A Curious Career

by Lynn Barber

  In the evening, we went for dinner to the art publishers Taschen who had an enormous Jeff Koons ceramic of a child and two angels pushing a pig. It was my first glimpse of the other side of the art world – not the lonely artists in their studios, but the plutocrats who buy their stuff, the collectors. I still find them weird. I thought at one point I might like to do a book about them but Doris Saatchi, Charles Saatchi’s first wife and the one who got him into art originally, took me out to lunch and told me that I would find collectors very boring indeed. It was odd, coming from her, and she didn’t really explain it, but she said it so seriously I was inclined to believe her. She advised me to stick to interviewing artists, and I did.

  I always feel when I’m interviewing artists that I’m doing something worthwhile. Of course some of them, like Tracey Emin or Grayson Perry, are so articulate they don’t need me to get their ideas across (both of them have written superb autobiographies) but the point at which I feel I’m doing something useful is when I interview artists who are not natural self-publicists, and who ‘don’t do words’. This is what I think of as my ‘pro bono’ work where, for once, my motive is not showing off as a writer but using my long experience as an interviewer to harvest information that would otherwise never be published. I remember the first time I interviewed Rachel Whiteread it was like hewing coal, trying to get the most basic biographical facts out of her, but I felt that every little nugget I collected would be of use to art historians fifty years down the line. And, as I argued to her then, I do feel that successful artists ought to talk to the media, not for reasons of self-aggrandisement, but to try to make art comprehensible to the widest possible public.

  My other great mission is to find a way of talking about art that is not the usual repellent art bollocks. This is the jargon taught in art schools and perpetrated in art catalogues that bears no relation to English and serves only to obfuscate the subject. My favourite ever was in a catalogue at the Baltic for a Brazilian artist called Tonica Lemos Auad whose work consisted of tiny piles of carpet fluff. It read: ‘Auad’s carpet installations begin by the artist’s delicate gathering and repositioning of minute strands of fluff, teased patiently from newly laid carpet . . . Auad sees these works as three-dimensional, site-specific drawings that create a space in which the viewer can enter and engage with the settings.’ As my elder daughter pointed out, you could presumably ‘engage’ with the art by hoovering it up. Rather than add to the art bollocks canon, I always try to keep my artist interviews as simple as possible, asking factual questions about their childhood, their early influences, their working practices, rather than about what their art means. I feel that if I can supply a solid biographical background, and some account of their technique, the reader can hopefully look at the work and deduce its meaning for themselves.

  My editors have generally let me choose which artists I wanted to cover and on the whole I’ve managed to bag the ones I wanted. The huge glaring exception was Lucian Freud who I pursued fruitlessly for years – I used to write to him once a month (my reward was a wonderfully rude handwritten letter, now framed in my loo, saying he had no wish to be ‘shat on by strangers’) and beg his friends to intercede on my behalf. I even got Nick Serota on board – he said he would try to persuade Freud to do an interview for his Tate show but he wouldn’t. One time I was in Moro, the Spanish restaurant in Exmouth Market which was the Observer’s house canteen for many years, when I saw a woman who looked familiar beckoning to me across the room. But I was having lunch with my editor and felt I couldn’t go table-hopping and anyway I couldn’t remember the woman’s name. Only when she and her companion got up to leave and walked past our table did I realise that her companion was Lucian Freud. I ran out into the street following them, but too late. A tragic missed opportunity!

  As the years rolled on, I quite often found myself in the same room as Freud – he was a friend of Nicky Haslam’s and I saw him at one of Nicky’s birthday parties and at the great ball Nicky threw for Janet de Botton, and he would turn up sometimes to Tracey Emin’s openings – but it was no good. By the end (when I think maybe he was a bit gaga) he would smile vaguely in my direction and say hello, but that was the most I ever got out of him.

