THE WORST OF 2004
THE BIZARRE AND EXPENSIVE ART
Photo:
Nan and Brian in bed, 1983, print by Nan Goldin.
There's much more to its grimy sheets, surrounding piles of crud and slashed pillow than a desire to shock. Not only does it tap into a time-honoured tradition of beds in art - from Boucher's sexily rumpled linen to Manet's reclining Olympia and Robert Rauschenberg's paint-splattered quilt and blankets - but it also stands as a stark reminder that this is where we spend large and crucial portions of our life: being born, being ill, dreaming, making love and, ultimately, dying. Like all of Emin's work, My Bed stands in as a highly ambiguous self-portrait which powerfully conjures up the artist's immediate presence while at the same time sending out provocatively mixed messages. Is it fragile, poetic or insultingly in-your-face? A cosy refuge or a chilling site for potential violence? As with the often perverse persona of Emin herself, easy answers are not forthcoming. The same goes for another classic work also owned by Charles Saatchi: the igloo-shaped tent lined with the names of Everyone I have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995, which includes an in utero twin brother, school friends, lovers and two aborted foetuses. Such works show that, although Emin continues to be her own source and subject matter, like the poetry of Patti Smith, the paintings of Frida Kahlo or Nan Goldin's photographs, these multifarious accounts of a life both ordinary and extraordinary can reach beyond her own experience to touch us all and, as she puts it, 'To start with myself but end up with the universe'. While her most recent projects are more oblique in their self-referencing - a novel and a feature film are currently in the pipeline - the many stories of Tracey Emin seem set to run and run.
Plastic fantastic: Ron Mueck
Photo:
Faces by Ron Mueck.
Hyper-realist sculptor Ron Mueck (pronounced Moo-ick) made his name at the Sensation exhibition with Dead Dad (1997), the anatomically exact representation of his father's corpse shrunk to a disconcertingly pitiful three feet in length. Viewers were both shocked and moved by Dead Dad - its comically precise title, like something out of Viz, belying the visceral impact of calloused feet and intensely lifelike lifeless ßesh, the late Mueck Senior diminished in death and outgrown by the son; yet paradoxically granted a form of immortality in acrylic and Þberglass resin. The alteration of conventional scale and confounding of expectation is a regular theme in Mueck's work, from the glowering, bristling, four-feet-high Mask, a depiction of the artist's face set in an attitude of baleful, red-eyed severity, to the 23-inch-long Man in Blankets, an old man again reduced to the size of a baby by age and illness; and Big Boy, a double decker bus-sized adolescent created for the Millennium Dome and shown at the Venice Biennale last year, whose crouched Þgure barely contains all the sexual and physical energy of a teenage male. Above all, Mueck is a brilliantly convincing technician (see his sculpture of a pregnant woman at the National Gallery, on show until 22 June 2003). But he's also a joker. The uncherubic and depressed Angel - perched with his head in his hands and hairy legs dangling, heavily feathered and clearly burdensome wings poised for ßight - appears to prove categorically, for example, that being good isn't often compatible with having fun. Mueck, 43, began his career as a model-maker for children's TV in his native Australia (his parents were both toy makers), before moving to London some 20 years ago and working in the advertising and Þlm industries. He turned to art full time in 1996 at the instigation of his mother-in-law Paula Rego.
Continues on the next page.