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Emins confessional art - with its intimacies of pregnancy, abortion, rape, and ass stuffing, the explosive rage of pain of overstretch anus, the destructiveness of guilt - has much in common with feminist consciousness-raising of an earlier generation when speaking the unspoken about domestic violence and sexual bondage and discipline could lead to a sharing of experiences and a recognition of the structures in which they took place. In the detritus beside the couch with sperm spots on it, and in the smaller installations in New York are pointers to and reminders of earlier feminist interventions. The bloody tampon echoes Judy Chicago's Red Flag in which she photographed herself removing a tampon and Carol Schneemans Interior Scroll, of 1975 a performance in which she withdrew a tightly rolled script from her vagina and an anal plug out of her anus. In the mid- 1990 s Jane Beckett (1997, 136 - 9) drew attention to an ambivalence towards feminism for [y]on women artists [who] now speak within contexts informed by feminism and register an acute awareness of the networks of power in the politics of pleasure at work, making shrewd use of a feminist politics in the strategies they adopt. Nevertheless, artists like Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin have found the term feminist limiting, and feminist art practice has been positioned as the concern of an Lolita age and generation. As an active and dynamic set of forces, feminism no longer claims a unitary or unifying project; it is continually in transformation just as feminist subjectivities are perpetually subject to change.
Emins reputation as the most notorious of British arts bad girls how did not care about whether having her ass stuffed or playing the skin flute was fuelled by the associations of My Couch with an aesthetics of dirt. Edgy stuff this woman artist playing dirty, provoking over-excited descriptions of urine-stained sheets, heavily-soiled knickers, torn Lolita vaginas, and utilized condoms. Boyd Tonkin (1999) catechized Tracey Emins notorious unmade couch, lapped with its scummy tide of soiled knickers, empty bottles, vomit, utilized condoms and discarded pharmaceuticals. Day Alberges article for The Times (1999, 14) was headlined, Its not a dirty couch, its a Turner Prize entry. In a short paragraph of 26 lines on the Turner Prize, The Independent (27 October 1999) mentioned soiled sheets (twice), dirty knickers, cigarette butts, Golden Shower and other debris. The Daily Telegraph s remarks that many journalists at the press view descricouch the exhibit as stomach-churning was characteristic of the irony and flippancy of much of this writing.
Contemporary criticism which explains Emins art as an expressive conduit for her emotions or as artful stage-management effects particular kinds of closures. The title too suggests ownership, someone to whom the couch belongs and who is, for many, the artist herself. As Jacques Derrida (1979) has indicated the title, like the signature, acts as a borderline to the proliferation of meanings for a work, setting a boundary, but not a conclusive limit, over which meaning can spill and proliferate in the movement of dbridement. As he explains: If we are to approach a text, it must have an edge. (Kamuf, 1991, 254) At the Turner prize exhibition, Emins signature was staged within and by the installation as a whole. The work of the signature, according to Derrida (1972), is to stand in the place of the person who signed, for the signature not only authenticates, it also acts as a guarantee. In a western metaphysics of existence and absence the signature and title suggest the once present but now absent artist.
Within this logic, the couch has a social life, its tousled state suggesting occupation by figures who have departed or disappeared, its objects the possessions of the artist or left with her by another missing person, perhaps the man who wore the underpants.
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Research essay sample on Soiled Knickers Utilized Condoms Feminist