  I also deeply regret that I didn’t interview Angus Fairhurst. I knew him from when he was Sarah Lucas’s boyfriend and he was always on my wish list but I thought there was no hurry – I was working my way through the YBAs and would get to him eventually. And then he hung himself from a tree in 2008, depressed, his friends thought, by lack of recognition. Perhaps if I’d given him a huge splash interview he wouldn’t have been depressed? Perhaps it would have boosted his career at a crucial point? My interviewing career is full of these awful might-have-beens. But of course there are still zillions of artists out there I want to interview – new ones coming up, but also old ones I have been slow to see the point of.

  The artist who has been my friend and guide through the art world for well over a decade is Tracey Emin. I first met her in 2001 when I interviewed her for the Observer, and I think maybe it was the first full-length interview she did, or the first one in which someone took her seriously. Most of her press coverage up till then had consisted of jokes about unmade beds, or photographs in Vogue or Tatler of her emerging from various parties. So although she was already famous she was still relatively unknown as a person. I was struck immediately by her honesty, her intelligence – anyone who thinks Tracey is thick must be thick themselves – and also by her commitment to her work. I have interviewed her several times since then, but this first interview is precious to me because it marks the birth of a lasting friendship.

  From the Observer, 22 April 2001

  Even in an interview, Tracey Emin wants to show you things, wants to spread her whole life out before you. Her studio in Brick Lane in London is anyway full of things to look at – the blankets she is making for her new White Cube show, the wedding dress she wears in her Beck’s Futures film, dozens of drawings on the floor waiting for the framer’s. But that is not enough for her, she wants to show you more, much more – and she has filing cabinets full, vast archives of her life. When I asked whether her twin brother Paul looked like her (‘No, he’s built like a brick house. Massive’), she had to show me a photograph to prove it; when she mentions the letters she used to write telling people they could invest in her creative potential for £10, she actually digs out the file. It is as if all the time she needs proof – proof of her existence, or maybe proof that she’s telling the truth?

  She said we should meet at her studio in Spitalfields because her house was off-limits to journalists. But then she wanted to show me the new studio she is moving to, and somehow from there we gravitated round the corner to her house. It was surprisingly neat and smart. Naturally, I wanted to see her bed to see if it was like My Bed, the one Charles Saatchi bought for £150,000, but she said I couldn’t because Mat (Collishaw, her boyfriend) was still asleep in it – it was five in the afternoon but they’d had a heavy night. She went to the kitchen to make tea and I was wandering rather disconsolately round the house thinking it was a bit characterless, a bit un-Tracey, until I noticed a white squidgy thing on the sofa. ‘Tracey,’ I squeaked, ‘there’s a used condom!’ ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I knew I should have tidied up.’

  Now truly it is strange to find a used condom lying on the sofa in an otherwise immaculate house. I even wondered if she planted it, but then decided she couldn’t have because I was first into the room. What does it mean, Tracey, I nagged – was it because she couldn’t bear to throw good sperm away? No, she huffed, she just hadn’t got round to tidying up. But most people throw them away at the time, I told her in my new guise as expert on the nation’s condom habits. ‘Do they? Where?’ ‘Down the loo.’ ‘Well, I’m more the sort of person that will clean them all up in the morning. And like some people use just one condom, right? But we use tons.’

  Next day, Tracey rang to say she needed to see me again. She’d had a dream in
which she was a sparrow and I was a bumblebee and she was flying with one wing trying to show me something. Maybe the bed, I thought, or more details of her fascinating condom habits, but no, she wanted to meet in her local, the Golden Heart. I wondered what she could possibly show me in a pub, but the answer was waiting for me when I got there – her father, Enver Emin. He is eighty but totally compos mentis and still with a flash of the ladykiller he must once have been. But I was surprised to meet a Turkish Cypriot who looked so African. He explained that his father was jet-black – he says there were lots of Sudanese slaves in the Ottoman Empire and he thinks his family must be descended from them.

