Gibbons, J. (2007). Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Rememberance. I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd.

Gibbons, J. (2007). Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance. I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd. SIT Library 701GIB

Chapter One 

Autobiography: The Externalisation of Personal Memory

Autobiography assumes a variety of forms and involves a range of practices. In literature alone, it encompasses ‘the memoir, the confession, the apology, the diary and the “journal intime”’, as well as less testimonial forms such as novels, drama and poetry. On another front, the revealing of personal histories has become a popularised practice through mass media such as tabloid newspapers or television – the chat show serving as an obvious example. Equally, autobiographical information has become a key part of the everyday administration or institutionalisation of our lives – in the filling out of insurance forms, applications for finance or social benefit, the recording of medical histories and so on. Operating on so many levels and in so many forms, autobiography plays a key role in Western culture and has come to represent a key issue of our time: the relationship of the private to the public. With this in mind, this chapter addresses the ways in which a number of artists have represented their histories and walked the often delicate path between the public and private spheres. I begin with a look at the prehistory of autobiographical art in self-portraiture, but for the main part this chapter is concerned with the work of artists who have made personal experience rather than the mirror-likeness of portraiture the lynchpin of their self-representations. What will become evident is that the current openness of expression in contemporary art has allowed for the terms in which autobiography is figured to be stretched and tested in new and significant ways. 

  The first artist to make self-portraiture a trademark of his work was, of course, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669). In a series of self-portraits that lasted his adult lifetime, Rembrandt brought a psychological depth to his self-imaging that went further than a simple chronicling of his changing appearance. Indeed, the amount of self-scrutiny that Rembrandt applied to himself in the seventeenth century was without precedent in the art of any Contemporary Art and Memory culture and coincides with the emergence of the individualist self in the West. As literary historian Michael Mascuch has shown, this new tendency was expressed in part by the spread of new, more popular, practices such as personal almanacs and diaries. Until this point in history the model for autobiographical writing had been set by St Augustine in his Confessions and sat within a clear framework of religious and moral piety. By the seventeenth century, ‘the spiritual notebook was losing its status as instrument, and acquiring a new status as an object created by a subject; that is, an autonomous text, deliberately wrought by an individual intending it to represent some aspect of his personality’.3 This corresponds with the view expressed by Rembrandt’s contemporary Constantijn Huygens, that portraiture is ‘the wondrous compendium of the whole man – not only of man’s outward appearance but in my opinion, his mind as well’.

  The nature of Rembrandt’s gaze is crucial in relation to this access to the inner man. As art historian Gen Doy has pointed out, seventeenth century portraitists were well aware of the way that the painted eye creates an illusion of captivating the gaze of the viewer wherever he/she may be positioned in relation to the painting, and even of following him/her around the room. But this alone is not enough to make the gaze compelling; in conjunction with this simple illusion, Rembrandt’s eye contact obtains because, while unflinching, there is something indefinable in it and it is almost constantly troubled. Again following Doy’s commentary on seventeenth-century portraiture in relation to notions of the self, it could be said that the nature of Rembrandt’s gaze bears the hallmarks of the sort of individual self-scrutiny that is associated with the philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) – the notion of a self-conscious, self-defining subject which, despite challenges from postmodern theorists, remains deeply embedded in the culture. Aligned with the compelling yet vulnerable nature of Rembrandt’s gaze, it is also a notion that privileges or encourages a romanticised interpretation of Rembrandt’s personality by those who read his self-portraits as autobiography. 

  However, the ‘story’ of Rembrandt’s life that emerges as the self-portraits follow on from one another is not an autobiography that looks back on the past to give it narrative shape. The majority of his images are not retrospective, and only a few serve to mark a life event such as his marriage to Saskia Uylenburgh in 1634. Instead, they are indicative of how Rembrandt wanted to present himself at a given time, in some cases to aid his pursuit of fortune and, in later life, to support his fame. The autobiography offered by the self-portraits has been constructed from without by critics and historians, who, as Gary Schwartz points out, insist on seeing Rembrandt as ‘a sensitive human being with great spiritual depths’ despite historical evidence to say that this was not typical of his conduct and character as experienced by his Autobiography contemporaries. The self-images that Rembrandt offers seem, rather, to represent the selective nature of memory, both on the part of the artist, who presents a preferred view in order to memorialise himself, and on the part of the viewer, who, in the vein of Romanticism, wants to believe in the depths of humanity that Rembrandt shows us. In crude Freudian terms, Rembrandt may be said to present us with mementos of his ego-ideal (or, rather, a long series of ego-ideals) which act both as a conscience and as a counterpoint to the baser realities of his life. By extension, the ‘thinking’ self that Rembrandt Contemporary Art and Memory portrays can serve as a kind of collective ego-ideal, and, as such, may be a key factor in his undeniable popularity. But the ego-ideal that Rembrandt presents is far from one of perfection, and the reason why Rembrandt’s self-portraits consistently find a widespread relevance is perhaps that they are not idealised, but touched by what art historian, Simon Schama, has called ‘the poetry of imperfection’. Even as Rembrandt seeks to impress with accessories and costume, his face is subject to ‘the pranks and indignities suffered by all mortal flesh’.9 In contrast to the human frailty expressed in his facial features, Rembrandt’s tendency to put on a show of material