The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Tracey Emin · an installation · a double bed, the artist’s own, with its mattress, stained and rumpled sheets, pillows and duvet, shown on a gallery floor, with a rug at its side and the debris of the days spent in it · 1998 · first shown in Tokyo in 1998, and in London in the Turner Prize exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1999 · sold at Christie’s, London, in July 2014, and on long-term loan to the Tate · the unit scored is the installation of 1998 as one work with its parts, the bed, its linen and the objects with it; the work is reinstalled at each showing, by Emin or to her instruction, its perishable and incidental parts arranged afresh, so that what now stands is the artist’s reinstatement of the bed, not the bed as found in 1998
Mode
The readymade carried into autobiography: the artist’s own bed and its debris, found, unaltered and unwashed, and shown as the work
Mythos
The bed of conception, love, sickness and death, held literally in one woman’s bed; the deathbed and the lament evoked, not built
Phase
Left and seen as a work in 1998, first shown in Tokyo that year, shown at the Turner Prize in London in 1999; reinstalled at each showing since
Presentation
A bed on the floor with its mattress, stained sheets, pillows and duvet, and a rug at its side with the objects of the days spent in it; the arrangement remade at each showing
Register
Abject, intimate and still; a chill of aftermath, and for much of its public a laugh or an argument
Scale
One bed, under a metre high and a little over two metres each way; one rug; some tens of small objects, their number varying by installation
Governing Proposition
A double bed, the artist’s own, stands on a gallery floor at its own low height, its sheets stained and rumpled, its pillows and duvet as they were left, and beside it, on a rug, the debris of the days spent in it. By Emin’s own account the bed is what remained after several days in which, in a depression after the end of a relationship, she could not get up; she looked at it, saw a work, and showed it. Nothing is painted, cleaned or made. The wager is that despair has a material form, that it is this, stains and empties and a body’s leavings in the one place a life is lived unseen, and that the thing itself, set on the floor where the viewer stands over it as over a sleeper, will show it as no image could.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963 and grew up in Margate. In 1998, by her own account, she spent several days in bed in a depression after the end of a relationship. When she got up she looked at the bed as it had been left, the sheets stained and twisted, the pillows and duvet as they had fallen, the floor around it covered with what the days had produced, and saw a work. She showed it that year in Tokyo, and the next year in London.
Nothing was made. The bed is her own double bed with its mattress, sheets, pillows and duvet, set directly on the gallery floor at its own height, under a metre high and a little over two metres each way. At its side lies a rug, and on the rug and around the bed lie the objects. The inventory is not fixed and has differed between showings; among what has been reported in it are empty bottles, cigarette packets and ends, tissues, underwear, contraceptives, slippers and a small toy. The sheets are unwashed. The stains are the record of the body that lay there.
Every part is required as a kind and permitted as an item. Take the sheets away, or launder them, and the work is furniture; take the debris away and the bed is a sickbed without a cause. But one bottle or three, these slippers or others: the work has been laid out afresh at each showing, by Emin or to her instruction, and it has not known less for it. Its necessity is that of a deposit, not of a structure, and that is the first thing that holds it below the summit: a work whose single items can be exchanged has shown that it needs them as a class and not as themselves.
Movement II
The work’s claim is that it is not an image. A painting or a photograph of the bed would show stains; the bed is the stains. That is the knowledge of the form, and it is an index, as a relic is: the thing that was there, carrying the mark of what happened. Put it in words and it becomes a confession, a made thing with a voice and a teller. The bed has no voice. It has only what was left, and the viewer reads the days from it as from evidence.
The second knowledge is in the height. On the floor the viewer stands over the bed as one stands over a sleeper, a sick person or a body, and the room takes on the stillness of a deathbed or of a scene after a crime, an emptiness shaped by someone who has gone. That is the work’s one elevation, a chill of aftermath, and it is real. It does not deepen with looking. The bed is grasped whole at first sight, and for much of its public the first response was not dread but a laugh, or an argument about whether this could be art at all.
What it discloses can be stated. Despair has a material form, and it is this. A woman’s sexual and bodily life, the traces of sex beside the means of not conceiving, is set in public without the frame of the nude, the joke or the clinic, and owned by the woman in it. Shame appears as residue rather than as a story told. The disclosure stops at the self, and much of it confessional writing and photography had already stated; but it is a meaning and not only a mood, and the room proved it by the force of what it provoked.
