Hey there! I'm back from my long break and ready and raring to go, with a new layout and look and my first ever guest post from Martin King's #100blogfest challenge, where he aims to publish 100 blogposts on 100 different blogs during the month of August. Phew!
Well, the summer is well and truly upon us, as seeing as everyone is taking a holiday I thought I might too. It's been a truly hectic couple of months and at the moment when I say 'brain, come on', it says 'what? why? Ssh' and goes back to drinking a drink with an umbrella, magazine in hand.
Now, as fans of good writing in all its forms, you'll forgive me for wandering off books for this one particular blog post and straying into the not-so-oft mentioned world of magazines (Elle, to be specific) to talk about some particular writing to be found there.
Sometimes, at the end of a rough day, all you want is food, bath and the miraculous good fortune of a happy ending in your bedtime read.
I know there’s been a bit of a Rose Tremain love in on this blog lately (I most recently talked abut her short story, Moth), but after seeing her speak at the Vintage events I’ve worked my way back through a fair part of her back catalogue. As a general conclusion, it rocks. If you haven’t read much of hers, you should probably stop reading now as seeing the name of the book will tell you the ending of said book (tis tricky to write a post about a happy ending without revealing the ending, of course) and these books are so good that I wouldn’t want to do anything that would discourage you from reading any of them.
Ok, here’s a funand divisive activity: go up to a group of friends (or strangers) and tell them you’re excited to go see the Tracey Emin retrospective exhibition that’s currently on at the Hayward Gallery in London. I reckon, out of a group of ten, five or six will go ‘no, she’s a fraud/awful person/exhibitionist opportunist’, one or two might go ‘who?’ and carry on drinking and the final two, three or four might express something between vague, sheepish interest and an interest equal to yours (or, more accurately, mine.)
(If you're not sure who she is, maybe click the highlighted words and watch the videos below. I'm not actually sure how well know she is outside the UK.)
I went to see said exhibit earlier this month and I thought it was excellent. There, I said it. EXCELLENT. Moving and raw and immensely affecting. I think her work is vulnerable and touching and immensely powerful in its honesty. Also, I think her work on fertility, childhood and abortion (namely, her childhood, fertility and abortions) has gone some way to lifting the veil of secrecy and shame that tends to hang over such things, and I don’t understand how people target her for her controversy when she’s just expressing what has been a difficult and controversial life. Art is self-expression, after all, so what else would she express? Most of it is actually about a longing for love: familial, nostalgic, sexual, platonic.
What I did find slightly creepy was the number of mothers with children and babies in prams watching the video installation How It Feels; if you’ve seen that you’ll probably be able to imagine how unsettling that might be. But then, I guess that’s the whole point of it. By expressing her own experience of it, she unites others who’ve experienced it but can’t, or don’t want to, say. Tellingly, there were people of all sorts there, and lots of them too.
Anyway, that’s probably enough from me, except to say GO AND SEE IT if you can, if only to put meat on the bones of the arguments against.
This is the gallery’s overview of the exhibit:
Her thoughts on the retrospective:
And a clip of a Sky Arts interview, ‘In Confidence’, in which Laurie Taylor exhibited, to me, a complete ignorance on the processes and meaning of art (that part isn’t really in this short excerpt though):
The Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want exhibit is at the Hayward Gallery until the 29th August 2011. For more information on Tracey Emin, see her page on Artsy.