status in nearly all his self-portraits is also noted by Schama, and seen to be especially poignant in the self-portrait of 1658 held in the Frick Collection, New York. Here, despite being in the depths of misfortune, the artist presents himself not only with dignity but also in a rich costume that defies his circumstance (alongside a face that is, nevertheless, a continuing testimony to the vagaries of time and experience).10 Memory, of course, is inherently selective and there is a proven tendency to rework the original facts of an event or experience in a way that coheres around the wishes and values of the person remembering.11 So, while the actual truth value of Rembrandt’s self-portraits may be in doubt, what is important for his viewers are the human truths that they appear to embody. In terms of memory or memorialisation, Rembrandt provides documents of himself that in chronicling physiognomic changes are literally autobiographical (the tracing of a life), but these traces, as already noted, are constructed in the present tense and most often bear a distant relationship to his actual circumstances and life events, and work more at the level of commemoration. This was echoed to some degree two hundred and fifty years or so later in the work of Rembrandt’s compatriot, Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890). Yet, while Van Gogh’s recordings of his own likeness are also numerous and run a wide gamut of changing circumstances, they are more a poignantly truncated record in relation to a short lifespan and show a more rapidly changing self-image. In addition, while Rembrandt’s troubled gaze is often reiterated, Van Gogh’s self-portraits are more overtly diaristic than Rembrandt’s. His self-images reflect the actualities of his life far more directly and, in that respect, construct an autobiography based more closely on his life circumstances. Van Gogh’s self-portraits shift from the conventional realism of the earlier self-images to an attempt to reinvent himself as a progressive and urbane artist when he arrives in Paris in 1886, as in Self-portrait with Light Felt Hat and Bow Tie, in which his dress is that of the fashionable townsman and his palette is lightened to match that of the avant-garde. But this is soon followed by self-portraits that document his changing mental state and reidentification with workers and peasants. This is strikingly shown in the Autobiography portraits he made of himself showing his bandaged ear in January 1889, in the aftermath of his first major mental health crisis in Arles, and in the bleakness of his penultimate self-portrait painted in St Remy in September of the same year (Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo). In contrast to Rembrandt’s tendency to hide the particular circumstances of his life, Van Gogh’s often painful baring of both life and soul makes the private public and paves the way for the confessional practices associated with the autobiographical art of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In this respect, his self-portraiture not only signals a paradigmatic shift in the genre of self-portraiture but expands the nature of the ‘memory-work’ that it performs. Nevertheless, changeable as the self-portraits are in relation to Van Gogh’s health and circumstances, they almost all fit within the conventions of the mirrored likeness, usually head and shoulders, although sometimes with an arm and hand holding a palette. Exceptions to this format are found in two extraordinary self-images in which Van Gogh has substituted his face, firstly for that of Christ (Pièta, 1889, after Delacroix), and secondly for that of Lazarus (The Raising of Lazarus, 1890, after Rembrandt). In appropriating familiar compositions and religious iconography that are already ingrained in cultural memory, Van Gogh finds a vehicle for themes of death and resurrection pertinent to his situation both as an invalid and an artist. In this, he asks to be remembered as a victim and martyr to the larger forces and conditions that worked against him, both in his struggle to develop successful interpersonal relationships and in his struggle to become a successful artist in his own time. A similar strategy is frequently replayed in the work of the last selfportraitist that I want to discuss, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907– 1954), who conflates autobiographical symbolism with cultural symbolism in a way that again sets particular terms for the ‘memory-work’ that her art involves. For the most part, Kahlo’s self-imaging divides into two dominant approaches: one which abides by the conventional format of the mirrored image (either head and shoulders or full-length), with personal attributes that often allude to the larger socio-political context that she inhabits; and one in which she illustrates or stages key moments in her life in a mise en scène of some sort. Representative of the first approach is a work such as The Two Fridas, 1939. In this large piece, Kahlo positions two seated full-length images of herself as if mirror images of each other – except that one wears what appears to be a colonial-style wedding dress while the other wears the traditional Tehuana costume of a south-west Mexican woman. A divided self is immediately suggested, but simultaneously denied by the entwining of the two figures with major blood vessels that grow from the exposed heart of each Frida. Painted at the time of her (temporary) divorce from leading Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, the ‘colonial Frida’ is the Frida that Rivera Contemporary Art and Memory espoused while her ‘twin’ represents the Frida that Rivera had in fact encouraged and helped mould – the representative of an independent postcolonial Mexico.12 Significantly, the heart of the ‘colonial Frida’ is broken and sprouts an artery that divides, ending on one side in a severed state, staining the wedding dress, and on the other the heart of the ‘Tehuana Frida’, which is whole and which sprouts a further independent artery leading to a miniature portrait of Rivera’s head. As others have observed, the personal can be seen to blend with the political in much of Kahlo’s work. In this case, the micro-politics of her relationship with Rivera are mapped onto the macro-politics of postcolonial identity, the tenuously linked hearts symbolising the pulls and stresses that the duality of identity exerted on Kahlo, born of a German father and Mexican mother and divorced from a man who she felt had refused to love her European side. While the bleeding heart can be seen as a symbol of Kahlo’s personal anguish, it is also central to both the iconography of Christ’s martyrdom and that of Aztec ritual sacrifice, functioning equally in both traditions as an emblem of suffering and surrender.13 In the almost diagrammatic