Movement III
In 1955 Robert Rauschenberg took his own quilt and pillow, painted over them and hung them on a wall as Bed. Forty years later the artist’s own bed returned to art, and the difference is the work’s turn. Rauschenberg’s bed is a picture: upright, painted, made. Emin’s is on the floor, unaltered and unpainted, and its claim is that it was not made at all. The same object, forty years apart, is first a picture and then remains.
Behind it stand Duchamp’s readymade, Oldenburg’s Bedroom Ensemble, the confessional and body art of the 1970s, Nan Goldin’s photographs of beds and lovers, and Louise Bourgeois; and, among Emin’s own generation, the found and the abject in Hirst and the Chapmans. Her own tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, had already staked the confessional mode in 1995; it was destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire of 2004 and is not part of this work. The departure of 1998 was to take the readymade from industry into the most private life and offer the artist’s own breakdown as the found object, so that authenticity is the material.
The stake was paid in full: years of derision in the press, the charge that anyone could have done it, and an exposure that cannot be withdrawn. But the turn widens paths already open, Rauschenberg’s and her own, and that is the second thing that holds it below the summit. Its law is single and complete, every object a trace of one body in one place, nothing added for the viewer; and it governs one bed and its floor.
Movement IV
In 1999 Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, and the bed was shown in the prize exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London. The prize went to Steve McQueen. The bed became the public argument of the year, and the argument showed what the work had been made to show: that a gallery could be asked to hold what a life leaves in private, and that a woman’s bodily life, put there without a frame, could still provoke outrage at the end of the century.
During the exhibition two performance artists, Cai Yuan and Jian Jun Xi, climbed onto the bed in an action no one had sanctioned. The work was reinstated. The episode belongs to the record and adds nothing to the object, but it marks how near the bed stands to its viewer: on the floor, unglazed, at the height of a body, it invited the one thing a painting cannot, to be lain on.
From that room the bed became the emblem of the Turner Prize as a public quarrel and of the Young British Artists in the popular mind. It is cited in nearly every account of British art and of the confessional since, and a line runs from it to later art that shows the unmade, intimate self, and to a wider culture of self-exposure. Its reach in discourse is wide. What artists demonstrably took from it, as distinct from what was written and said, is narrower, and the force it brought was a gathering of openings rather than a reorganisation of the field.
Movement V
Charles Saatchi bought the bed and showed it at the Saatchi Gallery. In July 2014 it was sold at Christie’s in London for about two and a half million pounds, to Count Christian Duerckheim, who placed it on long-term loan to the Tate; from 2015 it was shown at Tate Britain beside paintings by Francis Bacon. Its presence has been wide and continuous for a work of twenty-eight years. Price and fame are presence, not proof, and they are given no other weight.
Each showing remakes it. Stained linen and cigarette ends are perishable, the objects have differed, and the arrangement is laid out again each time, so that what now stands is the artist’s reinstatement and not the bed as found in 1998. The bed, the linen and the class of debris that carry the meaning stand; the incidental parts are renewed. The work has also gained with time a question it did not set: reinstalled by the woman who left it, it has become the record of someone younger, and it keeps yielding there, though much of the return is still to the scandal and to the persona.
It stands at 7.5, level with Hirst’s Pharmacy and For the Love of God, below Fountain at 8.0, whose readymade it carries into a life, and below The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living at 8.2. What holds it in Tier III is plain: a necessity of the whole whose items can be exchanged, a single chill of elevation, a making of few decisions, and a disclosure, form and law that are true and stop at one bed. The body, collapse, sex, gender and the harm of drink and smoke are held in one place; the family, labour, the state and history are not. A bed still lies on a gallery floor, unmade, and the viewer still stands over it as over someone who could not get up.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites hard, and the work’s own history has run it. The core resists removal: the bed itself, at full size, on the floor; the stained sheets, which are the record of the body; and the debris, which carries the days. Take the sheets away, or launder them, and the work is furniture. Take the debris away and the bed is a sickbed without a cause. But below the core almost any single object can go: one bottle or three, these slippers or others. The inventory has differed between installations and the work has not known less for it. Its necessity is of the whole as a deposit, not of its parts as a structure: the parts are required as a class and permitted as items, which holds the axis a tenth below the cap.
