MUSINGS: How To Get To Margate From London (Tracey Emin)

Tracey Emin, and her relationship with her home town of Margate, England. 

Transcript

How to Get to Margate from London

There is a long history of particular artists having particular relationships with place. Frida Kahlo to Mexico; Edward Hopper to New York; Georgia O’Keefe to New Mexico. Among the living, we have Tracey Emin, and Margate, England. 

Margate is a town of historic importance on the south coast of England, now in decline, although a number of recent initiatives have seen a revitalization of fortunes. Among these is the Turner Contemporary museum, which opened in 2011, and not only brings visitors to the town but also serves as a point of engagement and education for local communities. The Turner in the name of course refers to JMW Turner, who painted a number of famous scenes of the town. 

And then we have Tracey Emin, former enfant terrible of the British art scene, who made a sudden impact with her unmade bed, titled My Bed, in 1998, which at the time shocked both the art world and polite society. The piece was an installation of Emin’s rumpled and disordered bed, featuring all manner of debris, including bottles of alcohol, condoms, soiled sheets and scattered pills. It was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999 - also named after JMW Turner, but incongruously an award which has nothing to do with painting and instead is a modern art prize which historically has rewarded unusual entries, in a way no great surprise given modern art’s ongoing need to generate a discourse. 

It was a long time ago now, but I was present at that unveiling, and saw the work live. It was my first Turner Prize, and at the time I felt completely nonplussed, although there’s little doubt that the bed was to stay with me, and it still present in my mind’s eye today, although to what extent this is because of the bed itself, and not the heightened discourse which followed it, is difficult to know. 

Irrespective, Tracey Emin became known, overnight, and it really was her who became known, more than her art, which was an extension of a life lived very much in the public eye, to the tune of excess, shock and affront. Emin was a very public example of the brashness of contemporary art in Britain in the late nineties, and how it was tethered by a mutually supporting breathing apparatus to an equally brash media landscape, and to personal brand. 

Emin was a constant fixture, and a pretty irritating one at that. But in another life-constant, ageing, softening, and humility happened. And through that process, she rediscovered Margate, perhaps important just as much for what it was and its relationship to Emin - she had grown up there - as it was because it was not London, where Emin lived her very public life. 

In 2010, a year before the opening of the Turner Contemporary, Emin unveiled a piece in the town, a neon text in her own handwriting, which read I Never Stopped Loving You. It was installed on the front of Droit House, an emblematic building on the Margate seafront, where all passers-by would see it. 

Now, 15 years on, and just as a major exhibition of Emin’s is about to open at Tate Modern, Emin finds herself as engaged with the seaside town of her youth as anything else in her life. Over the last few years, she has worked assiduously to transform Margate into a creative hub, buying and converting buildings into art and community spaces, and being an advocate for all things Margate. If once upon a time, that bed was indivisible from her name, it’s arguable that now the thing which is closest to her, by association, is Margate. 

It’s a two hour train ride from London, and it’s a journey which feels as though it follows Emin’s life path, who - it seems - has spent most of hers working out how to get to Margate from London.