Art into Life: Essays on Tracey Emin

Description

Tracey Emin has undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis from a young, unknown artist into the 'bad girl' of the Young British Art (YBA) movement, challenging the complacency of the art establishment in both her work and her life. Today she is arguably the doyenne of the British art scene and attracts more acclaim than controversy. Her work is known by a wide audience, yet rarely receives the critical attention it deserves. In Tracey Emin: Art Into Life, writers from a range of art historical, artistic and curatorial perspectives examine how Emin's art, life and celebrity status have become inextricably intertwined. This innovative collection explores Emin's intersectional identity, including her Turkish-Cypriot heritage, ageing and sexuality, reflects on her early years as an artist, and debates issues of autobiography, self-presentation and performativity alongside the multi-media exchanges of her work and the tensions between art and craft. With its discussions of the central themes of Emin's art, attention to key works such as My Bed, and accessible theorization of her creative practice, Tracey Emin: Art into Life will interest a broad readership.

Deborah Cherry is Professor Emerita of Art History & Theory at the University of the Arts London, UK. She has written extensively on contemporary art, including two pioneering books on women artists, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (1994) and Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain, 1850-1900 (2000) and her research interests are contemporary art and visual culture, transnational art and cultural translation, diaspora and migration, afterlives and haunting. Alexandra M. Kokoli is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Middlesex University, UK. Her research is situated within feminist art history, theory and practice, focusing particularly on the fraught but fertile relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis.

Tracey Emin - artist, public figure, legend - remains divisive. In the first significant new scholarship on Emin in a decade, Tracey Emin: Art Into Life treats readers to a collection of critical essays that probes the reaches of her layered performances of identities. With both her enduring provocations and artistic preoccupations analysed here, this volume offers critical insights into Emin's continuing significance to art today. -- August Davis, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History, University of Texas at Arlington, USA