Sally D'Angelo- Part Deux on AFTER HOURS

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My bed was made after a period of depression and heartbreak, and it turned Tracey Eman into one of the most talked about artists of her generation. People actually argued about whether it was art at all, but that was part of what made Tracey's work so powerful. She took things that she might keep behind closed doors like sex, grief, shame, loneliness, desire, your body, and put them right in front of us. For more than 40 years, Tracey Eman has kept doing that, a painting that looks bruised, a neon sign glowing in the dark, a blanket stitched with words. Again and again, she says, "This happened to me. This is what it felt like, and maybe you recognize some part of it in yourself." A few years ago, Tracey Eman was diagnosed with aggressive bladder cancer. She was told she had six months to live if the surgery didn't work out. But after beating those odds, there seemed to be a new softness in Tracey Eman's work. A second life is the name of her largest exhibition ever, spanning 40 years of her career. It is just traveled from Tate Modern in Britain to the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, and from there, it will continue on to other museums overseas. Gesso's Jill Deacon has seen the exhibition and had a really moving conversation with Tracey Eman, about what it means to get a second shot at life. Let's talk about this exhibit first. A second life is what it's called, which is how I've heard that you describe this period of your life as sort of dying and going to heaven. Tell me about what it is about life right now that feels like heaven. Well, before, I was always quite nihilistic and always underappreciative of everything I had. You know, it was like that classic case of thinking that I did never done well enough. Life was never put enough. I was always constantly sad, had like a sadness over me. And what was strange when I found out that I probably wasn't going to have long to live, I decided that I would let that death looks after itself and I would take care of life. So every day, you know how it all was, I was starting to really appreciate life more and more and more and more. And then with the off the surgery, when I came round out of it all, I just felt so different. I felt like a lot of badness been taken out of me and that there was this new time, or it was like a given time, it was almost like like somebody said, look, she's not that bad. Let's give her another chance and it just happens. And then also, I think anybody that knows when they're faced death like that, you look back on everything on every period of your life and you have a lot of regrets. And you think, oh my god, if I could have done this differently or if I had done this, that didn't deal. Why did I do this if I had another chance to do that? And when I was laying in bed, after the surgery and the intensive care and not knowing whether I was going to make it or not, I sort of thought, God, if I could do things differently, I will. And I have. So it is my second life because I've had been given a second chance and I love it. But how interesting that you feel, I mean, I hear you saying that the surgery in some ways you feel it, whatever else was the cancer that was taken out of you in your bladder surgery, you think sort of metaphysically there were other things taken out of you as well. Definitely. The darkness, the sadness, the cynicism, the self-destructiveness. Yeah, it was all just being held in this ball inside my bladder. And as much as I miss my bladder, oh god, I miss my bladder, I don't miss the darkness that it was holding. And it's a real physical strange thing. I wish I could prove it scientifically and I'm sure one day they will be able to, because body holds memory as 100%, you know, but we can't really prove it right now. But one day we will be able to, and also sort of think like time, this is sort of not complicated if people understand what I'm saying. I don't believe in linear time. I've never really believed in it. I'm always late. I'm never on time. I get days from dates from times wrong. I'm an insomniac, you know, I have 24 hours in a day. I've never had regard for time like other people have. And now, since being so real, I'm absolutely convinced that time doesn't exist in this way that people think it is, because I think that being given a second life means that you've been given second time. So the time which happened before in my life is not as important as the time going forward for it's like a completely different feeling. So given how differently you feel now, then you did, you know, when you were the young woman in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s who made a lot of these deeply vulnerable pieces of art that are now and part of this exhibition, I'm wondering what that's like for you. What do you feel from this vantage point for that young woman who made that art? Well, it's good because the show's called a second life. So within the exhibition, there's two sides for the exhibition. And they're divided by corridor. And the corridor is quite an intense, close corridor. On one side, Jeff, these polaroids that I took of myself in 1993, where I actually thought I was kind of attractive then. I was very skinny, I was kind of crazy and I was wild. And I kind of, you know, I was more vain then or whatever it is. And then the other side is post my surgery with my stoma, with my body, how it all is now. And they both run opposite each other. So one takes you one way, one takes you the other way. And one is going from the past and the other is going into the future. And I actually liked my sort of like old rect body now. A lot more than that skinny young sort of like crazy body that I had. Why, what does your older rect body give you or tell you now that you wish you'd perhaps known when you were younger? Well, I'm softer. I'm softer. You know, I'm not as brittle and as breakable as I was when I was young now. Then I'm much