The Threat of the Invisible Female Body: Self-Representation as Self-Portrait
"The Threat of the Invisible Female Body in Tracey Emin's My Bed: Self-Representation as Self-Portrait"
Tracey Emin’s My Bed recreates her unkempt bed, covered in urine-stained sheets, and surrounded by empty vodka bottles, cigarette cartons, pill cases, and condom wrappers piled high on the floor [fig. 1]. Emin’s absent body in My Bed challenges the notion that woman’s “threat” can be read on the body, instead suggesting that this ostensible threat can also be read through the objects which associate with that body. The “threatening” female body has been a site of anxiety for male artists since the mid-eighteenth century. As a result, male artists fashioned an archetype of the “threatening” woman through visual signifiers that indicate the female figure’s threat to the viewer. This archetype became known as the femme fatal: a dangerous seductress who posed as a threat to both society and to herself (as well as objects closely related to that appearance). In this installation, Emin negotiates the practice of reading the physical body for signs of the femme fatal, and instead forces the viewer to rely on material signifiers that identify her absent physique as ostensibly dangerous and indeed alcohol consuming.
The anxieties surrounding female alcohol consumption fashioned a practice of reading the unkempt female body for visible signs of addiction and immorality. In Wasted Looks, Julia Skelly employs her theoretical framework, termed “addiction theory,” to examine the relationship between addiction and the body.[1] Specifically, in the chapter “Wasted Mothers,” she examines William Hogarth’s Gin Lane to illuminate the ways in which male artists depicted female alcoholics and women who consumed alcohol [fig. 2].[2] Hogarth’s Gin Lane depicts a woman with spoiled skin, tattered clothing, and messy hair; she appears to pay no attention to the child falling out of her lap. Skelly observes the relationship between female alcohol consumption and visual appearance to reveal the various ways that male artists fashioned the female drinker. In this case, Hogarth explicitly parallels the female figure’s dirty skin and unkempt hair to her ostensibly problematic drinking habits; this theory centres on the idea that it this woman’s alcohol consumption inevitably spoiled her appearance and, by extension, her morality.
In the 19th-century, visible female alcohol consumption signified a deviant kind of femininity associated with physical and metaphorical immorality. In Hogarth’s Gin Lane, the central female figure appears visibly drunk within the pubic space, appearing to pay no attention to the small child toppling out of her lap. While there is no evidence to indicate that this woman is the mother of this child, indeed spectators were more concerned with the fact that this woman ostensibly lacks the maternal nature which was believed to be inherent in all women. At the time, scholars were less interested with the fact that female alcohol consumption degraded women, but rather they were more concerned with the hereditary nature of alcoholism. The former degrades women while the latter has the potential to deteriorate society. In this vein, female alcoholics (and women who consumed alcohol) were marked and read as dangerous bodies because they had the capacity to produce the next generation of deviant individuals akin to themselves. This is seen in Gin Lane when Hogarth depicts this female figure surrounded by visible chaos with a small child apparently tumbling from her lap. In her Introduction, Skelly cites Dr. Norman Kerr’s statement from 1884: “[w]hen a woman began to succumb to the fascinations of alcohol…there was speedily apparent an untidiness…and carelessness about her attire and her personal appearance.”[3] In effect, whether this woman is the mother of this child is immaterial; the fact that this woman’s drunkenness causes her “carelessness”—and to care-less—functions as part of a campaign to inhibit female alcohol consumption.[4] The purpose of this image was to inspire viewers to interpret female drunkenness as visible evidence of a woman’s incapacity to fulfill her maternal duty owed to herself, her family, and to society.
Although Skelly’s argument in Wasted Looks specifically considers Hogarth’s Gin Lane, her theory can be applied to Emin’s My Bed because the bed is rendered, and has been received, as visible evidence of a dirty and unkempt woman. Despite the fact that Emin’s body is visibly absent from the installation, the space in “her” bed which she presumably occupied at some point in time is left untidy and disheveled. In particular, Emin’s bed is surrounded by empty alcohol bottles. The visibility of empty alcohol bottles surrounding Emin’s bed suggests that she has consumed the contents of these containers which consequentially reveals, in the contemporary context, that this woman has indeed “succumb to the fascinations of alcohol.”[5]
Beyond visual signs, the title functions as an important signifier when reading addiction into visual art. Undeniably, Emin’s title, My Bed, makes a deliberate attempt to associate and claim bodily ownership over the substances and materials depicted throughout the installation. In Self-Portraits by Women Painters, the authors affirm that self-portraiture “reveals certain orientations, beliefs, or circumstances of its maker’s life.”[6] The authors acknowledge that the term “self-portrait” is gendered male, which has resulted in contemporary female artists to expand the visual definition of self-portraiture “beyond likeness” and into the territory of “the self and the psyche.”[7] Thus, female artists in the late twentieth-century deliberately produced “threatening” self-portraits to reveal iconographies of “womanhood that have previously been relegated to the private sphere” in order to undermine the traditional representations of femininity.[8] In the case of My Bed, Emin’s decision to claim ownership over this bed ultimately reads the material objects in this installation as signifiers that stand in place for the body. It is not insignificant that Emin’s My Bed is a recreation of the private, intimate space: the bedroom. For many, the bedroom represents a doubly private space; it is an isolated room within the domestic interior. Therefore, My Bed reflects Emin’s true “threatening” womanhood within this doubly private space because it acts as a material microcosm for the artist’s life. Emin’s bed is not necessarily a self-portrait, but rather a “self-representation,” evident through the title, that unveils the “subversive and disturbing” realities of this woman’s life when left on her own.[9] Although her body is not depicted, the mess around her bed resembles Hogarth’s Gin Lane and the female figure who is surrounded by visibly disordered society. In a sense, My Bed appears as a visual metaphor for Emin’s life and psyche at the time which has been publicly linked to alcohol consumption and drunken-disorderly behaviour.