fusion of the personal with larger cultural meanings, the separations and entanglements inscribed in the painting allude to rather than replay or restage the events or circumstances of Kahlo’s life. While the iconography is deeply encoded, the stylised technique and symmetrical composition also play a large part in the way that Kahlo chose to memorialise the dualities and inner conflicts of her identity. In contrast, the self-images that depart from traditional portrait formats are different not only in the introduction of narrative but also because they introduce an element of retrospection and historicisation. However, works such as The Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and My Birth (1932) are more than simple recordings of past events; they are also, both literally and metaphorically, a reframing of these events. As art historian Gannit Ankori notes, The Henry Ford Hospital not only replays the trauma of miscarriage but overtly addresses a much broader trauma of identity. Kahlo herself referred to the piece as an ‘anti-nativity’ and represented herself as La Llorona, the weeping woman from Mexican folklore, who in various versions stands for evil, extreme violence, bad motherhood and sexual deviance.14 Similarly, My Birth draws a complex relationship between personal and collective history and mythology, compounded by an atemporal combination of Kahlo’s own birth and the death of her premature foetus in a single image, in which she is ‘born but gives birth to herself’.15 Thus, while more historically specific than The Two Fridas, My Birth and The Henry Ford Hospital also make similarly broad cultural references, connecting the personal to culturally shared mythologies and histories. This interweaving of personal memory with religion and myth not only allows for hindsight but also Autobiography generates insight into the interweaving of personal memory within larger cultural schemes. As Ankori suggests, the painting can be seen as an image of rebirth, a response to recent events that must have caused Kahlo to dwell on the idea and experiences of motherhood (a failed abortion, the adjustment to oncoming motherhood and a quickly ensuing readjustment to the miscarriage and the death of her own mother). On the other hand, Kahlo rejects any conventional image of mother and child, exposing the carnal reality of the female body, allowing Kahlo to rethink her identity as a woman.16 However, despite this flouting of iconographic convention, the work takes a conventional form – that of a domestic retablo, a votive image that is used to give thanks for escape from disaster, usually accompanied by an inscription.17 In this case, however, the inscription is conspicuously missing from the scroll at the bottom of the painting – a telling absence, given Kahlo’s habit of inscribing the scrolls in her more conventional self-portraits. The reason for the absence of the inscription becomes obvious when it is remembered that the painting refers back to the miscarriage depicted in The Henry Ford Hospital, in which personal disaster had been neither avoided nor overcome. Moreover, the missing inscription can also be read as a sign of the unspeakability of trauma – the inability, as Cathy Caruth notes (after Freud), of being able to fully assimilate trauma as it occurs and the need to find belated and symptomatic or allusive ways of reviving the crisis in order to remember it.18 In works such as My Birth, the practice of self-portraiture shifts in a way that is to prefigure later approaches to autobiography in contemporary art and the ways in which it functions as memory. Given that Kahlo’s self-portraits have begun a process in which the past is reworked as a means of understanding the self in its larger context, it is useful to introduce the notion of Nachträglichkeit (loosely translated here as ‘retroactivity’ or ‘hindsight’). Nachträglichkeit is a psychical process mentioned many times by Sigmund Freud, whereby an original experience is reconstituted, retranscribed or rearranged in relation to ongoing circumstances – not only to replay the experience but to gather new meaning and endow it with a psychical effectiveness that has been lost by the repression of the experience.19 As literary theorist Nicola King has recently shown, Nachträglichkeit forms an important counterfoil to the notion of memory as the simple excavation of the forgotten or repressed, as is clearly the case with My Birth.20 As King has noted, the metaphor of excavation quickly calls to mind Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on memory and history and the methods he used to chronicle his native city of Berlin. Here, memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but the medium through which that which has been known or experienced has to be processed – the soil that has to be dug and turned Contemporary Art and Memory over. But, importantly, this act of digging not only reveals deeper hidden strata but also necessitates a re-seeing (review) of the strata which had to be excavated.21 Again, memory is complexified by a conflation of past and present, in which that which is retrieved is contingent on what is felt or experienced in the present and becomes as much a feature of the present as of the past. After Kahlo, this synthesis of past and present plays an important role in the mapping of autobiography in the work of the US-based French artist Louise Bourgeois (born 1911), in which the function of memory is not only to recall, reconstitute or reconcile the past but also to construct and represent the present. While Bourgeois is now widely known for the autobiographical basis of her work and its attention to memory, this aspect of her work did not begin to make a widespread impact until the 1980s with her major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York (1982), followed by one in Frankfurt in 1989 and another at the Serpentine Gallery in London (1995). Until the first retrospective Bourgeois had been seen, and saw herself, largely in terms of her competencies as a Modernist/Late Modernist artist, positioned in relation to dominant strands of modern art such as Formalism (Brancusi in particular) and biomorphic Surrealism, contrasting influences which suggest early on, as Frances Morris has put it, that Bourgeois is a case apart, whose ‘career refuses to answer to narrative unfolding and does not mesh with an avant-garde notion of modernism’.22 In terms of the foregrounding of autobiographical content, a watershed occurred as early as 1974, when Bourgeois produced the first work to make reference to a particular memory from childhood entitled The Destruction of the Father, in which she rendered the family dinner table as a large cavity, grotesquely and significantly reminiscent of the interior of the mouth. The Destruction of the