Body Commodity
A Review of the Works of Tracey Emin
by Sara Agosa

While flipping through a 20th and 21st century female artist collection, which featured women artists from all over the United States and Europe, a frightening pattern emerged before my eyes. On every other page, women’s nude bodies were splattered in various angles, propped up and twisted in positions more fitting for a pornographic magazine than a sophisticated and progressive art anthology. Tracey Emin’s work--in particular, one of her multi-media pieces (which looks like a cross between a carelessly made patchwork quilt and a colorful, although confusing assortment of sentence fragments)--typifies the neurotic bodily fixation corrupting contemporary women’s art. Although some of her pieces are attractive for the integration of words and form, overall, I was disappointed with the immature and undeveloped depiction of sex and sexuality so prominent in her subject matter. Women’s artistic obsession with sexuality and sexual exploitation has become so cliché in Western art that I consider these women more of pop culture imitators than artists-- Prostitutes of Pain--who, in their pursuit to win a place in the art world, have fed into generic representations of women’s sexuality to achieve shock value status. The prevalence of these manufactured images and themes--the most prominent being the overdone “crotch shot”--makes me question whether female artists would have a place in the modern art world at all without using sexually charged and painfully explicit subject matter to leverage, what seems to be, their creative deficits.

When an image is not created from the heart, but merely from a physical point of power, something is lost in its appeal and intensity. Emin’s depiction of female sexuality perfectly reflects a larger societal issue of how women, who on one hand complain of their oppression, and on the other hand, use it for their benefit when convenient, undermine the beauty and essence of women’s artistic expressions. A scantily dressed woman sitting on the floor, embracing a wad of bills and coins in between her legs, the words “Psycho” and “Slut”, along with several other sentence fragments sewn in between small squares and images of cowboy boots and sperm hunting for an egg to penetrate, and an installation of a bed with its usual appearance: rustled sheets with several empty bottles of booze and piles of clothes strewn on the floor (which reminded me more of a young college student’s dorm room than a grown woman’s boudoir), convey a cheapness and emptiness--a lack of authenticity--largely due to the misuse of the same sexual theme over and over again.

By and large, it is unfortunate that even modern women artists, in their undeveloped and artificial attempts to communicate sexuality, continually feed into the stereotypes that they are seemingly trying to reject. When these artists can no longer use their bodies as commodities behind the lens, similar to porn stars who are cast out of the industry once they begin to age, I hope that they will feel creatively secure enough to approach art with a little more originality and depth. After all, pop culture pieces become obsolete with inevitable cultural shifts; what makes a piece genuine is not the “shocking” or explicit details, but whether or not it invokes the viewer to transcend the milieu of his or her time to explore more deeply within.