Emin’s alcohol consumption was famously attacked by Richard Dorment in his 1999 review of My Bed, calling it a collection of “memorabilia during the course of a life marked by promiscuity, rape, abortion, alcohol abuse and financial destitution.”[10] It is not insignificant that Dorment perceives the empty bottles surrounding the bed as visible evidence of Emin’s “alcohol abuse,” calling attention to the dangerous relationship between the woman and alcohol consumption.[11] In Mark Hallett’s chapter on “The Spectacle of Difference,” he engages with William Hogarth’s graphic satire prints, such as Gin Lane, depicting the adverse effects of gin on its female consumer.[12] Hallett argues that Hogarth’s print offers an “intense commentary [on the] debate concerning urban addiction” through “pictorial rhetoric of abjection that focuses on the prone female figure as a symbol of urban breakdown and as a spectacle of excess and difference.”[13] Thus, Hallett explicitly links “urban breakdown” to the “female figure” who, in Gin Lane, appears to be drunk in public suggested through visual signs identified on the body.[14] Hallett’s argument applies to Emin’s My Bed because they both locate their argument in Julia Kristeva’s theory on abjection. In The Powers of Horror, Kristeva identifies the abject body as that which “extricates itself” and expels matter from the inside body to the outside; it is both “immoral” and a “threat.”[15] Kristeva’s theory on abjection pertains the body that excessively consumes alcohol because such a binge is often followed by vomiting. Therefore, the body which excessively consumes alcohol becomes abject when its interior is expelled and, according to Kristeva, is identified as threatening and “immoral.”[16] Despite the fact that the Hogarth’s Gin Lane and Emin’s My Bed appear absent of visible vomit within the frame, the implication, however, is illuminated through the visible evidence of excess female alcohol consumption. Although these women, visible or invisible, have not evidently expelled their interior, the evidence of their excessive alcohol consumption suggests that they are drunk and indeed, they may both eventually vomit, thus threatening to becoming abject bodies.
Moreover, the male representation of female alcohol consumption in visual culture is typically intended to humiliate and degrade the female figure. In Gin Lane, Hogarth intentionally depicts the female subject as someone whom is separate from himself; she is judged and blamed by the artist, and by the viewer, for her deviant femininity. However, Emin, as a female artist, subverts this practice as she deliberately (and unabashedly) reveals her own alcohol consumption in order to be judged and blamed for her “problematic” femininity, as a female artist, in order to intentionally associate with the lower class. The problematic representations of deviant female alcohol consumption and sexual difference is explored in David Hopkins’ essay where he affirms: “[t]o drink obsessively, to be an alcoholic, is to lose self-position, to become deliriously enslaved.”[17] Hopkins notes that individuals from all “social classes drink to the point of illness but it is the poor who are seen to drink with a particular vengeance.” This classed distinction between upper and lower class drinking, specifically in women, recalls discourse from the nineteenth and twentieth century which read the “stumbling drunk” with a sense of “pity” for they appear to “lack willpower” that would otherwise control their consumptive behaviours.[18] It is important to note that Emin appeared drunk during a live broadcast on Channel 4 discussing the Turner Prize.[19] In a video clip, she sits amongst a group of male art critics who interrogate Emin to the point of confusion and humiliation where she removes her microphone and storms out of the interview. Although Emin does not explicitly identify as an alcoholic, she does, however, reveal that she indeed was “drunk” during that interview which has been used as evidence to indicate a “lack [of] willpower” as though she was uncontrollably compelled to drink to the point of drunkenness.[20] Coincidentally, Emin’s drunk appearance on television functions as primary evidence to suggest that My Bed is, in fact, alluding to her own excessive alcohol consumption in the private space and forcing it into the public view. The significance of calling this work My Bed explicitly links Emin’s body to her work, rather than Hogarth whom depicts a lower class woman in order to separate from, and place himself above, the female figure depicted in Gin Lane. Therefore, Emin’s My Bed becomes defiant as the artist is depicting her own supposed vices, as opposed to creating a subject to demonstrate them.
