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RA Magazine Summer 2008

Issue Number: 99

Tracey Emin RA on curating Gallery 8 of the Summer Exhibition

Tracey Emin RA in the Summer Exhibition 2008 Galleries. Photo © Juergen Teller. Ping-pong Table, 2007, by Ron Arad/Courtesy of Ron Arad and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London/© Timothy Taylor Gallery, 2008
‘I’m not going to drive a red bus into the Royal Academy and hang everything inside it – I’m not out to be provocative on that kind of level’

Tracey Emin RA brims with enthusiasm about curating a special gallery for the Summer Exhibition. ‘It’s a great honour. My first idea was to make a show that really shocked me. But although the art I choose might be radical and off the wall, the presentation will be calm and classical. I’m not going to drive a red bus into the Royal Academy and hang everything inside it – I’m not out to be provocative on that kind of level.’

Her aim is to attract ‘a new audience – people who wouldn’t normally go to the RA’. But she has huge respect for the Summer Exhibition: ‘I really enjoy this over-hung, over-drenched show. It’s a spectacle – especially the print room, which is insane! You really look – you go searching and scavenging. People say the Summer Exhibition should change, but I don’t think so. It hangs Home Counties conservative art with graffiti kids from Peckham. It’s a good leveller, and that’s why it should stay the way it is.’

Emin admits that she has never before curated a show: ‘I won’t disappoint anyone who expects outrage. I want to curate something that would have upset Ruskin, because he destroyed all of Turner’s pornographic work and I won’t forgive him for that.’

In response to this year’s theme – ‘Man Made’ – Emin comments, ‘You might imagine it would be regimented and unnatural. But to me it’s much more visceral and natural.’ What does she mean? Emin laughs, ‘I don’t think posh Royal Academy ladies will come into my room and feel let down because they can’t find any pubic hair.’

Can she offer some examples? ‘I want Mat,’ Emin says, referring to Mat Collishaw, who famously showed a light box revealing the brutal impact of a bullet hole on a human head in the 1988 Freeze exhibition. ‘I want to show his work from Damien Hirst’s collection,’ she adds. ‘It’s a noisy, mechanical thing showing a zebra mounting a woman, from 1993. It looks very Victorian, like What The Butler Saw.’

Emin has no intention of focusing on fellow members of the so-called YBA generation, who exhibited with her in the RA’s Sensation show in 1997. Instead, she is roaming widely. ‘I want Sir Peter Blake RA. I’ll ask him for recent collages, with women and film stars who look like they turned him on.’

She is also introducing newcomers, such as Rachel Kneebone: ‘Her work is exciting for me – porcelain figurines, vulnerable and with an eighteenth-century look. I like Georgian things – my house was built in 1729, and I like simplicity and straight lines.’

Keen to bring in artists whose work is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the Summer Show, she has selected work from celebrated photographer Juergen Teller and a painting by Vincent Hawkins (top left): ‘For me, his painting shows the sexual combined with the intellectual – it pulls the whole gallery together.’ There is also a video by the Australian artist Shaun Gladwell which she saw at last year’s Venice Biennale, as well as sculptures by Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez. ‘When I saw her pot structures, I thought they were like paintings. But the space they take up is like a physical form, so they’re totally abstract and quite sexy – they go in and out. They’re vulnerable and weird.’

Emin is also inviting Julian Schnabel, who has earned plaudits for his recent film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: ‘It’s like watching a moving painting. But I want to exhibit one of his Jane Birkin paintings from a few years ago.’

She is not afraid of disturbing work and is including the Israeli artist Sigalit Landau. ‘She has made a beautiful video of a woman doing a hula hoop routine with barbed wire.’ Isn’t it unbearable to watch? ‘Well, there are scratches, but it’s strangely erotic and mesmerising.’

Sexual arousal is a prominent theme of her gallery and she plans to include work by sculptor Rebecca Warren. ‘It will, hopefully, be one of her erotic sculptures because I like things like that. I want to go to an art exhibition that makes me feel excited and feverish.’

- Richard Cork