I always say this, being an artist, being a successful artist isn't just about doing this. Like my studio is on four floors, this is just one floor. You know, half my studio is, you know, computers and offices and other people working for me. And anybody who wants to be an artist that thinks it's just about being in your garret, painting, forget it. It's never going to work for you.
You have to also have your head screwed on. and be together because otherwise no one's going to know you're there. That's another thing.
Do you think you've become a calmer person? Yeah, much calmer. Do you feel more in control of your life?
Well, saying that, I was still running around like a lunatic trying to catch up with my life. But I think definitely, I don't want to bang on about it, but it's not drinking spirits anymore. I gave up drinking spirits in 1999 and that's probably one of the best things I've ever done for myself, health-wise and for my brain. You know, I'm just starting to actually recover after years and years of drinking really heavily. I mean, I don't fall over anymore.
Before I would have been sitting here, I would have been halfway through a bottle of whiskey and in between the filming I would have been going off to vomit in your loo. I would have had the mic on and we would have had the sounds, you know, and it would have been hilariously funny but not really very good. So you don't want to give people what they think you are? It's not like I don't want to give that to people, I'm not that anymore. In life you shouldn't change but you should grow and if you're going to grow you should grow into something which you want to grow into not into something you don't want to grow into.
Tracy, she always has the title of the show before she actually starts making the work. She never paints a picture. A picture comes easy to her.
She has to almost suffer in order to make a painting that means something to her. Most of the time what makes a great canvas which you see in this room. ...is when she has had to suffer and she's erased and pushed and pulled the painting back and she's fighting with the painting. This painting here was the most frustrating painting in the whole show.
When she was making it there was crying, there was screaming, there was shouting. What's interesting, you talk about love. Because I think a lot of people watching this around the world will associate your name with, you know, very graphic art, not just drawings, but installation art and all sorts of different presentations, which alluded to terrible abuse you suffered and also the way in which sex for a time in your life seemed to be very loveless.
You had abortions. You found that very tough at the time. I mean, is there a part of your art that has been about that sense of regret and loss?
The work that I made about abortion was about questioning abortion. It wasn't pro-choice, it wasn't pro-life, it was about, as a woman, going through that experience, what I felt. And that work really helped a lot of women, whether or not they liked art or not, they felt that they could identify with me or have someone to actually, you know, converse with and talk about.
It's one of those closed subjects. Women get up. In the morning, they go to work in the morning, they have an abortion in the afternoon, and they go back into work the next day and they don't tell anyone because they feel so mortified and so ashamed of what they've been through. And if they have a sense of regret or longing or anything afterwards, they're not in a position to tell people because no one's going to be sympathetic because they'll say it's your choice.
How do you know what you're going to feel like until after the event? I'm a very passionate person and I'm, you know, I have a... have deep emotions, we all have emotions, but mine really come out like what some of my friends say that I apparently have containment issues. You know, I'm always constantly telling the truth apparently, you know, I'm always saying things you shouldn't say, but I'm always making work about things that are closed subject matter for a lot of people.
And I also think that I could never censor myself ever in any way. I couldn't, otherwise I wouldn't be able to make the work that I do. Sometimes I've got some paintings that I've done when I've been younger, like quite sexual, and I find them a bit embarrassing.
But, you know, life's embarrassing sometimes, isn't it? When I was younger I made work that was so close to me, it touched me, and at the beginning a lot of people didn't see it as being art. They just thought it was obviously dull or my personal effects, they couldn't relate to it as art. And still people have a lot of difficulty with those works, but for me it was just me making something with the reality of the subject.
So instead of making a drawing of it, or a sculpture of it, making something, I just used it, I used the real thing. But to do that it meant that I had to separate it from my mind. I had to take it out of its real environment and put it into a white space or into a white cube. I had to create it and say this is art.
I also had to defend it and justify it to the end which I promise to the day I die I will still have to have arguments with taxi drivers about the bed. It is art. Because there must be so many people who say Tracy it's interesting but it simply isn't art.
Yeah but then a lot of those people don't understand that I spent seven years at art school you know I'm a Royal Academy Mission. I'm a professor of drawing now. You know, I didn't go through all those things and become this through nothing, you know.
And that does include critics. I mean, one of my senior critics in the UK, Brian Sewell, I just wanted to quote you one thing he wrote about you because it maybe sums up one field of criticism. He said, being Miss Emin is Tracey Emin's core activity.
She barks, look at me, look at me, all of the time. She's like some sort of fraudulent... medieval marketer of relics.
She puts on show these trivial keepsakes of herself. When you get that sort of savage criticism, how deep does it cut you? He's a very entertaining writer. He really doesn't like contemporary art, so I wouldn't expect him to like what I know, so I don't know how much he likes women. He never writes nicely about women in any circumstance.
He also reviews cars, okay? Do you get hurt when people criticise your work? Depends, if they're complete tossers I don't or whatever. Or make someone with a complete tosser then.
