Tag: identity

A Perfect Place to Grow pays homage to the artist’s Turkish Cypriot father who, she says, is a fantastic gardener but a terrible carpenter. It consists of a wooden birdhouse-like structure on wooden stilts. The little wooden chamber has a sloping corrugated iron roof and an old wooden stepladder attached to the side which the viewer is invited to ascend in order to look through a small peephole. Inside the birdhouse a short video loop plays (originally shot on super-8 but transferred to DVD). It features Emin’s father walking back and forth through vegetation in a bright, hot sun. Wearing a pair of blue bathing trunks and a cloth sun-hat, he pushes through the fronds of tall, swaying, reed-like plants. He approaches the camera carrying a pink dahlia in one hand, which he extends towards the viewer. After smiling and blowing a kiss, he turns and walks away, his brown back disappearing into the foliage. The same footage repeats with a red flower held in the other hand. The sound of cicadas chirruping loudly in the heat accompanies the visual drama. On the floor beside the hut on stilts is a single wooden trestle, constructed by Emin’s father, surrounded by flowering plants in pots such as geraniums, clematis and lilies and a green plastic watering can. The artist has stipulated that this should be full of water because she likes the idea that she could come into the gallery and water the plants herself.

Much of Emin’s work features members of her family as well as death and depression. The words ‘the perfect place to grow’ originally appeared on Emin’s first quilt, Hotel International1993 (private collection), appliquéd below the name of the Margate hotel once owned by Emin’s father, Hotel International. In her text work, Exploration of the Soul 1994 (Tate T11887), Emin describes the idyllic early years she and her twin brother Paul spent at ‘the giant hotel’ before bankruptcy forced her father to sell it and return to Cyprus. The separation of her parents was the impetus for a series of disappointments followed by intense disillusionment with life as a result of being raped at the age of thirteen. The Perfect Place to Grow may therefore be read as harking back to a kind of ideal beginning before the shattering exodus from childhood paradise and the severance of paternal relations. 

1) Tracey Emin, A Perfect Place to Grow, wooden birdhouse with metal roof, wooden steps, wooden trestle, plastic watering can, plants and film, Super 8, shown as video, monitor, colour and sound (mono), 2590 x 2950 x 2000 mm, 2001 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

2) Tracey Emin: Hotel International & Tracey Emin in bed, lying under Hotel International, with Jay Jopling at the Gramercy Hotel, New York, 1993, © Steve Brown / Courtesy White Cube

3-5) Tracey Emin, Sometimes the dress is worth more money than the money, film, 2000

6)  Tracey Emin, A name they called our dad , 2002, embroidery and text on paper

7) Tracey Emin, Dad, 1993, 4 photographs, colour, Chromogenic print, on paper, ink on paper, wood, glass and resin block, dimensions variable 

8) Tracey Emin, Hotel International, 1993, applique quilt, 257 x 240 cm. Private Collection, New York.

9) Installation view of Tracey Emin: 20 Years, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Presented for the first time at Sala Montcada, Fundació “la Caixa”, in the season “El yo diverso” (The diverse I), this small format, right-angled video projection relates to two other pieces: two photographs that recall Goya’s duel with clubs and a sculpture with silhouettes joined at the waist. The description of the video is as follows: two hands are digging out two holes in the ground and then covering them over, each hand using the earth dug out by the other. That enigmatic action is very beautiful and open to different interpretations. One of them is linked to one of the basic concerns of Cabello and Carceller’s career: working together, living together, thinking together; that could be symbolised by the figure of the couple, which was also the nexus of the three visions shown at Sala Montcada in Barcelona. The fiction the artists narrate revolves openly around the way we construct ourselves and the way we are constructed. The hands that appear in the projection are immersed in that task. First, they mark out the territory, then they dig out the earth, they finish the process and start all over again. But there is something curious here, which would tend to confirm what we have said. It seems that everything returns to what it was before, but the earth has changed place and, if we keep on with this continuous task, it will change places over and over again. Every action has its consequences, and all the more so if it is on our immediate environment. The earth could symbolise the most elemental raw material -what we are, our first feelings-, which we act on and on which the nearest person deposits the result of her actions. In that way, like most of Cabello and Carceller’s works, the video talks about team work and communal living. Another aspect we should point out is the character of this work in relation to other videos. So, as in the earlier Un beso (A kiss, 1995-1996) or Bollos (Dykes, 1996), this work is characterised by visual and temporal economy. They all show short, concise, and simple, actions, but open to interpretations. That is something both creators have continued in later works on the same support: Una habitación doble (A double room, 1998), Sin título (promesa) (Untitled, promise, 1998) and Sin título (viaje) (Untitled, journey, 1999).Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes

This shift in position is consistent with Michel Serres’s observation that, in human relations the positions of sender/receiver are always in flux. In 1948, Claude Shannon, a research engineer with Ma Bell, rationalized communications by offering a model that stubbornly remains dominant in information theory and beyond. Communication is an immutable message in the form of information initiated by a source, moved through a channel with all its susceptibilities and vagaries, and is finally received at its destination. This is the world of signals, noise, probability error, coding and decoding, and channel capacity, of clear transmission functions within tolerances.16 But Serres’s analyses of communication question the stability of this system. He prioritizes the concept of noise over message, noting that in French a secondary meaning of the word for “parasite” is “static or interference.” Rather than the unwanted remainder, noise is the motive force that moves subjects from parasite to host.17 There is no message without resistance.

In a certain way, identity, then, is a noise…that interferes with the messages that we transmit and receive. It’s hardly audible to others, but we hear it loud and clear. Yet it’s not the kind of noise that bothers us; on the contrary; it gives us a sense of reality, a measure of empowerment: it adds “room-tone” to the otherwise hyper-real world around us. Some may enjoy listening to it more than others; some may tune in to it more than the others would care to. And some play it so loudly just for the fun of it or in order to make the others listen; but the others usually do not and would not listen.18

Dystopia is a noisy non-place.

—Being Heard: Listening In—Sound & Our Dystopian Present by Matt Malsky