Emin and femininity
By Jackie Wullschlager
FT
June 9 2007 03:00
Will 21st-century art belong to women? For most of its 100-year
existence, the Venice biennalehas consisted of exhibitions by white
male painters from western Europe and America. But this year, the UK,
France, Germany and other nations are represented by women working in
mixed media. The result is the most feminised biennale in history, and
a shift from the boldly universal to an emphasis on emotional
storytelling in a quieter vein, which unites female artists across the
globe.
Queen and pioneer here is Tracey Emin. Borrowed Light, her exhibition
of paintings, drawings, sewn work, neon installations and wooden
tent-like sculptures, is triumphant, original, beautiful, moving and
the best thing she has done so far. Her trademark sadness and
loneliness still shout out – the embroidery "Sometimes I feel so
fucking lost" (2005), the seeping textures and outlines of wistful
figures and hearts in the "Abortion Watercolours" (1990), and simple
neon inscriptions which almost speak aloud, such as "I know Iknow I
know", all provide retrospective context here – but as challenge and
liberation, Venice and the international setting are her turning point.
In compelling new work Emin responds with paintings and drawings which
place her as late-expressionist heir to such distillers of pain as Egon
Schiele and Edvard Munch. Her focus is the female body, and especially
its splayed open legs and crotch; in the series "Tower Drawings" what
makes her depictions exceptional is the mastery of a hesitant, wavering
line which seems to start, stab, retreat and jolt forward, yet remains
always aesthetically strong: a distinct signature of doubt and anxiety.
In the paintings – "Fuzzy Sex", "Ruined", "Preying for a Penis", the
"Purple Virgin" series – the surprise is how that level of intimacy and
longing is carried over to paintings whose compositional tension and
tortuous figuration belie the apparent spontaneity of their
mark-making. The chromatic range is delicate but rich, recalling
sensuous colourists from Venetian fresco painters to de Kooning. The
effect, as Emin puts it, is at once "pretty and hard core": the
summation of half a lifetime’s absorption in autobiographical themes,
but with an exhilarating sense of future ambitious possibilities in
paint.
Women in the visual arts have at least a century of catching up to do.
Venice shows them doing it at speed, from Armenian Sonia Balassanian’s
video diaries of a soldier, wife and freedom-fighter in "Who is the
Victim?" and China’s "Everyday Miracles", where four female artists use
traditional feminine materials to question identity and social change,
to Isa Genzken’s icy astronaut dolls and ironically formal plastic
ornamentation conveying a vision of chaos and multinational greed in
"Oil". All have their charms, but Emin alone is on her way to becoming
an icon of female emotional pain transformed into art. JW