  Anyway, Mr Emin was sitting placidly in the pub nursing a cup of tea, waiting to collect his wife Rose from Tracey’s studio, where she was sewing blankets for Tracey’s new show. I asked what he thought of Tracey’s work and he said, ‘I love it, but I don’t understand it. She creates her own ideas, and it keeps her on her toes and keeps her happy.’ He particularly likes the appliqué blankets, because they remind him of his mother. He said he was off to Cyprus on Sunday to finalise the purchase of some land to build a holiday house for Tracey and his other children. ‘How many children have you got?’ I asked, but when he said five, Tracey jumped on him. ‘No, Dad, come on!’ Apparently, he usually admits to eleven children, but he once told Tracey twenty-three – they range in age from eighteen to sixty-three. Then she started arguing with him about his having two families, and I was once more pitched into the boiling high drama that is her life (and art).

  Tracey and her twin brother Paul were Enver’s ‘second family’ in Margate. He already had a wife and family in London when he met Tracey’s mother Pam, but instead of divorcing, he simply maintained two households and commuted between them. Both sides knew about each other: ‘My late wife used to adore Tracey.’ When the twins were four, he drove them and their mother and aunt and grandmother across Europe to Turkey, installed them in a hotel on the Black Sea, then drove back to London to collect his other family, installed them in another hotel and spent two months shuttling between them.

  So it was all open and above board? Yes, he agrees, but Tracey butts in furiously: ‘It was never above board, Dad! It’s not above board to have two families, right?’ She obviously picks this fight every time she sees him, she won’t ever let things be. That is why her childhood pain is always so fresh and available to her art. If a wound shows any signs of healing, she’ll pick the scab until it starts bleeding again. This is an incredible strength in her art – the way she can call up old emotions, feel old pains – but it must be quite a drawback in her life.

  With other artists, such as Rachel Whiteread or Damien Hirst, you can hate the work and like the person, or vice versa, but with Tracey no such split is possible. Her art demands a sort of subservience to an Eminocentric vision of the world that feels like surrender. That is why, I think, people often resist her art for a long time and then suddenly fall for it, as Charles Saatchi did (and I did).

  The best account of Tracey’s life is her video Curriculum Vitae in Tate Modern, which is so good I don’t want to spoil it. But the key facts are that she was born in Margate in 1963, and lived at first ‘like a princess’ – her parents ran the Hotel International and all the staff spoilt her rotten. But then the business crashed when she was seven, ‘And suddenly we had nothing, and we were squatting in a cottage which used to be the staff cottage.’ At that point her parents split up – she recalls her mum shouting, ‘Oh go back and fuck your wife’ – and from then on the little princess was just one of Margate’s ordinary mob of deprived single-parent kids.

  She had no front teeth (she lost them all to calcium deficiency, the result, she says, of being a twin – she has incredibly complicated bridgework now) and no boobs till she was thirteen – ‘They grew really quickly. One minute I didn’t have any tits and the next I had the biggest tits in the world.’ At thirteen she was raped. For the next six months she avoided boys, but then she became ‘a slag’ – her word – and started sleeping with half the boys in Margate. ‘It was a power trip, definitely. And also I had this kind of idea – why go to another country, why not just sleep with someone to get experience? In Margate, you see, underage sex was definitely the thing to do – breaking into girls. If you hadn’t lost it by the time you were sixteen there was something wrong with you. It wasn’t like Middle England. And also, being by the sea is brilliant because there’s loads of places to have sex!’

  Her film Why I Never Became a Dancer – one of her three favourite pieces, along with her tent and her bed – recounts her going in for a dance competition as a teenager and all the boys shouting, ‘Slag, slag!’ And so she resolved, ‘I’m out of here, I’m better than all of you.’ Despite having no O levels, she managed to get on a fashion diploma course and parlayed that into an art degree course at Maidstone. She got a first and went on to the Royal College – which she hated, but says it was her own fault for expecting too much of the college and not enough of herself.

