at least they were upfront about it. the white cube the gallery space is not in service of a higher tabula rasa, it is meant to be stark-raving white, madness white, imposingly white. It is not even the world of order but of money ensuring composure.
but there is nothing that can contain the raw emotion and power of tracy emin's work.
i take my friend with, and little do we know as we walk across the park we are preparing ourselves.
in 1990 Emin drew in pencil a ghostly, naked, female figure on one half of a printer-sheet-paper. the other side reads: "pethetic little thing". (i found this drawing randomly last year.)
pethetic little thing, pethetic little thing.
the words used to ring in my head. why did changing the spelling turn the admonishment into tenderness? a phrase i almost wanted someone to call me, and maybe pet the side of my face? to let me admit?
but then a woman's body stares back at me in it's bursting fullness, it's unending rawness. it is pain and beauty and the feeling of being not just alive but BIG. the bodies are hot.
its grey outside, the gallery is austere, and full of gallery goers dressed in a stunning array of character eyelglasses, neon beanies, modular pea coats or somehow cubist puffer jackets, a few shameless designer handbags. they are all dead eyed predators, frankly.
but nothing can contain her work. the work is ignoring the white cube and it's inhabitants, and instead we stand in the aura of the painting. it radiates.
i fall asleep with a heat pad wrapped up around my stomach and i hold it. and lately i've been going to the sauna. we sit silently together, our breasts out, including the one much older woman who i think lives at the student gym. heat is very important. in fact, there can be no progress -- political, moral, spiritual -- without feeling.
we cross a difficult space between "I was" and "I am" every morning.
abstraction has a purpose. the compositions are sexual the paintings are erotic: the realm of pure feeling, heat, and energy. in fact, it becomes sort of cosmic. these bodies are in childbirth, menstruation, menopause, they are images of ecstatic union, of lifeless and painful sex, of loneliness at the head of the bead. they weep and tug and plead and scream. it is precisely here, where the boring DSM manual-high-school poetry class delineation between pain and pleasure erases. this type of BIG HOT FEELING refuses to be interpreted.
they are erotic in the way susan sontag wrote: "we need an erotics or of art" or audre lorde wrote "once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of."
we keep walking and I realize that all three floors of work are dated from 2023. the compositions are repeating in different abstractions: a man lying behind a woman turned ever so slightly away from him, his hands reaching loosely lowly, her arm cradling her own head. this is artistic proccess, or practice, or the secret: to paint one image 100 times over and over. habit, dedication, repetition.
the arist william kentridge describes repetition as embodiment. turning art-making into habit is the only way to become an artist. more simply, she's been working hard, and there's something erotic in feeling like i want to work ... hard and deep, cough... too.
if they are "pethetic" then they are certainly not "Pathetic" but a recapitulation of the word entirely. it is to take a word which was once said with spit from above and ask it to feel. you cannot call me pathetic, world, for i will take your word and wrap in in my tummy, stroke my own hair and say:
"shhhhh, pethetic little thing, you are okay."
i try to express some version of this to my friend. she says yea.... (hesitantly) "but wait, it's like, i don't want to be a pathetic little thing?"
i think she's right too.