Score: 7.4 / 10
What it brings into the open can be stated, and it is a condition, not only a mood. Despair has a material form, and it is this: not a gesture or a face but stains, empties and a body’s leavings in the one place a life is lived unseen. A woman’s sexual and bodily life is put in public without the frame of the nude, the joke or the clinic, and owned by the woman in it. Shame is shown as a residue rather than told as a confession, and disclosure through the object is credited in full. These hold, and the outrage of 1999 showed them plainly. Held below 8: the meaning is near to what confessional writing and photography had already stated, and it stops at the self, without carrying the condition into a social world beyond the room.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Elevation is not sought, and what there is runs low and dark. The register is abjection: the dread of a bed that looks like an aftermath, the pathos of small comforts among the bottles, the sense that someone nearly did not get up. At its best the bed has the stillness of a deathbed or a scene after a crime, an emptiness shaped by a body that has gone, and that is a real claim on the dreadful sublime, once. What holds it lowest of the twelve is frequency and depth. The bed is grasped whole at first sight; the chill does not recur or deepen with looking; and for much of its public the response was a laugh or an argument about whether it was art. The dread is in the object, not in a picture of it, and it is single.
Score: 6.5 / 10
The bed is the most archetypal piece of furniture there is: where a life is conceived, made love in, sick in, born in and died in. This bed holds that cycle literally, not by allusion: sex and its refuse, contraception and the refused birth, blood, sickness, and the near-death of the despair. That much is built into the object. The deathbed, the marriage bed and the lament of the Magdalen are evoked by viewers and by the press, and are atmosphere. What keeps it particular is its great strength: it is one woman’s bed, with her brands and her stains, and it acquires the archetype without losing her. Held below the bar because the structure, once seen, is the single fact of the bed, and nothing in the arrangement builds on it.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The inheritance: Duchamp’s readymade; Rauschenberg’s Bed of 1955, the artist’s own quilt and pillow painted and hung on a wall; Oldenburg’s Bedroom Ensemble; the confessional and body art of the 1970s; Nan Goldin’s photographs of beds and lovers; Louise Bourgeois; and, in Emin’s own generation, the found and the abject in Hirst and the Chapmans. The departure: the readymade taken from industry into the most private life, unaltered and unpainted, the artist’s own breakdown offered as the found object, so that authenticity itself is the material. The stake was real and paid: years of derision in the press, the charge that anyone could do it, and an exposure that cannot be withdrawn. Held below 8 because the artist’s own bed was Rauschenberg’s turn forty years before, and the confessional mode was Emin’s own, proved in the tent of 1995.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Substitute another form: what does the work stop knowing? Paint the bed, or photograph it, and the index goes: these are the stains, not images of stains, and the work’s claim is that it is the remains, as a relic is. Hang it on a wall, as Rauschenberg did, and it becomes a picture; on the floor at its own height the viewer stands over it as over a body, as one stands over a sick or a sleeping person. Put it in words and it becomes a confession, a made thing with a voice; the bed has no voice, only what was left. These are what the form knows. Held below 8 because the arrangement is in part interchangeable, reinstalled differently over the years, and because much of what it knows reaches its public intact through photographs, which shows how much lives in the idea of the real bed.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Evidence over promise: twenty-eight years, and the axis can be partly shown. The questions the work has sustained are real. Is it a confession or a performance of one, the bed as left or the bed as staged? Is the abject female body here reclaimed, or offered up? What does the price, from a collector’s purchase to the sale of 2014, do to a work made of a life at its lowest? And one question the work has gained with time: reinstalled by the artist decades later, it has become the record of a younger self. That yield is the work’s own, and it is growing. What holds the axis: much of the return is to the scandal and to the artist’s persona rather than to the object, which, once seen, gives back less than it first gave.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The field is British art of the 1990s and the confessional and installation art of its decade, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the readymade carried into autobiography, so that the artist’s unredeemed private life is the found object. It is a real extension of possibility, but it gathers what confessional art, the readymade and Rauschenberg had opened rather than reorganising them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the emblem of the Turner Prize as public argument and of the Young British Artists in the popular mind, cited in nearly every account of British art and of the confessional since, with a visible line to later art that shows the unmade, intimate self, and to a wider culture of self-exposure. What can be shown of redirected practice, as distinct from discourse, is less: wide in the press and the public image, narrower in what artists demonstrably took from it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at twenty-eight years. Form: legible and whole as a bed with its linen and debris; no part that carries the meaning is known to be lost. Presence: wide and continuous for a work of its age, from the Turner Prize room to the Saatchi Gallery to a long loan to the Tate; fame and price are presence, not proof. Fabric is charged. Stained linen, cigarette ends and soiled objects are perishable; the arrangement is remade at each showing, and items have differed between installations, so that what stands is the artist’s reinstatement, not the bed as found in 1998. The surface is also in part fixed to its moment, the scandal of 1999. These charges set the figure at the lower edge of what the span allows, and no further.