The Weight of Things

My Bed, Tracey Emin

I've always been drawn to the work of Tracey Emin.

I first encountered her sensibilities the way so many others did, at Tate Britain, where the now famous My Bed was on display. I was on break from Lehigh University, where I was studying philosophy as an undergraduate, visiting England to explore graduate school programs. As I toured various schools, I stopped to wander through museums. Everyone had been standing in front of the bed that winter, the final weeks of the Turner Prize run. The room at Millbank was airy and full of light, and the crowd moved through it carrying intrigue and skepticism, a public gathered around something private. An intimate spectacle. The bed sat in the gallery as it had sat in her flat: twisted sheets, empty vodka bottles, cigarette packets, slippers, a pregnancy test. It was raw, unfiltered, confessional. It disheveled the audience. I was mesmerized.

The newspapers and art critics had started to define what it meant, and the question people were asking was whether it was art. It resurfaced the question Duchamp had posed with his urinal, the one that unsettled the art world eighty years before. I remember, though, feeling that this wasn't quite the right question. It felt different. Fountain was an erudite provocation, a move in an argument about institutions and power. Emin's bed was every bit as provocative to me, and yet somehow more approachable. It was an everyday object still warm from a life. Its question was different. How does a life get into an object? How does a life become a work of art?

A few years later, after studying philosophy at the University of Warwick, outside the city, I arrived at Goldsmiths College to continue my studies. I was a student of philosophy in what I would later learn was the cradle of the Young British Artists: Hirst, Lucas, Hume. The cohort had passed through a decade before me, but I remember those little work studios strung along the campus, and I remember vividly discussing their presence. Emin, who was often characterized as part of this group, had never attended Goldsmiths. She came from Maidstone and the Royal College, from Margate before that, and was folded into the movement from the outside. She was never quite of it. Which was rather fitting.

Her art moved me. Then I discovered her words.

I began to notice how they spoke to me, and I realized they spoke to so many others. The scratches. The misspellings. The hurried hand. They were connective. The words told a story as captivating as any line on canvas, and they were lines, and that was the discovery. The hand that made the letters, that crafted the sentences, was the hand that made the marks, and both had lain in that bed.

Her work felt ordinary, commonplace, relatable, in the most exceptional way. At the time, I recall others found her work obscene, vulgar, out of touch, and I remember feeling the opposite: that she was speaking from a place most people rarely listened to. She was taking stock of imperfection, and showing how it could be beautiful.

There was an unmistakable singularity to her work.

Lucian Freud commented on her distinctiveness. Freud was an unflinching observer, and his method was intense and profound. Visceral. Obsessive. Practiced. While the most talented artists of his generation turned toward abstraction, he remained faithful to the figure. He built flesh in thick, sculptural layers until it had a tangible, heavy presence, and he rarely worked from photographs, expecting his subjects to endure punishing, months-long sittings. Freud used imagination to paint what he could see, and seeing required an intensity, a palpable, disciplined view. He was squarely part of his tradition, and yet undeniably apart from it, which may be why he identified with Emin. Martin Gayford, the art critic and writer who once sat for Freud through those long hours, recalls the painter remarking that Emin had a signature, a uniqueness, and that it expressed itself even through a Christmas card.

A Christmas card, the place where individuality goes to be polite.

I have been thinking about Freud's remark while reading Gayford's new book of conversations with Emin, My Heart is This, published this year as the largest retrospective of her life opened at Tate Modern. The conversations began more than twenty years ago, around the time I was coming to terms with her brilliance. The bed is on display in London once more, decades after I stood in front of it. I wonder how people face it today. What stirs in them as they see the soiled sheets. There is a passage in the interviews that moves me the way the bed once did. It is about her teaching, and the method she employs.

Emin, now in her sixties, hosts life-drawing classes at her studio in Margate, the seaside town she grew up in, fled, and came home to. In her classes she teaches what she calls understanding how things are, "the weight of things." In one exercise, she tells her students they are going to draw someone sitting down, and before they draw, they are going to sit in the chair the model will sit in. That is the whole instruction. Sit there first. Feel your bottom hitting the chair, the pad of your foot on the floor, your elbow finding the armrest. Then get up and draw. Now, she says, you are drawing an arm that is weighted. A head that is heavy. A hand that is limp. You are drawing someone who looks mournful.

It is a small instruction, almost nothing, and it turns the usual story about empathy around. We tend to think empathy starts with the other person, that you project yourself outward into their situation. Emin's exercise starts in your own body. You cannot see the weight of another person's arm until you have felt weight in your own. Bergson called this intuition, the effort to enter into a thing rather than walk around it taking notes, and he considered it rare. Emin gets students there with a piece of furniture.

There is a second exercise. After her students have spent a session drawing the model, she announces that they will now draw her and the model together. She sits at the end of the couch. Afterwards she asks them which drawing they like best. Invariably, they say the Tracey one. She asks which is better. The Tracey one. Then she tells them why. Through the workshop she has been talking with them, explaining things, moving around, doing this and that. Her students have seen her animated. They have seen her alive. They have felt her presence. And so she gives them the lesson, delivered with heart: "Remember she has a soul, remember she's a person, remember she has skin." The model has been holding a pose, still as an object, and the students have drawn an object.

You draw well what you have listened to. The more empathy you have for someone, the more you can hear how they should be painted, and the hearing happens before the hand ever moves. It is what I had felt in front of her work all along without the words for it: she spoke from an unlistened-to place, and she painted from one too. Most of what looks like talent is listening.

Curiosity cultivates mastery.

The two exercises offer a complete education, and not only in drawing. Feel the weight in your body. Listen until the other stops being an object, until there is no subject or object, only a vitality that flows between. Pierre Hadot, the French philosopher, spent his career recovering a thread from the ancients: philosophy practiced as spiritual exercise rather than doctrine, a daily training of attention meant to change the person doing it. The best-known example is Marcus Aurelius, who wrote his Meditations as exercises of exactly this kind, notes to himself, never meant for readers. Michel Foucault, near the end of his life, returned to the question we had all encountered with My Bed: why could a lamp or a house be a work of art, but not a life? These formulations can remain formulations forever. Emin turned them into homework. Sit in the chair. Feel the weight. Draw again.

The homework works. The work of Tracey Emin demonstrates that a life, attended to without flinching, can become legible, that intensity and force can traverse one's own composition. Every image, she has said, travels through her heart and her blood before arriving at the end of her hand. The tentativeness in her line, the willingness to extend a mark and simultaneously indicate what it could be, comes from the same place. She knows the moment is fleeting. It has probably already slipped by. The drawing is what remains of the listening.

Which brings me back to the Christmas card. The card Lucian Freud had in mind appears in Gayford's book: a robin on a branch, drawn for the Tate in 2002, a few red lines and two ivy leaves. Emin says of her printmaking that no matter how carefully she works, the result still comes out "chipped, crooked, not right." She still has this level of eccentricity. She means it as a confession of limits. I read it as the argument. When a life has been composed this way, the signature cannot be withheld. It shows up in a bed. It shows up in a robin.

I think sometimes about the generation learning to make things now, at a moment when the lifelike has never been easier to produce. We spend so much effort teaching people to render. Emin starts earlier. Sit in the chair first. Ask what the other has weighed. The drawing will follow, and so, perhaps, will the life.

The robin sits on its branch, crooked, not right.