my ovaries, my lymph nodes, my urethra, part of my vagina and part of my intestine to make the stoma’.

In her 1978 work ‘Illness as Metaphor’, Susan Sontag railed against the very premise of her title. ‘My point is that illness is not a metaphor,’ Sontag wrote, ‘and that the most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet,’ she added, ‘it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped’. As lurid as it is, it is hard not to read Emin’s surgery, and the stoma that resulted from it, as a shrieking metaphor. This is the artist who has made a career of offering her viscera up to the world, after all; whose oeuvre is bloodstained and bodily. The overtly sexed nature of Emin’s surgery is also glaring – ‘my ovaries… my vagina’ – in the case of an artist who has made work about her rape, pregnancies and abortions.

For years though, this profound bodily experience was absent from Emin’s work. Her sickness was concealed; invisible, as chronic pain and disability so often are. ‘When I self-catheterized I kept it a secret,’ Emin told Colostomy UK in 2023. ‘The nurse who had advised me, advised me really wrongly,’ Emin explained. ‘She told me not to tell anyone. She told me it would get in the newspapers.’ Perhaps the nurse was right – she wouldn’t be the first to advise secrecy, celebrity patient or not. ‘The fear surrounding cancer being even more acute, so is the concealment,’ Sontag writes, suggesting this stems not just from fear of death, but from shame. ‘Cancer is notorious for attacking parts of the body (colon, bladder, rectum, breast, cervix, prostate, testicles) that are embarrassing to acknowledge,’ Sontag notes. But, this is Tracey Emin we’re talking about. As she herself proclaimed in the Colostomy UK interview, ‘it's like, when have I ever kept a secret about myself?’ Later, she suggests ‘it’s hard enough dealing with the fucking bag, let alone dealing with the secret’.

The metaphors keep crowding in: the retention of secrets, the pressure build up, the urge to ‘spill’ and the eventual, inevitable overflow – all seem uncannily mimicked in the urostomy bag’s life-saving function. ‘I have to deal with it,’ Emin has said of her ‘bag’: ‘I have to live with it’. This involves overcoming embarrassment. ‘I have accidents,’ Emin confessed. ‘I was in Chanel and my bag burst and it went all over the floor and my clothes’. She later described this incident as one of her ‘greatest golden moments’ in an article for The Independent, where she recounted ‘a tsunami of piss cascading down my body crashing to the champagne carpeted floor’. Illness is not a metaphor, and yet. What better metaphor could there be for Emin’s artistic practice, her position in the contemporary canon, than a tsunami of piss crashing against champagne carpeted floors? In all of Emin’s work, the body will out. Condoms in Tate Britain. A pile of cash spewing from her loins. Her naked body locked in a gallery for three weeks; the resulting series titled ‘Life Model Goes Mad’. ‘Cancer, as a disease that can strike anywhere, is a disease of the body,’ Sontag stresses. ‘Far from proving anything spiritual, it proves that the body is, alas, and all too much, the body.’ But, for Emin, the body is also, ‘all too much,’ the art.

If the image of piss cascading over Chanel’s champagne carpet is a good metaphor for Emin’s work, it also speaks to the confessional mode that has dominated contemporary culture for thirty years, of which Emin is both touchstone and symptom. Emin’s early work certainly caused a sensation, but looking back it seems of a piece with its cuspy millennial era – on the same horizon line as Chris Kraus’s books, LiveJournal blogs, JenniCam and the birth of reality TV. Three decades on, the confessional mode has congealed and been increasingly commodified, as evidenced by the dominance of autofiction and the personal essay, and the relentless personal branding required by social media. From ‘My Bed’ to the Instagram photo dump: personal experience is, alas, and all too much, the only subject. Piss and champagne may in fact be interchangeable now – far from prompting shock, the bursting forth of the personal, the traumatic and the bodily is par for the course, and profitable.