more rounded now, more grounded, more rounded, more human, more, more empathy. I'm like, I just understand things. I mean, we all do as we get older, hopefully. I understand things much better now than I did. And so I can, you can talk about wasted time and regret in your life. But, you know, it's never too late. And a lot of people live their life thinking it is too late. Everything is too late, you know, and it's not. Nothing is. You have time to learn things around. I want to rewind a little bit to, you know, some of the origins of that harder, more brittle self that you described. You know, let's talk about your childhood for a moment. You grew up in the coast of England in Margate. You've described leaving school at 13. I wasn't enjoying school, you know. I wouldn't enjoy it. I was told of constantly for being late. I wasn't nurtured in any way, you know, apart from, and then when I went back when I was 15, I did art three days a week, because I'd miss so much school in education. And I liked art, so I was just left in the art class. So it shows that if the brain is receptive and you're doing what you want, and it all comes to fruition, it's like the best education that I could have had in a way. So in that period, you did leave school at 13. You were a chain smoker, starting it, or you started smoking anyway. Prinking smoking, having sex, staying out late, staying out all night. You name it. I didn't live like a teenager, like a 13-year-old. I led a life of like someone much older. You got to, in your early 20s, I believe, you had something of a transformative moment. I understand it at a art gallery. You were at the Tate in London, and you saw the Mark Rothko painting untitled. And you sat in front of those pinks and yellows in that painting, and you wept. Well, I'd never, I'd never been to the Tate Gallery. I didn't know where it was. I'd been to the National Gallery, but I didn't know how to find the Tate Gallery. And when I finally found it, I was looking for a network of moot paintings and walking through, and suddenly I was confronted by this Mark Rothko painting. And I'd never seen anything like it before in my life. And it just kind of resonated and shook. And sort of like, she's in front of me and vibrated and moved. And I thought, what am I looking at? And I sat down on the bench in front of it and then I started to cry and cry and cry. And I didn't know why I didn't understand. And then when I got back to the arts school, I looked up Mount Rothko and the first paintings of his that I saw with his figurative ones, his religious ones. So I thought, "Oh, wow, I really love his work. It's so amazing." And then, of course, I realized that he'd committed suicide not long after the painting. And I thought, the pink yellow, and I just thought, "Oh, my God, I felt everything through that painting. I could feel it." And it was it that that's when I realized that art, true art, wasn't about how something looked. It had to be how something felt. And that's how it was for me. And what was interesting is that previously it's that I'd always just only loved expressionist work, you know, Evangel Sheila, Edvard Morgheed to call it. And this was my first real life encounter with a very, very minimal abstract painting that I totally got and totally understood without anybody explaining anything to me. So you did study painting. You're at the Royal College of Art in London. And I want to talk about a pretty extraordinary decision that you made when you graduated from there, was to get rid of and destroy nearly all of your work. What happened to all that art? Well, actually, the Royal College of Art was very kind to me. I never had a new way to store my work on my paintings. So they stored all my work for me for two years. And then there was, I had to move it. There was no room for it. So what I did was, I had nowhere for it to go in the world. The world, there was no room for it in the world. And it made me realize that making the work was the important thing and understanding why I made it. Maybe that was more subconscious at that time. But I put it all in the courtyard and the Royal College of Art then the painting schools at the back of the V&A. So it was really like Victoria and Albert. Yeah, for an Albert Museum. And I put all my paintings in the courtyard and I got a sledgehammer and I spent two or three hours just smashing them all up with a sledgehammer screaming. It was blood running off my hands. It was kind of like nobody could get near me because I was going so crazy with the sledgehammer. And when I think now we should have had it on film or something, because it must have looked really wild and insane. And the people that saw it still obviously really remember it and talk about it. But it was me realizing that I, you know, being an artist isn't just about making pictures. It's not just it's not about making things and what it's about making part of the world that has a place that has a position that's needed, that's qualified, that I take full responsibility for. And at that time, I couldn't be responsible for those paintings. I just couldn't. So they have to go. I'm Tom Power and you're listening to Q. You're listening to guest host Jill Deacon's conversation with the British artist Dame Tracy Eman. And if Dame didn't make it clear, she is one of the most significant artists to come out of Britain in the last four decades. Provocative boundary breaking, literally protested by some people. And you're about to hear why in this next part of their conversation, Jill talks to Tracy about one of her most famous pieces of art and why it's misunderstood. Well, one of your most famous installations was something called everyone I have ever slept with. So you had moved away from paintings at this point on canvas. And you used stitched names, 102 names inside a tent. And they were the names of, as the title suggests, people you'd slept with. But also, you know, you say slept with not had sex with because in some cases, these were people you'd just slept