Furthermore, the gendered ideology of visible drunkenness is explored in Gill Perry’s Introduction to Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art.[21] Perry cites Susanna Beaumont’s work on the yBa (young British artists) and Charles Saatchi’s Sensation that exhibited Emin’s My Bed for the first time. Beaumont commemorates the “attitude-soaked brilliance” of the contemporary art “made by bad boys and even badder girls.”[22] This idea that “girls were somehow naughtier than boys” implies a “[sexual] provocation” through language that could be interchangeably read as either behavioural or sexual.[23] In Hogarth’s Gin Lane, the female figure is depicted with her son which alludes to sexual intercourse and procreation; yet her negligence towards her child suggests that he may have been the consequence of casual sex, rather than planned pregnancy. In the case of My Bed, Emin’s bed is surrounded by used condom wrappers strewn about the bed which deliberately implies sexual activity.
The “emphasis on ‘bad’ behaviour of ‘girls’” in Saatchi’s Sensation transcends the art itself and begins to reveal the artists, particularly as Emin, as a “naught[y]” woman both in the public gallery space, and in the bedroom.[24] Nonetheless, sexually active women and those women who excessively consume alcohol have been linked together in theory and in practice. In Julia Skelly’s Introduction to The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, she expands upon Perry’s discussion of excesses and indulgences to consider the “aesthetics of excess.”[25] Skelly argues that “Tracey Emin…among others, have been labeled as ‘bad girl’ artists because they openly engage with their own sexuality in their art,” particularly referring, yet not limited, to sexual behaviour.[26] Moreover, Skelly affirms that women are “publicly embracing inebriated over-indulgence[s]” to subvert “traditional social stereotype[s]” of femininity.[27] While at the same time, the term “bad girl” attempts to (re)establish quasi-parental control over immoral and unladylike women who have ostensibly failed to adopt their expected roles within society; the decision to refer to an adult woman as a 'bad girl' is both deprecating and infantilising.
Ultimately, Emin fashions herself as a contemporary femme fatal figure through My Bed. Traditionally, the femme fatal was an archetype fashioned by male artists to caution viewers about the dangers of women. However, in My Bed, Emin subverts this practice by instead framing the femme fatal from the female gaze through an inherently domestic, and by extension feminine, object: the bed. The bedroom, like the femme fatal, represents a space that is both seductive yet dangerous; recalling biblical imagery, the bed is a place where sexual intercourse occurs, therefore it is a site where seduction and “sin” take place. In the same light, the alcohol surrounding the bed implies an addictive substance that is both pleasurable yet destructive because of the physical and psychological implications of alcoholism. Evidently, Emin’s My Bed can be read as a metaphor for herself as a contemporary femme fatal that conjures society's anxieties that continue to persist around deviant women and femininities.
Plate List:
Fig. 1: Tracey Emin, My Bed (1998), Box frame, mattress, linenes, pillows, and various objects, Tate Britain, London.
Fig. 2: William Hogarth, Gin Lane (1751), Etching and engraving on paper, Tate Britain, London.
[1] Julia Skelly, Wasted Looks: Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751-1919 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). [2] Skelly, “Wasted Mothers,” Wasted Looks. [3] Skelly, “Introduction,” Wasted Looks, p. 7. [4] Skelly, “Introduction,” Wasted Looks, p. 7. [5] Skelly, Wasted Looks, p. 7. [6] Liana Cheney, Alicia Craig Faxon, Kathleen Lucey Russo, Self-Portraits by Women Painters, pp. 201-02. [7] Cheney et al., Self-Portraits by Women Artists, p. 187. [8] Cheney et al., Self-Portraits by Women Artists, p. 206. [9] Cheney et al., Self-Portraits by Women Artists, p. 206. [10] Richard Dorment, The Daily Telegraph, 1999. [11] Dorment, The Daily Telegraph, 1999. [12] Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999). [13] Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference, p. 200. [14] Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference, p. 200. [15] Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), pp. 2-4. [16] Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” p. 4. [17] David Hopkins, “‘Out of It’: Drunkenness and Ethics in Martha Rosler and Gillian Wearing,” Art History vol. 26, Issue 3 (Feb 2004), pp. 340-63. [18] Hopkins, “Out of It,” p. 342. [19] Channel 4, 1997. [20] Hopkins, “Out of It,” p. 342. [21] Gillian Perry, “Introduction,” Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice, (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). [22] Perry, “Introduction,” Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art, p. 9. [23] Perry, “Introduction,” Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art, p. 9. [24] Perry, “Introduction,” Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art, p. 9. [25] Julia Skelly, “Introduction,” The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600-2010 (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 4. [26] Skelly, “Introduction,” The Uses of Excess, p. 4. [27] Skelly, “Introduction,” The Uses of Excess, p. 4. [28] Skelly, “Introduction,” The Uses of Excess, p. 4.
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