So why then, does ‘I followed you to the end’ still have such power? Is it the pull of the real that tugs on the guts? Certainly, Emin’s work has an urgency – a frantic quality that, in her last White Cube exhibition, was more muted. Yet, it is not personal confession that gives the works their force, but how they function together as allegory. By turning herself inside out, Emin seems to have gotten outside herself more than ever before. The bed that was once her bed is now emblematic: a symbol of the universal tragedy of human suffering and mortality.

If this show relates to the confessional mode, it is in its affective connection to ‘illness memoirs’, such as Virginia Woolf’s ‘On Being Ill’ and ‘The Cancer Journals’ by Audre Lorde, both of which are quoted in Boyer’s ‘Undying’ – the essayist and poet’s own ‘illness memoir’ about undergoing cancer treatment as a single mother, which is just as much about the polluted world and exploitative working conditions that render people sick. Yet, Boyer notes, she has ‘never seen a sickbed scene from the point of view of the person in it’. Such a scene would ‘have to be painted on a canvas with no edges, to be too small to measure, to be too large to contain,’ Boyer suggests. ‘It would happen outside of time, happen inside of history, exempt the present from the linear, rearrange substance so that blankness is an element, rearrange aesthetics so that the negative is almost all. That kind of painting would be hard to make,’ she reckons. This is precisely the kind of painting Emin has made.

Tiny repeated scenes; bed after bed after bed, weeping, leaking, bleeding. Vast canvases where the same figures recur, making different shapes on the same mattress. Horizon lines reaching from canvas to canvas, as painting after painting is literally whitewashed – the image concealed in blankness, only for the hidden parts to seep through, insisting on coming to the surface. Taken together, the works in ‘I followed you to the end’ are disorientating. They happen outside time, in a constant present. In the realm of myth.

In a painting titled ‘The Saddest Tomb’, a bloody wash slips into a swathe of blue, which seems to carry Emin’s recurring sickbed as if on waves. The figure has been cut adrift, this painting suggests; she is floating out to an unreachable place. The sick bed that is also a grave, an altar and a work of art, is here rendered a life raft and a shipwreck, all at once. ‘In the sickbed, the sick disassemble and this disassembly crowds a cosmos, organs and nerves and parts and aspects announcing themselves as unfurling particulars,’ Boyer writes: ‘a malfunctioning left tear duct – a new universe; a dying hair follicle – a solar system’. In these new works, Emin’s stoma is a pulsating cosmos, which often slips into a crimson halo. But it also remains an orifice. The exhibition ends with a video work, in which Emin records her stoma in close-up. The one minute film plays on loop: the stoma is always bleeding; it is a wound that will not close, will not heal; that always remains open and gaping.

‘It’s not like a tumour,’ Emin has said of squamous cell cancer, ‘it’s almost like millions of blisters which all connect, and that’s cancer and you can’t stop it.’ If Emin articulates a spirituality to suffering, it is not romantic or sentimental. The exhibition is exhausting. The paintings too are like ‘blisters which all connect’ – bed after bed, wound after wound; alas, and all too much, the body; interminable, unending.

Yet, Emin’s ‘confession’ is also an artful lie. ‘The best thing I did, 3 days after the surgery I was up, walking around the ward going up stairs,’ Emin told Colostomy UK. ‘Otherwise, you’ll end up with a hunchback on top of everything else, so you’ve just got to start walking straight away. Otherwise, your core, all the surgery inside, groups together all the scar tissue, and then you can’t stand upright’. And so, behind these bedridden figures is an artist standing upright, painting in a frenzy, throwing onto canvas what her body both promises and threatens. For what is a stoma, what is a sickbed, and what are these works but scar tissue – stigmata of damage and healing, life and death, altogether and all at once.

By Eloise Hendy

Cover image: Detail of Tracey Emin, *I Watched You Die, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 203 x 280 cm © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. Photo © White Cube (Eva Herzog)*