beside. Tell me about you talk about art, the purpose being how we feel and not necessarily what the image looks like. But what were you trying to make people feel? What experience were you trying to create for visitors? Seeing that tent. Well, actually it came to curator. Carl Friedman was my boyfriend at the time. And Carl was curating this exhibition at South London Gallery called Minky Manky with a lot of British artisans. And Carl wouldn't put me in it because he said I was his girlfriend and it would look very patronizing because I used to make very small work with lots of writing. He said to me, if you can think of a big work, a big idea, you can be in the show. So the names of everyone I've ever slept with, that's quite a big idea. And my number 10, I even had his name in it on the tent flat. And the idea of the tent was that you went inside and you read the names of everybody I've ever slept with. And there was also people I'd said slept as sex with, one night stands with, people's names. I couldn't remember. I mean, I've been having sex since I was 13. So there was some quite horrific stories in there as well. There was rape. There was sex without consent. There was many things. And there was love. And there was also affection because I used to sleep with my nan when she was in her 90s and hold her hand, listening to the radio. You know, it was a list of everyone I'd ever slept with that I could remember. So it wasn't Tom DeCarrie. It wasn't a tent. It wasn't salacious. It was about simply about my journey, me in the world through intimacy. And the idea was that people would go into the tent, look at the name of the people I'd slept with and then come out and think of the names of the people that they'd slept with and consider their intimacy and consider their lives. And also in the 90s, it was in 1995, you know, and the AIDS HIV pendant was, you know, at its peak, absolute peak. And I thought it was good. And I'd been looking at the AIDS squelts as well. And I thought it was a good thing. I said at the time it was like carving out gravestones as I sowed every name. It was really strange thing to think about my own intimate past and how it affected me. And I thought it would be good for other people to think about it as well. So it wasn't like a vanity thing. It wasn't a joke. It was really serious. And inside the tent, the tent was a dome. So there's lots of, when you see pictures of it, it kind of looks sort of slightly cathedral-like. And on the floor, I'd made like a little mattress and it said, with myself always, with myself always, something like that. Because at the end of the day, you know, that's who we are with. We might join in a moment of love, making an intimacy that's really passionate, but then we break away and we're alone again. I mean, at the time of making something like that, there, I mean, and just generally when you were starting out, there weren't a lot of artists making autobiographical-based pieces. And you, you've talked about sort of being dismissed to some degree for being narcissistic and naval gazing with pieces like that or sensational. And I know that you're interestingly your friend Madonna faced a pretty similar criticism of much of her work, certainly for introducing her personal sex and her personal life into her music. Did the two of you talk about what it was like to be on the receiving end of that type of scrutiny for the work that you were doing with a very clear purpose, but that was interpreted as pure narcissism in some ways? No, we don't. We took about, what do we mean Madonna took about? What do you talk about with Madonna? We took about, oh, look, we took about, oh, she loves her. And we took about life, in general, but we don't kind of moan about, like, because we're meant Madonna, you know, we're doing all right. We've done okay, because we carried on and we didn't let people stop what we were doing. And we felt, I mean, I don't take just from Madonna, there's many women, you know, whether it's Shirley Manson, you know, Laurie Anderson, there's these great women through creatives that just keep going regardless. And they're not going to be put down and they're not going to be quietened. And when I think how much I was billyfold for my work back then and myself and my personality, my accent, the way that I dressed, my background, everything, you know, it's amazing that I just kept going. But why was I stuck? This is what I do. It's my vocation in life. I'm an artist. Why would Madonna stop? She's just one of those awards, you know, she's nearly 70. She's fantastic. She was right, you know, and it's like everything from whether we're talking about the Epstein files to, you know, many, many cases now are where women are speaking out, speaking out, speaking out. And slowly the world is listening. And with me and my art, what I was doing 30 years ago, whether it was talking about abortion, sexual abuse, teenage teen abuse, whatever it was, people won't listen in because they just decided to dismiss it. And now the establishment world is caught up and they are listening, not just to me, but to many women. They are. And the other thing I would say that's changed significantly is that now, you know, we live in a time when personal sharing, oversharing some might call it, you know, the personal details of people's lives are made online every day. I wonder, do you ever stop? I don't know if you chat about this with Madonna. But to wonder if you were making some of that early work today, would it be received differently? I mean, would people still find it provocative in in this current context? I was pioneering. You were. I was brave and pioneering. And if that kind of opened up a floodgate, like Andy Warhol's refers to people's 15 minutes of fame, that's not my that's not my responsibility, that wasn't my doing. I think a lot of people now have the courage to speak in the first person, they're quite bravely would say aye and not be afraid to say aye. And I think this is a good thing, especially when