Yeah, no, what annoys me is all these journalists that write about, they're journal journalists, you know, they're not just critics or whatever. And they spend pages and pages slagging me off. They get paid for writing that stuff, which I say pays their credit card bills, pays their mortgage, pays for their cars, pays for their mistresses.
They're actually making money. ...with my back and that I resent. If they don't like it, don't write about it.
Champion what they like, not what they don't like. Various people got very hot under the collar screaming, this isn't art. Yeah, but... What did you think when you heard that or read that? Well, I just screamed louder and said, yes it is.
It's my art. And with being an artist, if you have true conviction about what you're doing and you're doing it for the right reasons, no one can take that away from you. And I've proved that with the bed.
Just a testimony of time, the fact that it's still here, it's become even more iconic, it's more seminal, it has more presence now than it did then. Then people just thought I was like a silly young thing doing some shocking piece of art. Let me ask you about money. It is clear that you're a brilliant sort of entrepreneurial flair and you've been commercially very successful.
But I just wonder whether... Making a lot of money can stifle your creativity. No, definitely not. I'll tell you what stifles your creativity.
When you haven't got the money to pay the gas bill, or you've got a choice of paying the electric or the gas, and you've got two metres and you know you've only got money for one. I had a very poor upbringing when I was young, as a child, and I was very cold a lot of the time. And I swore to God that I would never be cold. I like to be warm, I like to be comfortable and I will work really hard for that.
And yet, you know, you have set up a shop, Emin International, and I just looked online, you can buy egg cups, you can buy mugs and cat bowls and t-shirts and handbags. You know, you are turning yourself into a highly profitable brand. Well actually, I wish the little shop didn't make a big profit.
the shop just breaks even. The shop is a really nice thing. I employ four people, I have a shop.
But where does that leave all your talk of artistic integrity? Because it means people can buy things directly from me and from my studio. Most of us in my generation do have a good commercial head on us because we had to. Because there were no jobs, there was no money.
Back in the 80s and 90s things were really, really difficult. There were no galleries, for example, hardly any galleries. no collectors. Art has changed so tremendously in the last 20, 30 years in Britain.
It's phenomenal and it's fantastic. But if I'm sorry to interrupt, it does mean you know again in terms of where you've gone in your career, it does mean that sort of that raw rebel yell that you were sort of known for you know in your early career has now become much more sense that you're woven into the establishment. I mean Just one example, the other day you were commissioned, I think by Financial Times, to draw a sketch drawing of the Queen to mark the Queen's Jubilee.
Yeah, and also I met the Queen here a few months ago in Margate at Turner Contemporary. I've met the Queen twice now. This isn't about the establishment. This is about the fact that I've been around now for 20 years and I'm not going away.
And the establishment is growing with us. It's a symbiotic thing. There's not a war going on. I'm not some sort of adolescent punk going around spitting at everyone. I'm a woman who's nearly 50 that's taken quite seriously, quite seriously, in the world as being an artist, and I'm respected for that.
Do you think you're a good business person? Yeah, I am. If I wasn't an artist, I think now I'd like to go into property. That's what I'd like to do.
It sounds terrible because it sounds so sort of commercial or whatever but you can't be a good artist and just be locked up in your garret doing your watercolours or really believe in what you're doing if no one sees it. It's like with music, if you make music people have to hear it for you to know that it's true music, it has to travel through the airwaves. Slightly different process then because you have to go through more channels as a musician to get your work.
It was industry innit. You got to go through the radio and the shops. You don't really have that same kind of problem with art. Yeah, but you still have to understand how commerce works and business and the art market and all that kind of thing. There's very few people that are just, it's like acting, it's like anything, you know, you have to work really hard and understand how it all works.
So it's very rare that someone's just picked up and then shown in a really good gallery. It's a long slog. So what was the process for you?
I was just picked up and shown in a gallery, yeah, genius, yeah. No, I mean, I went to art school and everything. You know, I did an MA in painting, got totally disillusioned with art, destroyed all my work and then kind of started all over again.
It was a hard slog. I mean, I was 30 when I had my first exhibition, which actually for these days is quite late for someone. Most people are around 24, 25 if they could, so I was a little bit later. If I don't work I get depressed and I get inertia and my body sort of seizes up but if I'm working then it doesn't so it kind of, you know, it creeps up on me. If you weren't an artist what would you be?
Well the obvious question I think, if all the art stuff hadn't have happened to me, it hadn't been so good I probably would have been dead by now. I think I was in such a bad, sad, pathetic state in sort of around. 1990, that kind of thing. I don't think I would have been around for a start. I made this exhibition once called I Need Art Like I Need God and I really meant it, not in a religious sense but it's like you lose faith, you lose all meaning of life and then you hang in there and it comes back it's like art came back and saved me.
And I think if... I wasn't an artist and if the art hadn't been good I wouldn't be around now.