Father was the first of many cathartic works in which Bourgeois has exorcised childhood memories and fears. In this case, it was the fear that was regularly produced at the dinner table by the overbearing behaviour of her father that was invoked, and turned into a private fantasy that involved the dismemberment and cannibalisation of the father by Bourgeois and her brother and sister.23 In line with the notion of Nachträglichkeit, that which had been repressed resurfaced at an appropriate moment – at a time when revision and reconstitution of the experience could be safely and expediently revived as part of a process of healing in order to strengthen Bourgeois’ sense of self in the present. In the artist’s own words, The Destruction of the Father ‘deals with fear – ordinary, garden-variety fear, the actual physical fear that I still feel today. What interests me is the conquering of the fear; the hiding, the running away from it, facing it, being ashamed of it, and finally, being afraid of being afraid.’24 It is also worth noting in this context that The Destruction of the Father was worked on during the year following the death of Bourgeois’ husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater – undoubtedly a period of intense psychological adjustment and reassessment. In the late 1970s, Bourgeois was also beginning to analyse earlier works in terms of her life history. This is evidenced in an interview with Susi Bloch in 1979 in which she speaks of abstracted figure sculptures, such as The Blind Leading the Blind (1947–1949) and One and Others (1955), in terms of ‘a reconstruction of the past’.25 However, the most explicit announcement of her developing preoccupation with the past is witnessed in ‘Child Abuse’, an insert in Artforum in 1982 at the time of her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.26 It is here that Bourgeois claims that ‘everything I do was inspired by my early life’ and speaks openly of the effect that she felt her governess, Sadie, had had on her family relationships (that Sadie became her father’s mistress, that her mother could tolerate the situation and that Bourgeois felt betrayed both by her father and by Sadie). However, this is more than an outing of family intrigue in that Bourgeois gives further insight into the way that she sees memory in relation to her art: ‘It is the attitude of the poet who never finds the lost heaven and it is really the situation of artists who work for a reason that nobody can quite grasp.’ Art is the medium through which she comes to terms with and transcends a painful and imperfect past, and memory is the thematic basis of her sculptures and installations: They are my documents. I keep watch over them… To reminisce and woolgather is negative. You have to differentiate between memories. Are you going to them or are they coming to you. If you are going to them, you are wasting time. Nostalgia is not productive. If they come to you, they are seed for sculpture.27 

Cell (Eyes and Mirrors)

From the mid-1970s onwards, then, Bourgeois’ work is continually built upon personal experience, whether in a more abstracted form such as in Twosome (1991), a huge phallic mechanical installation piece which stands for the relations of the family and house as well as bodily functions such as birth, sex and excretion, or in the Cells installations that incorporate far more specific iconography from her past.28 The Cells occupy the bulk of Bourgeois’ production during the 1990s and, after The Destruction of the Father, may be seen as her most specifically autobiographical works. Assuming the form of rooms that the viewer looks into rather than enters, the Cells invoke a memory technique first recorded by ancient scholars in which memories are linked to imaginary objects and images and arranged in the rooms of an imaginary building, ordered visually for the easy retrieval of information or experience.29 The only thing is that, for Bourgeois, the exercise is not to systematise or to objectify memory, as is the case with the ancient art of memory, but to find a physical expression not only for that which has occurred but also for the complex of emotions that accompanied the experience. Objects and spaces are not organised programmatically in a way that resembles the conscious mind. Instead, Bourgeois compresses the space and objects of her cells so that the effect is not that of a room that can be easily ‘read’ or inhabited. A suggestive play of meaning is created through juxtapositions of objects and accessories that resemble the comparatively unregulated realm of the unconscious mind rather than the well-ordered house. Sometimes these spaces are constructed with salvaged wooden doors and panels, as in Cell 1 (1991), and sometimes they are sealed off with industrial wire mesh, as in Cell (Eyes and Mirrors), 1989–1993 (fig. 1). While the memories are domestic in origin, the ‘rooms’ show little sign of homeliness or housekeeping (indeed, some are evocative of workshops rather than domestic living spaces or combinations of the two). Instead they are made of found materials and evoke gaol-like enclosures that, for Bourgeois, ‘give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering’.30 Furnishings and accessories gathered within the cells are orchestrated to evoke the past and the pain that is embedded in it, ranging from found or period objects that refer to Bourgeois’ childhood in her mother’s tapestry workshop, such as the industrial band saw in Cell (Arc of Hysteria), 1992, or the pivoting mirrors in the aforementioned Cell (Eyes and Mirrors) or the spindles and skeins of thread in Red Room (Child), 1994, to actual objects from Bourgeois’ own life, such as the clothes in Cell (Clothes), 1996, or the perfume bottles in Cell 2 (1991). Alongside the management of the present through the past and vice versa that is central to Nachträglichkeit, the decontextualisation and recontextualisation of materials and objects in these works clearly harks back to Dada and Surrealist strategies whereby additional and unplanned associations are generated by new juxtapositions. In this, the objects and the spaces Bourgeois creates for them are more than illustrations of a life history and more than a making public of the private; they also allow for broader subliminal responses. As Robert Storr has put it, [T]he content of her art is not primarily autobiographical but archetypal, an astonishingly rich, nuanced, sometimes alarming, sometimes funny and almost always startling fusion of classical personifications of human passions and terrors, Symbolist variations on them, Freudian reinterpretations of both, and direct or indirect transcription of her own unblinking glimpses into the murkiest waters of the psyche.31

