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By Lucie Godeau
AFP, EDINBURGH
Wednesday, Sep 03, 2008, Page 15

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The first retrospective of work by Tracey Emin, the enfant terrible artist who has made a career out of intimate personal details including her own unmade bed, has opened to mixed reviews.

As well as My Bed, a mess of vodka bottles, cigarette butts and dirty underwear, Tracey Emin: 20 Years also features Conversations With My Mum, a video of her talking to her mother, and It’s Not the Way I Want to Die, a model of the roller coaster in her hometown of Margate.

The show, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, has attracted more than 13,000 visitors in the three weeks since it opened, but many critics have been scathing, accusing her of being unsubtle and self-important.

Most of the works focus on the artist’s own life — her teenage years, being raped at the age of 13, relationships and fears about never being a mother — with an unblinking intensity.

“Emin has turned her life into a public spectacle like no other artist before her,” wrote Patrick Elliott, the exhibition’s curator, in its catalogue.

Born in 1963, Emin is, alongside figures such as Damien Hirst, associated with the Young British Artists group that emerged in London in the 1990s.

Her eye-opening works have made her a household name and brought financial success — millionaire advertising guru Charles Saatchi, a major collector of contemporary British art, has repeatedly snapped up her pieces.

Emin has gradually become part of the art establishment — she became a member of the Royal Academy in 2007 and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale last year.

But she still draws stinging reviews from some critics.

“By the end of this show, I felt as if someone had been shouting at me down the phone for a couple of hours — a kind of emotional earache,” the Guardian newspaper’s reviewer wrote.

The Times was hardly more flattering — “What distresses me far more than Emin’s taste for the obscene ... is her amazing, unshakable faith in her own importance,” its reviewer said. Visitors to the Edinburgh show were divided in their reactions, meanwhile.

“Heavy, boring, rubbish” and “personal, thought-provoking, absorbing” were just two of the comments left in a visitors book.

The show runs in Edinburgh until Nov. 9 and travels to the Contemporary Art Center in Malaga, Spain from Nov. 28 to Feb. 22, 2009, and the Art Museum in Bern, Switzerland from March 10, 2009 to June 21, 2009.

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