man and woman are depicted having sex on the huge white canvas: their bodies outlined in blood-red lines, faces barely there, legs wrapped over and into each other like a chain puzzle. Above the couple, and merging with them, are the words: “You keep fucking me,” repeated 12 times in horizontal lines. Look at it vertically and at one point it becomes: “You keep fucking you.”– the scratchy primitivism, the intensity of the act, the words. Words have always been important to Emin.
Emin no longer drinks or smokes. She blames the smoking for her cancer and wishes she had stopped drinking decades ago. “When you think you’ve got six months to live, you really don’t want to have a hangover or forget what happened the night before. You need every single moment. You want to be aware and heightened – touch, feel, smell, memory, everything. So the idea of drinking didn’t seem a good idea – and then I stuck to it.
She says her mother, who died in 2016 and whom she adored, noticed the change. “My mum said I’d become a snob. I said: ‘I’m not a snob. It’s hard for me to be a snob!’” After all, she is the working-class girl from Kent who was patronised by the art establishment from the off. “But, looking back, I know what she was saying. Maybe it was because I wanted to live differently from where I’d come from. I wanted to be someone else from somewhere else.
She says it was partly her fault that few people made a case for her work. She couldn’t have been a worse advocate for herself. Yes, she had left school at 13 without qualifications, but by 20 she was studying for a print-making degree and emerged with a first before getting a master’s in painting – achievements that seem all the more admirable because of her early struggles.
Three years after The Tent came My Bed, which was bought by Saatchi for £150,000 and sold in 2014 for £2.2m. Detractors dismissed it as another brazen slop of self-publicity. But what Emin showed in the used condoms, bloodied sheets and general chaos was the desperation of a woman on the verge of giving up. She was suicidal when she created My Bed. Originally, it had a noose, but she removed it.
Emin asks if we can take a short break. “I’ve got to plug my thing in, otherwise I’ll have to keep going to the loo every 10 minutes.” She walks out. A moment later, I hear her panicked voice. ‘Ooh, no. Oh dear. Ohdisaster.’” Do you need help, I ask. “I better get a cloth.” A minute later, she is back, and laughing. There is a little puddle by the door. “That’s because it was too full.”
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