“Tracey Emin: 20 Years”, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, is a retrospective in the form of a labyrinth of blurted confessions. The visitor who penetrates to the centre of the autobiographical maze will find there, in all its melancholy bathos, the artist’s signature work: My Bed, of 1998. The celebrated unmade bed is a rebarbative memento of low-rent, self-destructive excess, the classic instance of Emin’s particular variant of abject expressionism. An island composed of grey rumpled sheets, dribble-stained pillows and a crushed mess of duvet is bordered by the flotsam and jetsam of squalid debauchery: an empty bottle of Absolut vodka, a half-squeezed tube of KY jelly, some condom wrappers, a brimming ashtray, a crushed duty-free size carton of cigarettes and a knot of knickers and tights, still entangled in the twist of sudden undress.
 
It is a work of art that resembles the scene of a crime, or a suicide. When she first exhibited it, the artist hung a noose nearby, a touch of melodrama subsequently deemed superfluous, although one that had its roots in Emin’s genuine belief that she was killing herself with drink at the time. But My Bed might equally well have been inspired by the memory of an Endemol camera panning over some bedroom debris in the Big Brother house (no one was a bigger fan of Big Brother, in the early days of the franchise, than Tracey Emin); and it also bears a distant, belated family resemblance to certain types of Old Master painting – being, in effect, a Dutch vanitas still life constructed as a tableau vivant from the materials of a modern bedsit. The combination of associations might be unusual but it is also a reasonable guide to Emin’s nature as an artist. She is fond of borrowing from...

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