Emin's bed
July 2 2014
Picture: Guardian
Tracey Emin's unmade bed sold for £2.5m last night at Christie's. To Jay Jopling, her dealer (funny, that). More in The Guardian here. Catalogue note (with added YBA guff) here. Here's a snippet:
A profound exploration of the condition of the female artist, My Bed forms part of Emin’s continued dialogue championing the relevance of art and its ability to addressing questions of gender, sexuality, malady, fertility, loss, and inequality. ‘To map the movement of My Bed is to interrogate its débordement, its potential for meanings to overspill into the disjunctive yet overlapping contexts of sexual politics, homelessness and displacement at the end of the twentieth century. With their cartographies of diaspora and address the unresolved longings of identity, the installations of My Bed touch on and point to some of the key concerns of a contemporary moment’ (D. Cherry, ‘On the Move: My Bed, 1998 to 1999’, in M. Merck & C. Townsend (eds.), The Art of Tracey Emin, London 2002, p. 135).
I would have paid to see the Christie's art handlers (poor souls) pack and unpack this from the auction view. Did they wear white gloves? Did they measure every fold of the sheets and the placement of every tampon, to replicate exactly the artist's original intention? Did they do a condition report before and after the sale? Or did they just gather it all up and shove it in a box?
Update - a reader alerts me to this article in The Guardian, which sets out just how the bed has to be handled:
When My Bed went on loan to Edinburgh's Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2008, senior curator Patrick Elliott was the man in charge. He and his team of conservators and art handlers received the work in boxes, with every item carefully stowed inside. Putting the piece together took about two days. "It was forensic," he says. "Every object was wrapped in tissue paper inside a freezer bag. As we took each item out, we sat round a table, noting its condition. We do that for every artwork, from a Rembrandt to a piece like this. So there we were, looking at a Durex, noting whether it had any marks that shouldn't have been there. It was quite bizarre."
Emin herself was on hand to make sure the installation looked right. "I remember her saying," Elliott adds, "that the sheets weren't nearly as stained and smelly as she remembered them." And when it came to packing the installation away, there were some surprises in store: a number of extraneous objects had found their way onto the bed. "We found a good few extra things," he says, "from a pair of slippers to a note to Tracey telling her how much this person had been moved by the work."
Update II - a reader asks:
Re the white gloves: Don't you think rubber gloves would be more appropriate in the context?
Deffo.
Another reader wonders:
I have a feeling that if Emin was a man that bed would not be sold.
