Well, GT is drawing me out of my lazy shell, having asked me to blog for them on their site. You can find the first post here, where I basically recap my vacation, with a slant toward art:
http://live.glasstire.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1683&Itemid=22
Kenny Goss kicks off his transformation from commercial gallery impresario to non-profit foundation with “A Tribute to Tracey Emin,” an admirable little Whitman’s sampler of the renowned British artist’s oeuvre. After spending the last couple years on a global spending spree, snatching up top-dollar works while the market soars, Goss now begins the process of getting North Texans to care. And really, they should.
Perhaps aspiring to the ranks of the other great area collector couples, Goss and partner/pop mega-star George Michael hope to distinguish their collection with its singular focus: recent art by British artists. Starting with Emin, in a few weeks they will follow with new work by Damien Hirst, recently unveiled in Los Angeles and given enormous press for its exorbitant prices ($99 mil. for a diamond encrusted skull, anyone?)
Decidedly more modest in scale and scope, Emin’s work is unabashedly romantic – almost embarrassingly so. “There’s a Lot of Money in Chairs” (1994,) is a signature early piece: a grandmotherly arm chair embroidered with a quilt-like patchwork of letters and text fragments. Quotes sewn upon it are cloyingly sincere, and run along the lines of: “to have the power to forgive is the greatest power of all – and because of this I forgive myself.” A more recent video shows a lonely dog, wandering lost and unwanted in grainy, moody Super 8.
Emin is a notorious bad girl in England, appearing on the BBC tanked and belligerent, shrouded in a perpetual cloud of cigarette smoke, and wildly flaunting her tortured sexuality like a blunt knife. Her art gained clout by revealing the duplicitous nature of that weapon, one that seemed to cut its wielder most deeply. It was the sculptural equivalent of looking into your crazy sister’s diary, and it struck a nerve, rocketing Emin to super-stardom in England, in a way fine art could never do here.
Even in this age, a visual artist must possess above all a sense of presentation and design — how to craft objects and environments that capture sensibilities, encapsulating the personal for wider consumption. At first glance, Emin’s work might seem especially raw, with shaky camera holds and choppy edits in the videos, rampant misspellings and reversed letters in the text pieces, and the scribbley nature of her mark making in the drawings.
But you can’t escape the calculated nature of all the gentle brutality. She’s claimed in interviews to be dyslexic, and doesn’t intentionally misspell. But I couldn’t help but notice in her “…Chairs” that there are many long pieces of text neatly and flawlessly written. When you are cutting out letters and sewing them together to form words, or you’re producing a monoprint that is going to be sold for in the five-figures, its not as if you don’t have the time to figure out which way the ‘r’ goes.
Her work has grown increasingly tasteful and sweet as time has gone on, even as her spellings gotten “worse.” For instance, you’re greeted at the door here with a neon sign of a glowing pink heart wrapped the around the blue words, “George loves Kenny.” I don’t always completely buy her “I’m damaged goods – love me – I hate you” shtick, but one’s own inner adolescent girl tells you not to dismiss neon slogans like “Keep Me Safe” too quickly, to try to drop the post-modern irony for just a sec.
Ironically enough, I like the virtuosic designer-ly aspect of it all best, the very thing that throws the work’s self-declared sincerity most into question; her sexual drawings are even almost a sort-of 21st equivalent to Gustave Klimt’s. At the very least, much of this stuff would make for great $1000 Tracey Emin trademark t-shirts, or emo band record covers.