  Meanwhile, Tracey’s love life was a mess. At Maidstone she had a long affair with a fellow artist, Billy Childish, which ‘did her head in’. Then she had another bad affair, after the Royal College, which resulted in two abortions. Up till then she thought she couldn’t get pregnant because she’d had very bad gonorrhoea as a teenager and the doctor said she would be sterile. The first abortion, in 1990, was horrendously bodged because no one realised she was carrying twins: the second abortion, she says, was ‘revenge’ for the first.

  At this point she destroyed all her work and gave up art. ‘I felt isolated, insecure, unloved, unwanted and pretty crazy, mad. I don’t think I felt mad because I’d had an abortion, I think I felt mad because I was angry, and because I was living on £12 a week.’ She got a job as a youth tutor for Southwark Council and took a philosophy course at Birkbeck, ‘And suddenly my brain – it was like doing exercises in a gym and your muscles waking up. It was brilliant.’

  But she spent two years making no art at all – it was Sarah Lucas who got her back into art. They met at Sarah’s ‘City Racing’ show in 1992 and became instant friends. ‘It was wild, brilliant, really love without sex, but totally passionate – it was almost like how girls are at school, that inseparable kind of thing.’ Sarah said they should get a studio together, but Tracey said she wasn’t interested in making art. OK, said Sarah, they’d get a shop and make merchandise. It was an old shop in Bethnal Green Road, and they took it for six months and called themselves the Birds and made T-shirts saying things like ‘I’m so fucky’. ‘What was brilliant about the shop,’ Tracey recalls, ‘was it gave me a platform to find what I was good at – and what I was good at was ideas, and being un-precious about them and having an audience. Sarah was very encouraging in all this.’

  Then they went to Geneva together – ‘our Swiss convalescence’ – and made loads more stuff and Jay Jopling offered Tracey an exhibition at White Cube. ‘I thought it would be my one and only exhibition so I decided to call it “My Major Retrospective”. Two weeks before the show, Jay came to my tiny flat in Waterloo and apparently he left going “Omigod, what have I done”, because all I could show him was this crap, smelly old ancient things like my old passport or bits of fabric from my sofa when I was three years old. There was nothing that looked like an exhibition, so Jay left thinking he’d made a big mistake.’ But anyway it was a success, and four hundred people turned up for the opening.

  After Sarah Lucas, her next big influence was Carl Freedman, an art curator she went out with for three years. He said if she wanted to be in his 1995 mixed show ‘Minky Manky’ she had to produce something big – up till then she’d only done small – and so she produced her famous tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95. Then she had a solo exhibition at the South London Gallery called ‘I Need Art Like I Need God’, and, ‘On the opening night there were a couple of thousand people and three television crews. And I walked in and thought: Omigod, I’ve arrived! Her arrival was confirmed by
her notorious appearance on a Channel 4 debate at the 1997 Turner Prize, pissed out of her mind and terribly funny – afterwards, she said, she didn’t even know she’d been on television, she thought she was round at some boring dinner party. And then her friend Vivienne Westwood started dressing her, which gave her a whole new audience in the fashion magazines. Westwood actually doesn’t think much of Emin’s art (but then she doesn’t like any modern art), but she admires her style. And as Tracey says, the collaboration works to their mutual advantage, ‘It’s symbiotic. And it’s fantastic for a woman of my age, thirty-seven, to be like this muse and this glamour thing – we’re having fun with it.’

  In 1999, Tracey hogged all the publicity for the Turner Prize with her notorious My Bed, and then didn’t win. She thinks it was a plot, she thinks the Tate just used her for publicity and never seriously considered giving her the prize. She is quite bitter about it, still. When I said I’d forgotten who did win, she crowed, ‘Exactly! People don’t remember – it was Steve McQueen. But all the papers had my photograph, not his. Revenge is sweet.’ She forced herself to keep smiling at the time, but she cried bitterly afterwards. And she blames that disappointment for the kidney infection that put her in hospital a few months later. Her health has always been precarious – one of the first things she did when she started making money was to take out private health insurance. ‘I’m sickly and I get run down and I have very bad herpes, and I like knowing that the doctor’s there.’