Feature

Bigmouth Strikes Again

Salem, 2005

(Photo: Courtesy of Tracey Emin and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York)

“I’m a very, very sad person,” she says when I ask her about the tone of the new show. “I can’t decide whether I’m unhappy because I make unhappy work or I make unhappy work because I’m unhappy.” Asked how she would describe that sadness, she answers immediately and assuredly: “Melancholy. It’s a melancholy.” As for the name of the show, she told me, “It was originally going to be called ‘Everything for Love’ because I wanted it to be positive, but then I thought that ‘I Can Feel Your Smile’ is just really lovely; it makes me want to cry in a way. It comes from a text message that I sent to a friend whose husband had died. I thought I could feel her smiling, and that got me thinking about death and where we go when we die and if the dead are watching us.”

“People here don’t seem to expect me to have a sense of humor. Or tits, for that matter.”

But ultimately, the fulcrum of “I Can Feel Your Smile” is Emin herself—as it was with her bed, the tent, and, indeed, every exhibition she has ever had. She called her first solo show, at London’s White Cube Gallery, “My Major Retrospective,” “because I didn’t think I would ever have another one.” And though it’s far from rare for artists to use themselves as their primary subject (consider Rembrandt’s and Picasso’s self-portraits), somehow Emin’s version of making the private public seems so much more, well, public than that of other exhibitionists. “It’s strange—most collectors will never know what the artist whose work they’re buying even looks like,” she says, “but with me they all seem to want to meet me and talk to me.”

The sunlight pours in through the panoramic glass-walled space, and as Emin reclines in her sun lounger, I’ve begun to feel like her therapist, and I tell her so. “Yeah, it’s getting a bit like that, isn’t it?” she replies. “I have come to realize that I’m going to be alone for the foreseeable future,” she says, looking out over Central Park. “And that’s definitely a bit of a downside, but it’s tough shit, that’s how it is.” She closes her eyes. “I’ve made a decision. And that’s to make my work.”