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged as command of the medium, to the same measure as any other, and the making here is chiefly a decision and an arrangement, with almost no hand. Credited: the recognition that the bed was a work; the choice to show it unaltered and unwashed; its placing at floor height; the rug at its side, which makes a stage of the debris; and an arrangement, at its best, as exact in its disorder as a still life, placed so that the eye reads days, not mess. These decisions are load-bearing. What holds the axis: the medium is almost wholly selection and placing, the decisions are few and looser than the exact acts of the readymade, and the placing has varied from showing to showing. The floor holds, by a tenth.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Take two of the most distant things reported among its debris: a small soft toy, a token of childhood comfort, and a used condom, an adult act and its refuse. They obey one law: everything in the work is a trace left by one body in one place over a few days, and nothing has been added for the viewer. Bottle, packet, tissue, slipper, the stain on the sheet: each is a deposit, and each says that someone lay here and could not get up. The law holds without exception, and it holds through the work’s afterlife, where even the reinstallations are the artist returning to her own deposit. Held below 8 because narrowness is not coherence: the range is one bed and its floor, and the law, once grasped, governs a small territory.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The orders held are several, and the bed holds them in one place. The body: sex, blood, illness and sleep. Consciousness, in its collapse, the depression the bed records. Intimate relation: a lover’s absence and the traces of sex. Gender: a woman’s body and its management, set where the nude had been set for a male gaze. Consumption and its harm: alcohol and cigarettes. Childhood, faintly. They are integrated, because they are one person’s days. What holds the axis low is what is absent: the family only by implication, no labour, no state, no history beyond one life, no natural order and no sacred order except as viewers bring the deathbed to it. The figure describes the form: one bed.
Score: 6.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.4, then The Unconcealment and The Living Form at 7.9. A work whole in form after twenty-eight years, its presence wide and continuous, its perishable parts renewed in each showing by the artist; a disclosure that can be stated, that despair and a woman’s bodily life leave a material record and that shame can be shown as residue; and a form that knows it as an index, the stains and not images of stains, set on the floor so that the viewer stands over it as over a body.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 6.5: one chill of aftermath, grasped whole at first sight, which does not recur or deepen. Next above it, The Encompassed at 6.7: the body, collapse, sex, gender and harm held in one bed, with no family, labour, state or history. Then The Made at 7.1 and The Bottomless Well at 7.3: a making almost wholly of selection and placing, its decisions few and varied between showings, and a return that runs as often to the scandal as to the object. They are one fact: one bed, exactly what it is and no larger.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.9, The Made at 7.1, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0, The Made by a tenth. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 7.9, The Swerve at 7.8, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.4 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 6.5, The Made, 7.1, The Bottomless Well, 7.3, The Inevitable, 7.4, and The Archetypal Deep, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.7. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The twelve sum to 89.8, an average of 7.48 that displays 7.5. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.5, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work from photographs of its showings, from the record of its exhibition, sale and loan, and from the critical literature; its exact contents in any one installation are known less precisely, and where a judgment turns on them it is held more loosely. The work scored is the installation of 1998 as one work with its parts: Tracey Emin’s own double bed, with its mattress, stained sheets, pillows and duvet, shown on the floor with a rug at its side and the objects of the days spent in it, first shown in Tokyo in 1998 and in the Turner Prize exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1999; bought by Charles Saatchi and shown at the Saatchi Gallery; sold at Christie’s, London, in July 2014 to Count Christian Duerckheim and placed on long-term loan to the Tate, shown at Tate Britain from 2015. The work is reinstalled at each showing, by Emin or to her instruction, and its perishable and incidental parts have been arranged afresh; what stands is that reinstatement, weighed on survival and on necessity and on no other axis. Emin’s tent of 1995, destroyed in 2004, her drawings, films and neons, and the photographs and press of the bed are context and are not scored. No words are quoted but the titles. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the catalogued medium and dimensions, the venue in Tokyo, the year and price of Saatchi’s purchase, the later venues of the loan, a fixed inventory of the objects, which are named only as reported, and any statement by the artist on how she now regards the work.