Sunday, 25 August 2002
Soiled sheets, empty vodka bottles, used condoms, a pair of bloodstained knickers – when Tracey Emin's My Bed was entered for the 1999 Turner Prize, its frankness alarmed even the most seasoned students of conceptual art.
Soiled sheets, empty vodka bottles, used condoms, a pair of bloodstained knickers – when Tracey Emin's My Bed was entered for the 1999 Turner Prize, its frankness alarmed even the most seasoned students of conceptual art.
Now, two years after advertising guru Charles Saatchi bought it for £150,000, Ms Emin is making the bed anew – this time it's a four-poster.
As she prepares for a trio of major solo shows, Emin is hard at work on the sequel. And far from simply embelishing her original idea, she has opted to start, literally, with a clean sheet. The new bed will be sturdy, with colourful appliquéd blankets and elaborate embroidered coverlets. Lying at its foot, as if to mock her critics, will be a gold deathmask of her face.
The bed is just one of a huge array of potentially provocative new work to be exhibited by the 39-year-old enfant terrible this autumn. One is a blanket decorated with the US flag and the wording of a flyer advertising bio-hazard suits and gas masks that was handed to Emin in London shortly after 11 September .
Like the bed, this piece, entitled Don't Try to Sell Me Your Fucking Fear, will be given its début at New York's Lehmann Maupin Gallery next month.
Other works revisit familiar territory. There are at least two other blankets, including one covered in her trademark appliquéd writing exploring the trauma of her abortion, the subject of a monologue in one of her early video pieces.
Honey Luard, spokeswoman for Emin's studio, White Cube, confirmed the as-yet-untitled new bed would be the centrepiece of the New York show. "It's a really beautiful bed and it's taking shape very well," she said. "Tracey has already made a cast of her face for the gold mask, and there will be lots of other surprises"
She added that Emin was preparing "something special" for the third of her shows, at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art: "It's going to be a really big new sculpture. We can't say what it will be at the moment, but it's likely to be a bridge of some sort."
Emin was unavailable for comment, but in The Art of Tracey Emin, to be published by Thames & Hudson in October, she reflects on My Bed.
Asked about her decision to sell it to Saatchi, whom she had snubbed initially because of his work on Conservative Party election campaigns, she says: "I was pleased Charles Saatchi bought it and it became like an icon... I didn't want to sell it; I wanted to keep it for myself. It is just a mattress and all the objects actually fitted into one dustbin bag. I wanted to keep it as a pension and I thought if I could keep this large sculpture it would be a really good thing to bring out when I was older."
On its notoriety among art critics, many of whom have argued that they could have made it themselves, she says: "But they haven't done it. It was a shame when it got criticised and people didn't see it for what it was. I always saw it as a damsel fainting, going 'Aahhhh'..."