While rendering Bourgeois’ private life public, the personal history in the Cells is theatrically and obliquely staged through a mixture of props in a way that produces an ambiguous and complex edginess – an uncanniness, ‘a sense of unfamiliarity that appears at the heart of the familiar’, which I would argue obtains even without knowledge of Bourgeois’ life history.32 This more suggestive approach is not the case with the work of the next artist who I want to discuss, Tracey Emin (born 1963), whose autobiographically based works tend to cut to the quick and are largely characterised by their directness. This is not to say that Emin’s work lacks complexity, nor that is without ambiguities; far from it, as the several authors contributing to The Art of Tracey Emin (2001) have amply demonstrated.33 It is to say, rather, that the forms that Emin employs are seemingly more explicit and that the references to life events are more blatantly put. Bourgeois may have found an iconography that dealt with her own past, but, as Storr has suggested, she employed it in a way that enabled it to connect with the sort of sublimated or generic pain and suffering that lies buried deep in the human psyche. Emin, on the other hand, constantly foregrounds specific events, experiences or emotions from her past, which she frames within familiar forms and materials of mass or popular culture. In doing this, she makes both her sufferings and pleasures directly accessible, although not so much calling upon us to share them as to witness them, so that, in contrast to the shared psychical engagement demanded by Bourgeois’ installations, the control and ownership of the memories and feelings that Emin makes public lies clearly with the artist, not the viewer. This brings me to the much-repeated notion that Emin’s art is essentially confessional, which I would suggest, at most, is only partly true. The gestures Emin makes are declarative displays of a private life in which the soul is bared. As noted at the start of this chapter, autobiography is historically rooted in confession, and confession, stemming from earlier religious and more recent psychoanalytic practices, now survives widely in the broadcasts of mass media, which frequently act as moral purveyors of the behaviour of their subject – the chat show again furnishing a familiar example.34 Emin’s art, however, does not sit comfortably in a shared moral framework, as is traditionally the case with confessional practices. This is as evident in Emin’s written work, in which her accounts of psychological and sexual abuse and rape are remarkably lacking in recrimination (although the men involved are shown to be ultimately weak and ignoble).35 Similarly, episodes from her life in which her own behaviour might bring strong moral censure are guiltlessly and guilelessly told, causing Jeannette Winterson to suggest that some of the rather crass and insensitive revelations in Strangeland (2005) ‘should have been edited out by someone that loves her’.36 Rather than meeting a need to confess, the self-absorption of Emin’s work can be seen as a means by which she copes post-traumatically with the cruelties and abuses of her life – something that is shared with Kahlo and Bourgeois. As will be seen, Emin has developed a wide range of approaches and strategies through which she stages past events and experiences. At times,  these traumas are dealt with almost in terms of archival documentation, as in her appliquéd tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963–1995 (1995). This provocatively titled piece was included in the well-publicised Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy (1997) that brought the generation of artists known as YBAS (Young British Artists) firmly into the Establishment. While in common parlance ‘to sleep with someone’ is a euphemism for having sex with them, Emin is literal in the title of this work and commemorates family members and platonic friends as well as sexual partners and aborted foetuses. In effect, Emin provides reminders of the many intimacies that her bed has been host to but does not attempt to differentiate between them nor to disclose the relationships involved, so that if we want to know more about who is named we have to go to whatever is available in other sources. Nevertheless, the sewn-in names represent memories, which the viewer reads under quite intimate conditions – in order to see the names in full, he/she has to get inside and lie on his/her back (almost as if lying in bed). Details of the memories represented are not up for sharing in the viewing of this piece and nothing is actually confessed. Alongside the naming of her dormitory companions, it is the idea of the intimacies and associations of the bed that Emin opens up for scrutiny. And, as Renée Vara has suggested, the tent adds substantially to the meaning of the work, its iconography (for Emin in particular) going back to the Tibetan tent as a site of that which is ritualistic and contemplative. Significantly, given such nomadic origins, Emin’s tent was to ‘roam different galleries’ and provide more widely placed opportunities for contemplation, in this case the contemplation not only of who has been slept with but what this might mean in terms of human intimacies.37 At other times Emin’s works make more explicit references to her past, as in the appliquéd wall hanging Mad Tracey from Margate, Everyone’s Been There (1997). In this work, a mixture of aphorisms vie with one another in the manner of a graffitied wall, some of which clearly echo the sort of humiliations that Emin experienced while growing up in Margate. In other pieces, such as the video Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), Emin’s humiliating experience is put into narrative form. Here, Emin relates her teenage truanting and accompanying sexual encounters against compilation footage of Margate, the mise en scène of her adolescence. However, although it is more specific in its recollections, Why I Never Became a Dancer is, again, non-confessional. It provides key autobiographical details but the events are presented in a way that, firstly, gives a record of her experiences and, secondly, that squares the record in terms of the humiliations she endured. She does this towards the end by dedicating the video to the men who managed to publicly shame her out of a dance competition. The final sequence shows Emin, having long escaped from Margate, dancing with considerable style in a venue in central London, at the end of which she names the individuals who taunted her. This is memory as redress and retribution, and, as an example of Nachträglichkeit, it shows Emin now in control of a past that once threatened to destroy her emotionally. Of course, Emin’s work runs a far wider gamut than these few examples demonstrate, and the stuff of which memory is made varies from piece to piece. Many works mix pain