I first encountered Tracey Emin’s piece Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 – 1995 at the beginning of this project before I started my dissertation. I thought I would add it here in a post, as it seems relevant now.
Although at first Emin’s tent appears to be a very distasteful homage to her sexual encounters however on closer inspection this is not entirely true. It is in fact everyone she’s slept literally and not in a sexual sense. There are 102 names on it.
“Some I’d had a shag with in bed or against a wall some I had just slept with, like my grandma. I used to lay in her bed and hold her hand. We used to listen to the radio together and nod off to sleep. You don’t do that with someone you don’t love and don’t care about”
(Didcock, Barry (2006). “The E spot”, The Sunday Herald, 30 April 2006. Retrieved from findarticles.com, 19 June 2007.)
I like this piece of work I like how it knows that you’ll assume the worse and see it as a sexual monument. I also like the transition it goes through from your first sight and horror to the overall acceptance of its not so horrific nature.
But, is it horrific or distasteful? it’s a widely accepted part of life that we no longer have one partner for the rest of our lives, is its bare facedness that show us our own humanity too much. After all do we really like to see what we really are?
The pigment piles are in a way my “tent”. They offer a narrative as to why, through my practice I’ve transformed women into penis snapping brutes because I’m ashamed of my own promiscuity but do I need to be?
