Telling stories: performing authenticity in the confessional art of Tracey Emin

Abstract

The expressionist art of Tracey Emin is often labeled as confessional because of its intimate subject matter, which draws on the artist’s personal experiences of sexual abuse, erotic escapades, pregnancies, and abortions. Combined with Emin’s unrefined esthetic, such as her hand-written text or her sloppily-styled installations, seemingly autobiographical details emerge with a powerful sense of immediacy and work to establish an ostensibly authentic tone. But for all of its implications of veracity, how far does Emin’s confessional art disclose any truth? By analyzing parts of it through the classical figure of Penelope as well as the theories of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, I argue that the art of Tracey Emin reflects a complex notion of authenticity, one that is entangled with performance and which exposes that confessional truth-telling can be, and often is, a form of storytelling.

Keywords:

• Tracey Emin
• autobiography
• authenticity
• confession
• performance
• storytelling

Acknowledgements

The ideas in this essay were first developed in a paper on the implications of religion and confession in the art of Tracey Emin which was given at the 2011 Annual Southeastern College Art Conference. I would like to thank my PhD advisor Isabelle Loring Wallace and my husband Christopher Kincade for the many discussions on Emin’s art since that conference paper, and especially their insights on this essay.

Notes

1. See Merck and Townsend (2002). As the first sustained scholarly analysis of Emin’s work, this text is a fundamental foundation for the scholarship on Emin’s oeuvre; several of its essays are referenced here.

2. See: https://vimeo.com/79687251. Accessed 1 January 2016.

3. To date, several authors have discussed Emin’s confessional art in relation to the genre of storytelling. For readings of it as derived from familiar narrative strategies in feminist art as well as pop cultural sources such as reality tv, cinema, and music videos, see Fanthome (2008) and Healy (2002); for other discussions of Emin as a storyteller within the specific tradition of feminist art, see Betterton (2002); Lamoni (2011); and Doyle (2002; see also her contribution in Emin 2011, 33–40).

4. http://whitecube.com/exhibitions/tracey_emin_the_last_great_adventure_is_you_bermondsey_2014/.