and pleasure, as in most of the wall hangings, and much of the verbal content she employs across a range of media is couched in double entendre. Countering these conflations and ambiguities, Emin’s choice of medium is an important factor in the way that the works are read. Appliqué has both the familiarity and reassurance of its folk or craft origins and, from this vantage point, the viewer can feel at home or comfortable with the medium (it is also one of the forms which underwent rehabilitation in second wave feminist art in the 1970s).38 Another favoured medium, neon, as I have discussed elsewhere, brings associations of Emin’s home town and is a familiar part of most urban landscapes in the West.39 The video forms that Emin appropriates, as Lorna Healy has noted, are also familiar from popular culture, from the camera shake of the home video to the body language and camera angles of the pop music video, and, indeed, to the incorporation of pop music into some video works.40 So, while the subject matter is not always fulsome, Emin by no means makes the terms of engagement with her works difficult or obscure. Moreover, in selecting forms from popular culture in this way, Emin uses a method of representation that parallels the way that memories themselves are frequently mediated and reshaped using images and forms that are familiar and readily available in the wider culture. And so it is with My Bed (fig. 2), the focal point of Emin’s 1998 entry for the Turner Prize, an unmade bed with soiled sheets, knickers, condoms, etc. For all the sordid aspects of the piece, My Bed again portrays Emin’s life in forms that are actual and familiar and, in this case, quite domestic. Writing on the autobiographical status of My Bed, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson see it as a radical artwork that pushes at the boundaries between life and art – not through unconventionality of form or the method of representation (the bed is, after all, in the Dada tradition of the ready-made), nor even that of the life represented, but through the ‘convergence of anti-art and extreme artistic self-reference’.41 As the two authors note, the implicit contract of trust between author (artist) and reader (viewer) that has been held as the crux of the literary genre of autobiography by seminal theorist Philippe Lejeune does not apply.42 Just as Emin does not show any consistent obligation towards confessional practices, neither does she offer to negotiate any kind of pact with her viewers concerning what she represents and how she represents it.43 For Smith and Watson, My Bed is a happy blend of avant-garde practices and personal content that crosses established paradigms of autobiographical practice. On a more general level, Smith and Watson take advantage of the motif of the unmade bed as something that can stand for the state of autobiography as a genre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Autobiography imagined as an unmade bed is ‘inescapably a rumpled one – much slept in; still warm, if soiled; and haunted by conspicuously absent bodies’. Smith and Watson use My Bed as a vehicle to raise questions not only concerning the boundaries between art and life but also concerning the boundaries of autobiography, claiming that Emin takes autobiography to ‘the outer limits of the practice of memoir’ although, for me, as much could be claimed with regard to Kahlo and Bourgeois’ autobiographical works. In short, artists such as these have brought autobiography to a point at which its parameters and practices have expanded and diversified in a way that provides a radical alternative to the narrative conventions that predominate in its literary forms. In spite of this diversification of practice, however, there is an inescapable issue that applies to all manifestations of autobiography: the relationship of the private to the public, which brings with it the associated issue of the relationship of the personal to the political. As Leigh Gilmore has noted in her book The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (2001), selfrepresentation is constantly burdened by ‘its public charge to disclose a private truth’.44 This again harks back to Lejeune’s notion of a ‘pact’ or ‘contract’ between reader and author in literary autobiographies in which the expectations of both are tacitly agreed, although, as Lejeune more recently notes, the terms of the contract will vary from reader to reader.45 In other words, the bond between reader/viewer and author/artist is always positioned at this interface between the public and the private, which is variable and elastic in the forms that it can assume. As Paul John Eakin similarly observes, autobiography is not contingent upon an autonomous self but a self that is relational.46 This contingency extends to the relationality of the self to the public context in or for which the autobiography is produced and consumed. And, as Dipankar Gupta has also argued, the private and the public are all too often offered up in a simplistic binary opposition which ignores the historical specificity and the individual complexity of each of these categories – something which is characteristic of the range of practices already discussed in relation to Kahlo, Bourgeois and Emin.47 There is no doubt that the intrusions of the mass media into personal lives and the gratuitous use of electronic technologies of surveillance have turned the relationship of the private to the public into a highly contentious and sensitive issue in contemporary life. Nonetheless, because it is voluntarily given, autobiography is able to escape any accusation of intrusion into the private and carries the issue rather differently, especially when the limits and forms of autobiography are stretched or mutated in the various ways already described in the work of Kahlo, Bourgeois and Emin. However, despite their individually differing radicalisations of the genre, all three artists have a shared emphasis in the sort of experiences they reveal in public – the working through and coming to terms with personal trauma. This, in turn, can be seen as part of a more general cultural preoccupation with pain and damage, which Gilmore perceives almost as a characteristic of the zeitgeist (it is worth remembering here that the works of both Bourgeois and Kahlo have only recently achieved recognition and that it is largely for this content in their work). Gilmore further argues that it is trauma that is at the heart of the limit testing of self-representation and that it is at the negative limits of pain that radical forms of autobiography emerge.48 In short, limit-testing

Figure 2: Tracey Emin, My Bed. Installation Turner Prize Exhibition, Tate Gallery, London, 20 October 1999–23 January 2000. Photograph by Stephen White. Courtesy: White Cube/ Jay Jopling.