it comes down to women's testaments against rape, abuse, violence. And women now who say that they don't need to be a feminist, then they're probably living in a very, very safe, secure environment, spoilt environment, because the majority of women in the world are still suffering terribly, from whether or not it's something as simple as non equal pay to being locked in a cupboard and abused every day or beaten. And I think that there's a long way to go through a quality between men and women. I'm Tom Power, you're listening to Q, more of guest host Jill Deakin's conversation with the artist Tracey Eman after this. At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet, like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a zero dollar or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save too. So this Medicare planning season plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana's a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract in Rome and any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. I'm Tom Power, you're listening to Q, you're in the middle of guest host Jill Deakin's conversation with Tracey Eman. If you don't know, Tracey Eman is one of the most celebrated artists in the world. She's a Dame of the British Empire, she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, she's been shortlisted for the Turner Prize. A few years ago, Tracey was diagnosed with aggressive bladder cancer. She went through major surgery and survived what she describes as a near death experience. And she says it changed her. Her latest exhibition, A Second Life, brings together some of the work she made early in her career, but now after everything she's been through, she's actually looking at that old work in a completely different way. The art is the same, but Tracey isn't. Here's the rest of Tracey's conversation, guest host Jill Deakin. You've talked about how your art, in so many ways, saved you, kept you alive throughout all the hardships and trauma that you endured and experienced through your whole life. And I've found an interesting reading about how you are reacting differently to your older work these days. I'm thinking about your installation, my bed, with all those rumpled sheets. This time at the Tate, when I last installed it at the Tate, I was crying. When we have to wear hazmat suits and stuff, when we're doing it all, so it's kind of quite strange. But this time at the Tate, when I installed it, it looked sad, it looked flat, it looked yellow, it looked old, it looked sad, it looked tragic. And I couldn't understand why I couldn't profit up, why I couldn't put life into it, why I couldn't make it look more alive or whatever. And I realized it's because, or Harry, who I worked with, he said it's the first time I'd installed it since having the cancer. So I was revisiting something that I hadn't seen during my second life. And the effect that the bed had on me was quite profound. And that installation at the Tate is my saddest one that I've ever done. I've really got affected by it. I didn't like it, but it is, as it is. I mean, when I installed the bed in Margate, a ton of contemporary, it looked like it just like it was had so much for quantity. It just looked like it was like sex, you know, in the room. It was fantastic. It had a completely different feeling. And every time I've installed the bed, it has a different feeling, depending on the place, where it is, how I am, how I'm feeling. So it's sort of like it's interesting, sort of like a sort of anthropological sort of like statement of place. Well, and an examination of your relationship your current self in, you know, relationship with your former self and how differently that can feel at different times. Well, a lot of those things on the bed don't exist anymore or don't have a reason to exist, and especially not for me. So, you know, there's like contraceptive pills, full-scat newspapers, alcohol bottles, timing occurs. Things that just aren't part of your life anymore. Yeah, it's just, it's not part of my life anymore. There's a belt that's really small, and that is how my waist was then. You know, there's only, it's kind of weird. So it's like a sort of time capsule of a woman from the nineties. So it's not just about me. It's about time that's gone. I just have to pick up on something you said a minute ago. Has matte suits? Why did you have to wear as matte suits, too? And because I don't own the bed anymore, it's owned by a German collector, and all of the pieces are listed numbered. It went, when you open up the bed, when the bed's installed, all the little things from every dog in plaster, piece of paper, condom, everything. There are little, it's like a crime scene where they've put all the evidence into little bags, and they're all numbered, and they're all laid out and ventures. So it's replicated identically every time? Yeah. Well, it isn't. That's what I'm saying. Every time it's sort of slightly different, but all the same things are there that are counted, that are counted for. There's the take and servitors there. There's the people who represent the owner. You know, so it's kind of like a very strange thing. It looks like a crime scene. It really does. So even the artist has to be in a hazmat suit, unless you somehow taint the pieces that work. And also because the pieces are so fragile, it sounds so pretentious all of this, really. But it's not. It's a time capsule of something from 30 years ago, you know. So it has to be protected and looked after. You talked about this a little bit earlier, but I'm curious to ask you because I'm so struck by the fact that you, you know, for so much of your youth, you were quite self-destructive. You've talked about sort of smoking yourself to death or drinking yourself to death and so on. But then you came so close to actual death with your cancer diagnosis. And then you clawed to so hard to hold on to life. What do you know now that you didn't know back then? Well, how useful I can be if I stay alive. Not