This bed is the quintessence of everything that premium haters of contemporary art hate. It bothers them that it is not a product of the imagination of its creator, Tracey Emin, who has not even minded doing something nice. In fact, they cannot bear that it is as ugly as life itself, because they also strongly hate any type of art that is not a perfect illusion that separates them from the harsh reality and their futile lives. They do not understand how an artist can be considered such a thing if she does not work to please them and that, instead of entertaining them, they make them uncomfortable, annoy them! They are mortified that art has become an event similar to those that occur on the street and are no longer able to clearly distinguish between what is one thing and another. They also cannot bear that the spectator has to contribute something more than their contemplation and comply with what Duchamp said - the great culprit and referent of it - that the spectator turns grossly personal art into an intellectual and socially refined art. They rage because they do not bring together the spirituality and humanity of the paintings of the old masters, because they do not care about the transcendence or they do not have a clear purpose. They scream against this that they only talk about themselves. Worse still: that she is a woman and that she talks about her, and dares to reveal the miseries of a life that squeezes to the last consequences of freedom, in which there is no lack of rapes, abortions, drunkenness and lots of sex. Intolerable.
At that Sensation , a mythical exhibition held in 1997 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, along with the nudes of Jenny Saville, another of the young British artists who came out to claim the new era was Tracey Emin, who planted a tent with the names of all the men she had slept with between 1963 and 1995 embroidered on their sides. After that came My Bed (1998), a finalist for the Turner Prize in 1999, which would be sold for 3.2 million euros at an auction in 2014. The publicist and patron Charles Saatchi had bought it 14 years earlier for 188,000 euros and they have who exhibited it in his living room. The new owner, the German businessman and collector Christian Duerckheim, has left the work of art at the Tate Modern in London until 2025. And that is where it could be seen, until a few months ago, preceded by paintings by Francis Bacon and forming part of 700 years of British art, because it is impossible to understand his work detached from his biography, just as it is impossible not to understand that his biography deals with universal themes such as love, death, pain or desire.
Time is running and the bed is becoming more universal and less particular. And if it weren't for this confinement that makes us see in everything a reference to confinement and chaos, we would continue to snoop into the details: ripped sheets, underwear, used condoms, (empty) vodka bottle, slippers, ashtrays filled with cigarettes, a pregnancy test and that blissful blue carpet at the foot of the bed. Secondary objects, the trace left by what is missing. Everything refers to the true protagonist of the installation (exceptionally, we are not talking about a painting), which is not the bed, but the body that is not there. The footprint of the woman who has just risen from a deadly hangover and becomes aware of her condition. That bed is a shroud of contemporary Passion, a Shroud of the body of a woman who is harassed and accused by the media and critics of being sexually obsessed, emotional exhibitionist and fighter of her youthful traumas. That bed and what one does not see in it is a punch to the patriarchy.
Virtual tour: Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998), exhibited at Tate Modern (London).