autobiographical works not only juggle the relationship of the private to the public in a complex network of relational attitudes and circumstance, they do this specifically by opening their wounds to public probing. As has been seen, Kahlo, Bourgeois and Emin have all achieved this balancing act in their own ways – with Emin emerging as the most contentious of the three, due perhaps to the tabloid-friendly nature of her subject matter as well as to the exposure that her life itself has been given in the media in general. The final artist I want to include in this chapter has similarly pushed the boundaries of autobiography but taken the issue of the private and the public further by consciously foregrounding it in much of his work. This is the late Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), who was chosen posthumously to represent the United States in the 2007 Venice Biennale. Gonzalez-Torres’ work is emotionally low-key in comparison to that of Kahlo, Bourgeois and Emin, who wear their hearts openly on their sleeves. One reason may be that personal injury or trauma does not figure so conspicuously in the work of Gonzalez-Torres, which nevertheless was deeply affected and informed by his own experience of HIV and AIDS – the cause of his partner’s death in 1991 and of his own in 1996. Another reason is the rather different terms in which he figured his memories, which draw from Minimalism both in the more formal placement of the work within the gallery and in the use of serial objects as components of the works. However, while Minimalism famously struck new spectator relations in the breaking down of the conventional barriers between viewer and work (the absence of frame or plinth, for instance), Gonzalez-Torres stretched these relations even further by building particular forms of interactivity into the works. Typical of this approach are the untitled paper stacks that Gonzalez-Torres began to make in 1988, which in their allusive, mostly text-based content are as much neo-Conceptualist as they are neo-Minimalist. Many of these serve as a form of remembrance, at times autobiographical, as in ‘Untitled’ (Loverboy) (1990) or ‘Untitled’ (Ross in LA) (1991), and at times more broadly political, as in ‘Untitled’ (Memorial Day Weekend) (1989), a now commercialised holiday in the United States, or ‘Untitled’ (Monument) (1989), which carries the text ‘Ten men came only three returned’.49 However, while these pristinely cut floor pieces mimic abstract Minimalist works, their formal authority and integrity is compromised, as viewers are invited to take pieces of paper from the stacks, which are then constantly under replenishment. Not only does this continue the undermining of the autonomy of the work that was central to Minimalism, but it enables ‘memory-work’ to operate at the level of physical interaction with the work. Yet, while the paper stacks represent new ways of representing and sharing memory, even they are not as radical or extraordinary as the pieces that are made up of stacks or piles of sweets or candies. Again, there is a clear obligation to Minimalism in the way that these pieces occupy floor space, usually in a corner of the room, as with ‘Untitled’ (Fortune Cookie Corner) (1990), or sometimes, as with ‘Untitled’ LA (1991), arranged to occupy the gallery floor.50 And, again, many of these works make autobiographical reference. What is unique to them, however, is the proposition that the memory be eaten – physically ingested rather than kept as a souvenir or trophy (which is inevitably the fate of many of the giveaway items). This literal incorporation through the mouth brings a psychosomatic dimension to the work in which the body not only becomes a receptacle for memory but also the means of forming a communal bond between those who share the act of eating. Not only are the private lives symbolised in the works made public but the public is asked to absorb them into their own bodies and, in doing so, establish a symbolic bond with the person or persons represented, and perhaps with one another in the social context of the exhibition. In this, the social interaction required by the candy-based works may be likened to the many ritual practices of shared eating that act metaphorically for incorporation into the social body, from family meals to ceremonial feasts.51 In making his work participatory, Gonzalez-Torres has reconfigured the relationship of the private to the public. As already noted, this is a relationship that is of constant issue in Gonzalez-Torres’ work, and perhaps nowhere more obviously than in billboard projects that are public by virtue of the spaces that they occupy. While a number of these works again addressed broader political concerns that have impinged on Gonzalez-Torres’ life, such as gay history, AIDS and US military imperialism, there is one that stands out in particular for the fusion of the personal and the political, the private and the public. This is the billboard depicting an unmade double bed, produced in 1992, the year following the death of Gonzalez-Torres’ partner, Ross, from AIDS. The poster shows a recently vacated bed with imprints left on the pillows. However, while depicting such intimate subject matter, the manner of representation is highly aestheticised, working through low-key harmonies of colour and tone and a flattened composition. To me, this reduction in or absence of colour and form amounts to a sublimation of grief that chimes with Gonzalez-Torres’ acknowledged need to distance himself from his pain by placing this image in a public arena. And, as I have noted elsewhere, it is an image that in its aesthetic of absence brings to mind notions of the sublime invoked by Jean-François Lyotard in relation to modernist monochromatic painting.52 Following Immanuel Kant’s notion that the sublime exists in being able to comprehend incomprehensibility itself, Lyotard claims that what is at stake in modernist abstract painting is the representation of ‘something which can be conceived which can neither be seen, nor made visible’. The answer to this dilemma of representation, according to Lyotard, lies in Kant’s notion of ‘formlessness, the absence of form, as