even about my art. I've done my art. My art's done. I can make more art. I can make no more art. I've been known as an artist. So, okay, I've done what I need to do on that level. And now I make art because I just can't stop making it. It's me, you know, I'm an artist. But I think that I love what I do in Margate. I've got this art school here. I've got artist studios. I really put a lot back into the community. It's where I grew up here. I really just enjoy being useful to my artistic community and what I can do for it. I enjoy it immensely. My knowledge, the information that I have about art. And I really believe that art is a very good thing and that art can make the world a better place. And I believe that when mankind is making art, we're not going to war. We're not destroying the world. We're doing something positive and very good. So, I think art is, you know, I champion art. That's what I believe in. I mean, I feel in there's so many parts of your life when this is true. But one specifically is when you were going through your treatment for bladder cancer, you took credibly candid self-portraits, you know, showing yourself holding your, your, your, your ostomy bag, bags literally taped to your body and wearing your IV port, these bags. Yeah, but when you're ostomy bags taped to my body now, it won't be for the rest of my life. Right. But the idea of capturing that in, in an artistic expression, tell me about why, taking photographs of yourself was helpful and meaningful. I wasn't painting and I wasn't writing. I was on really strong morphine, you know, I barely walked or anything. It took me months and months to recover. And I just kept a documentation of it because for me, it was personally interesting to see my own recovery. And I wasn't afraid of how I looked and also I was coming to terms with the surgery as well. And I don't, you know, I can talk about the cancer as much as you like. At the moment, I really want to think that the cancer was yesterday, the cancer was behind me, and I want to go forward, and I never make a new use resolution on New Year's Eve, I make it whenever I like. I'm making one right now with you. I don't want to talk about my cancer like that anymore. I survived, I'm out of it, I'm ahead of it. I want to talk about the future, I want to talk about the things that can make the world better, the things that we can do, things we could do to unite each other, talking about my cancer could be one of them, it could help a lot of other people, but the best thing how I can help other people is to say, go forward, you can do it. I think the thing that's inspiring and instructive about your cancer, and my resolution is to make that the last time I reference it in this conversation, is the fact that it doesn't define you, but it had such a profound change on your life, and the usefulness that you feel now, and the determination to hold on to the life that the second gift of life that you've been given is pretty inspiring and motivational, and the philanthropy that you do supporting other artists in your community, I mean, I don't just start, you know, I'm just about to embark on renovating a really big old sea pavilion to make it a place that people can do into swimming, and like a cafe, and a local community place, an art gallery, artist studios, and it's right on the beach, and that I'm just really excited about, I mean, if you think about legacy as an artist, and let's just think about ego and vanity, right? My ego and vanity, when I go up to heaven and I can float around and go, wow, you know, I put that on the beach, I made all those people happy, that's a really good thing, isn't it? That's much better than getting a jet or a yacht or whatever it takes, you know, I'd rather see, I'd rather see, and also the other thing is when I set up my foundation, there was a more chance that I was going to die, and then when, and then I may, you know, I support the foundation, but now it's not for my death, but it's for my life, it's a living foundation that works, and I can see it working, it's amazing, so it's not like a sort of tax loss or anything like that, it's me fortune, and I love it, it's like my joy. I've heard you say that as you get old or you have a feeling that you have a duty to say a lot of things out loud, which I think is a teensy bit funny because I feel like you've been doing that your whole life, but what is it that you are saying out loud right now, whether it's in words or in your actions that maybe you haven't said out loud before? This is quite obvious, the world is becoming increasingly more cruel, more greedy and more powerful, and people tend to be somehow be gold by power and greed, the people that don't have any power that don't have anything on looking up to these ugly forces, these ugly things, and they're desiring those, we need to change it over, we need people to see that going for good is the right thing to do. I don't understand why it isn't sexy to be good, why not? I know who I'd rather be in bed with. I love that, keep saying that out loud. Tracy, I'm on what a treat to speak with you today, I love your New Year's resolution on this, you know, October day, and I love all your messaging. Thank you very much, bye bye. Bye. That is guest host Jill Deacon's conversation with the artist Tracy Eman, Tracy's latest exhibition, a second life is currently at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. That is it for Qtoday. Tomorrow on the show Diego Luna's latest film is a story of immigration from Mexico, not to the US, but to Spain, something that's been happening more and more in the past few years. He'll tell you about that and about the time he got cast in Star Wars Rogue One, and on his first day, Met Darth Vader. That's tomorrow on Qtoday. If you want to get in touch with me, [email protected] is the best way to do that. On Instagram, we're at CBCQ. I'm at Tom Joe Power from Team Towns Newfoundland. We'll see you soon, later on. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.