Before even entering this major retrospective, the viewer is greeted by the artist’s writing: the ticket area is wallpapered with photocopies of Tracey Emin’s weekly column for The Independent, now available as a 400-page volume published by Rizolli. Whether you notice it or not on your way in (the Hayward seems busier than usual since this show’s opening, after all), the point is made that Emin’s work is always contextualised by her words, wrapped in narrative, embedded in the multiple discourses that have shaped visitors’ expectations and have arguably brought them to the show.

Words may well condition the reception of all visual art but it would be hard to question that this applies even more strongly in the case of Tracey Emin. Furthermore, the wallpaper signals the exhibition’s highlighting of the textual elements in Emin’s work, going so far as to propose a re-viewing of her practice as scriptovisual. Considering the principally conceptualist associations of text-based art, this is indeed a brave and, I think, ultimately convincing proposition.

The first room brings together a selection of appliquéd blankets, including the earliest, Hotel International (1993), made in response to a request for a CV. Combining text scribbled in pen (and fading fast – a potential conservation nightmare) or pieced together in brightly coloured ‘sacred’ fabrics, recycled, we are told, from Emin’s baby blanket and the clothes of loved ones, the pieced blankets speak in many voices and moods. Despite the strongly confessional tone of many textile works, it would be a mistake to miss their political references, or take the emotive provenance of their raw materials at face value. No Chance (1999), for instance, incorporates a tattered Union Jack, and locates narratives of failure and frustration in the year of the Silver Jubilee, creating powerful tensions reminiscent of punk, in aesthetic as well as historical terms. The woollen salmon pink material that is identified as Emin’s baby blanket, the most typical transitional object, makes an appearance in so many of the works that one is forced to assume that either the artist was a seriously big infant or, more likely, that in this unfolding mythical universe fact and fiction are not exactly opposed to one another: as is so often the case in autobiography, truth exceeds reality.

Emin’s neons (bar two, which are shown alongside newer work in the upstairs gallery) are grouped together in a darkened corridor. It is curious that they haven’t been shown in this manner before: never have these signs looked more inviting and seedy in their colourful brightness nor have they been more eloquent. They speak of despair, revenge, regret, desire, they can be punning (‘Is Anal Sex Legal? Is Legal Sex Anal?’ reads a pale lilac neon) and, above all, they become more than the sum of their parts. Like so many of Emin’s works they evoke or rather create a location, in this case an imaginary metropolis where the inhabitants’ innermost thoughts and feelings magically take material form and flash bright for a moment, for all to see.

Two vitrines bring together photographs, notebooks, memorabilia and ephemera from Emin’s early years as an artist, when she kept The Shop with Sarah Lucas and ran the Tracey Emin Museum. Much of this has never been shown before and sheds light on an often ignored aspect of the artist’s output and career, a DIY entrepreneurial streak that manifests in both the difficult business of making a living (well, in the early days at least) and in the creation, dissemination and management of the very successful ‘Tracey Emin’ brand, from applique-ing EMIN on to a sunhat to moulding her nervous, smudgy, neo-expressionist drawing style. At the heart of Room 3 is a smaller room, a recreation of the 2003 exhibition Menphis at Counter Gallery (now Carl Freedman Gallery), a show within a show. Disappointingly, no comment is made on the misspelling of the ancient capital of Egypt, which hints, in my view, at a persistent Oedipal Orientalism, explored in greater detail in the section ‘Fatherland’ in Strangeland (2005), a collection of Emin’s writing, and in her feature film Top Spot (2004), where an English teenage girl travels to Egypt to meet a lover who’s actually in a borstal, among other works.

Rather than simply repeating Emin’s claim that she doesn’t know how to spell, critics and discerning viewers tend to now reflect on the claim itself as a key topos in Eminland. In a note at the end of Strangeland, Emin explains that her poor spelling has been corrected and that she is the process of learning how to spell. Whether any progress has been made on that front six years later is beside the point. Even if originally authentically accidental, spelling mistakes make up a calculated and intrinsic part of the finished work by not being corrected or edited out, just as deliberate as the famously unmade My Bed (1998), with surrounding detritus meticulously arranged for each installation. The inverted ‘N’, which corresponds to a Cyrillic letter that invokes foreignness and new patterns of migration within the expanding European Union, appears in so many of the monoprints that it becomes a signature of sorts. In the appliqué blanket Helter Fucking Skelter (2001), an aggressive barrage of recriminations directed at someone who ‘knows who she is’ but also, by default, at the viewer, we find the inscription ‘you see it’s a spirial whitch goes down’, where ‘which’ and ‘witch’ are collapsed, adding another insult to the mix. Mad Tracey from Margate Everyone’s Been There (1997), which isn’t included in the show, contains a pun that is illustrated in many of the newer works in the upstairs gallery: ‘she was masterbating’. Baiting the old masters by de-sublimating the reclining nude, Emin’s recent paintings, drawings and an animation screened in a loop, are not only a remarkable attempt to inscribe an active and self-sufficient female sexuality into the history of art but also, by raising eyebrows, prove that to do so still bears some revolutionary potential.

Also not included is My Bed, partly because it wasn’t available, as curator Cliff Lauson explained. Its absence, however, is perhaps liberating, because it allows for a refreshing departure from the most abject tangents of Eminian confessionalism. Despite acquiescing to some familiar mythologies and viewers’ expectations (there is the obligatory ‘Trauma’ section in Room 3), this show is the first of its kind to confidently and unapologetically present Emin’s oeuvre as a body of work that thoroughly deserves critical attention and, crucially, reassessment. The artist has expressed the hope that visitors ‘come out thinking I’m a better artist than when they went in’ and there is a good chance that most will.

Love is What You Want is part of the 60^th anniversary celebrations of the Festival of Britain. This is Emin’s second actual retrospective (her first ever show was also provocatively called a retrospective), after a smaller-scale one at the Dean Gallery, Edinburgh in 2008, and has the whiff of a celebratory homecoming about it. The pervasive tension between Emin’s maligned artistic corpus and her frequently flaunted physique is neither resolved nor hidden away but brazenly signposted in the photograph used for the show’s publicity and catalogue cover: here Emin is shown running away from the camera lens in the buff, the Union Jack fluttering behind her, over her shapely legs and bottom – a fit(tingly) patriotic streaker.

Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want
Hayward Gallery 18 May – 29 August 2011
Exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff and Cliff Lauson;
assistant curator: Richard Parry

Alexandra M. Kokoli

Alexandra M. Kokoli is Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.

Images: 1. Tracey Emin, Love is What You Want, 2011, Installation shot of neon works, Hayward Gallery © the artist.  2. Tracey Emin, Helter Fucking Skelter, 2001 Applique blanket, 700 x 828 © the artist.  3. Tracey Emin, Hotel International, 1993 Applique blanket, 260 x 240 © the artist. 4. Tracey Emin, still from Those Who Suffer Love, 2009 Animation © the artist and White Cube.