a possible index to the unpresentable’.53 Gonzalez-Torres’ bed seems to both embody and resolve Lyotard’s dilemma of unrepresentability, not only because of the absence of narrative specificity and the relative formlessness of the image but also because it provides an index to the unpresentable – to death itself, to that which is overwhelming and ultimately unknowable. Nancy Spector also notes the lack of narrative detail in the image, which, she suggests, renders it ambiguous and more open to the subjectivities of the viewer.54 But this lack of narrative specificity also allows for a connection to be made with an event in recent legal history which was concerned with the regulation of homosexual practices in the privacy of the home. The case of Bowers v. Hardwick had been brought before the Supreme Court in 1986, which ruled against sexual privacy for gay men and lesbians in their own homes, declaring them liable for prosecution for acts such as sodomy if against the law in the state in which they lived.55 In effect, the bed, which is normally the most private of spaces, was subjected to public control; as Gonzalez-Torres puts it, ‘It was ruled that the bed is the site where we are not only born, where we die, where we make love, but it is also a place where the state has a pressing interest, a public interest.’56 The ‘bed billboard’ was, therefore, both a subtle and complex piece of autobiography that conflated a personal tragedy with a wider political issue, and in bringing them together in the public realm served both to commemorate a personal tragedy and extend the debate over sexual privacy. Even more than Emin’s bed with all its specificities, the blending of the private and public in this work provides a clear example of the breakdown of the conventions of autobiography in the late twentieth century. Even when his works are exclusively autobiographical, Gonzalez-Torres is enigmatic and allusive. Typical of the sort of oblique autobiographical references formed in his work is ‘Untitled’ (Loverboys) (1991), a piece made up of 355 pounds of white and blue cellophane-wrapped sweets that in some versions is sited in the corner of the gallery and at other times laid out more centrally on the floor. The weight is specific, representing the combined weight of GonzalezTorres and Ross, and the combining of the weights in a single pile of sweets speaks to the intertwining of two lives – in Spector’s words, ‘a double portrait of two men in love’.57 For Gonzalez Torres, it was also another way of letting go, of dispersing the pain of witnessing the drawn-out loss of his partner.58 Another strategy was to represent the relationship by means of pairings or intertwinings that represented the notion of ideal lovers. In ‘Untitled’ (Perfect Lovers) (1991) (fig. 3), two identical clocks are placed side by side, their hands moving in synchronicity. While anchoring it in his own relationship, Gonzalez-Torres universalises the ideal of two perfect lovers, and deliberately so, in order to eschew and even skew homophobic reactions; in his own words, ‘Two clocks side by side are much more threatening to the powers that be than an image of two guys sucking each others dicks, because they cannot use me as a rallying point in their battle to erase meaning.’59 A similar pairing is the set of two identical mirrors, ‘Untitled’ (March 5th) # 1 (1991), one of several works that feature the date of Ross’ birthday as a subtitle. The second of them, ‘Untitled’ (March 5th) #2 (1991), was the first of his light bulb pieces in which the cords of two light bulbs run up from sockets near the floor to be knotted together at a height of around 10 feet, leaving a further 14 inches of cord to hang down with cords intertwining. As Andrea Rosen notes, the piece is particularly poignant, underpinned by the knowledge that one bulb can burn out before the other.60 Other light bulb pieces became more elaborate and assumed varied configurations on floor or walls or strung as a curtain in the middle of a gallery, but, as Rosen also notes the light bulb pieces as a group of works were meant to refer to the twenty-four most important events and concepts that Gonzalez-Torres would like to memorialise. And, again, they are both tied to particular experiences and a testimony of the artist’s need to maintain a dialogue between the personal and the social.

Figure 3: Felix Gonzalez Torres. ‘Untitled’ (Perfect Lovers) 1991. New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Clocks, paint on wall, overall 14 x 28 x 23/4 inches (35.6 x 71.2 x 7 cm). Gift of the Dannheisser Foundation. Acc. no.: 177.1996. a–b. © 2007. Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala Florence. Copyright © Felix Gonzalez Torres Foundation, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

In Gonzalez-Torres’ own words, ‘I’m a person who lives in this society and I’m a product of this society and this culture. I’m not only a reflection, I’m that culture itself…’61 While this obviously returns to the notion of incorporation into the social body that is implicit in the candy works, it further suggests that Gonzalez-Torres wanted his memories to be as collective as they are personal. The embeddedness of autobiographical practices in a larger cultural context found in Kahlo’s work is again made obvious in Gonzalez-Torres’ statement. But his work operates allusively and subliminally, more akin in this respect to that of Bourgeois. Gonzalez-Torres addresses the political and social limitations of his life through forms and strategies of representation that test the limits of autobiographical practices, and, in introducing participatory strategies, he is to my mind the most innovatory of all the artists in this chapter in developing ways to represent and share personal memories. In my next chapter I continue to examine the work of artists who represent highly specific or personal memories but, while autobiographical content continues to figure, particularly in the work of Miyako Ishiuchi and Nan Goldin, the emphasis will also be on the way that the choice of an indexical medium affects the status and impact of the memory represented.
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