I've spent my day off in London with my friend Alan Stewart catching up, taking Windows on the world photographs and visiting two exhibitions.
We began at White Cube with Tracy Emin's Those Who Suffer Love. It is stating the obvious but Emin's work is heartbreakingly honest and open. You might not like what you see but what you get is raw, intimate confessional art -genuine self-revelation. For me, that is what Emin's drawings and animation of a masturbating woman symbolise. She writes of them as being a symbol of lust, loneliness and self-preservation but they are also about the naked, open exposure of what is most private and intimate.
This sense of everything being out in the open links to Emin's drawing style which she describes as "simple and linear, straight to the point." Her drawings appear as though they are unconscious doodles, particularly in the Monoprint diaries with their scribbles, crossings out, reverse writing, all of which increase the sense of immediacy; the sense of actual emotions spewed out onto the page as they arise.
This is, of course, a style, an artful creation which has proved immensely profitable for Emin and to which she is returning in this show; she feels she has come back to what she really knows. And yet, confessional art, for all the artistry and style involved, ultimately cannot be faked because it involves emotional connection with our lives that must be experienced first before it can be conveyed.
So, while never having been a fan of her work and despite not identifying greatly with the attitudes and choices revealed through her honesty, I cannot deny the raw power - which is on a par, for example, with the primal scream of the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album - of her confessions and would agree with Julian Schnabel that: “Tracey’s need to be honest supercedes all decisions in her life and art. The crystalline presentation of the most intimate and private emotions are what she wants to share with us.”
Our second choice of exhibition was very different; David Claerbout's three video installations at Hauser & Wirth. These were calmer, meditative works concerned with synergies and harmonies which nevertheless embraced dissonance.
Riverside involved two films viewed side-by-side shot in the same landscape and with narratives which maintained a tension as to the extent to which their stories would intersect. The culmination of the piece involved a synergy of space and sound without a similar synergy of time and story. We are constantly inhabiting the space of others without being aware of their stories or the connections that we could experience were we to know them and, yet, Riverside seemed to suggest that at some level of experience or reality synergies can and do occur.
Claerbout's video installations reveal an intense attention to the life of his subjects such that patterns and harmonies are seen - 'heaven in the ordinary' - that would ordinarily be overlooked. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the second installation, Sunrise. This film focused on the pre-dawn household preparations of a maid, where her activities were reflected in the glass, chrome and water of the modernist home where she worked affording her simple activities a quiet beauty as they created patterns by being mirrored in the half-light.
Claerbout, however, counterpoised the still beauty of work in the half-light of modernism with the radient beauty of the risen sun as the maid cycled away from the house and into her life outside work. As the exhibition's press release notes, "balance of the film turns in these final minutes from mute perfection to a flood of emotion."
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Bruce Cockburn - Different When It Comes To You.
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