From the Guardian, an article about French conceptual artist Sophie Calle turning heartbreak into what sounds like a wonderful work. I always feel uneasy about this kind of personal conceptual stuff, as though you're intruding somehow. Though I also feel uneasy about the criticism that women artists like Tracey Emin get for airing their dirty linen in public. The comment always seem tinged with a bit of misogyny, or maybe that's too strong, more a disapproval at unseemly, emotional women. If you know what I mean.
What are your thoughts?
22 June 2007
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2 comments:
I'm always fascinated by the 'airing their dirty linen' comment, and never entirely sure how I feel about it. I think the main thing is that it's often used as a way of implying that confessional art is bad per se.
Whereas obviously you can have good or bad confessional art, just like any other genre of art. And, astonishingly, it can be produced by both men or women, though obviously if men do it it's ground-breaking, taboo-violating or just incredibly touching to see them making themselves so vulnerable.
eg Bill Viola filming his mother on her deathbed is High Art (make the analogies with Caravaggio or whoever you like), whereas Tracey Emin making drawings about her experience of abortion is just... well... why does she have to do it?
And I say this as a former Tracey Emin sceptic who eventually concluded that I do like some of her art, some of it really moves me (some less so), and she really can draw.
I'm always fascinated by the 'airing their dirty linen' comment, and never entirely sure how I feel about it.
That's exactly what I mean, and I too am a previous sceptic of Tracey Emin's stuff. I've really warmed to her work over the years having seen some of it IRL and been really moved by it. I'd totally forgotten about that Bill Viola work! Yes, that was seen entirely differently. It seems to be an issue of the perception changing according to gender. Maybe also, as Viola is always taking on grand biblical themes, the work about his mother's death is imbued with this - almost another act in his study of passion and death. Emin's work, however is unashamedly intimate...
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