Article

Thesis Eleven
2020, Vol. 156(1) 10–26
Liquid culture, the art of life ª The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513619898284

Emin: A feminist art journals.sagepub.com/home/the

historian/cultural analyst’s
perspective on Bauman’s
missing cultural hermeneutics
Griselda Pollock
University of Leeds, UK

Abstract
In this article I chart an indirect if not oblique path through my own theoretical formation
as a social and feminist art historian, informed by Marxist cultural studies but deeply
engaged with issues of difference and gender, to the response Zygmunt Bauman made to
a book I gave him that I had reason to believe would resonate with his work. It did not.
Indeed, my kind of theoretically informed visual and cultural analysis was indecipherable
despite the influence of his writing after 1989 on my work. Gender was not a topic for
Bauman. Feminist theory remained an impenetrable territory. Art (as opposed to cul-
ture) was not to be theorized. Yet, in his later work on liquid modernity, Bauman
incorporated the idea that we are all now artists of life. Here I recognized an oblique and
unjustified if not misdirected dismissal of the working-class British artist Tracey Emin.
My article concludes with my reading of her video work, Why I Never Became a Dancer,
which poignantly and defiantly exposes the social violence and violations of class, race
and gender in British society which she experienced. I seek to demonstrate how Bau-
man’s acute, but often academically devalued, attentiveness to the vernacular and quo-
tidian forms of cultural experience and its ability to register and reveal changing social
forms and forces should have enabled him to see Emin’s work as equally acute and
culturally significant.

Corresponding author:
Griselda Pollock, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, Woodhouse
Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Email: [email protected]
Pollock 11

Keywords
Bauman and feminist theory, gender, social histories of art, class, contemporary art,
Tracey Emin

In 1994, I handed Zygmunt a small book I had written titled Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–
93: Gender and the Colour of Art History (Pollock, 1993). I thought it might interest him,
given recent conversations and his evident interest in the crossovers between, art, cultural
studies and cultural sociology. It was based on a commissioned lecture to commemorate
a European Jewish exile whose work had reshaped British culture: Walter Neurath
(1903–67). In 1949, with Eva Urvasi Feuchtwang (1908–99) – they married in 1953 –
Neurath had founded one of the leading art historical publishing houses, Thames &
Hudson, and had thereby made art history possible and accessible in the UK (which was
still so backward with regard to art history), notably with the World of Art series.
I had opened the lecture-now-book with an image from the film Lust for Life, directed
by Vincente Minnelli in 1955 and released in 1956. I chose an imagined scene set in the
brothel in Arles in which the hyper-masculinity and sexual virility of Paul Gauguin
(Anthony Quinn) was negatively contrasted with the neurotic, self-destructive, effemi-
nized figure of Vincent van Gogh (Kirk Douglas). Many of Minnelli’s key films
explored the nature of masculine creativity and its deformations, for instance in The Bad
and the Beautiful (1952) and Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). A modernist in his
artistic tastes, Minnelli represented Van Gogh as a typically tortured but old-fashioned
artist who failed to grasp the more radical art and theory represented by Gauguin
(Pollock, 1993a). In this scene the aesthetic difference between the two artists was
reconfigured through the trope of sexual potency. It served also to elaborate visually an
argument I have made about the repeated tropes in modernist art by which white mas-
culinity acted out competition between avant-garde men for artistic leadership over the
representation of the bodies of abjected, often prostitutionalized, and frequently black or
brown female bodies (Pollock, 1988, 1994, 1996). As a feminist intervening in both the
art historical and cinematic fantasy of the white artist-man in colonial modernity, I had to
ask the following questions: How does a white European woman position herself,
therefore, in relation to this art history made ‘visible’ in Minnelli’s figuration? Am I
obliged to adopt the forms of professional transvestism normally required of women
scholars, and either masochistically identify with the image of my own objectification as
a woman subject, mediated through the demonizing or envious appropriations of
non-European cultures embodied in black women, or displace my attention onto only
formal concerns in the paintings, which provide what Freud defined as a bribe of a purely
formal – that is aesthetic – yield of pleasure as compensation (Freud, 1990 [1908]: 141)?
Can I call upon the discourse and politics of international, queer, postcolonial feminism
to interrupt these impossible positions, to construct a critical and historical relation to the
racist, sexist stories of modern Western art and culture and their multiple sites of dis-
seminations and consumption (Spivak, 1987 [1981]), 1985)?
One of my specific topics for this analysis in this book was one painting by
French-Peruvian artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) titled Manao Tupapau: Spirit of the
12 Thesis Eleven 156(1)

Dead Watching (oil on canvas, 116.05 cm  134.62 cm, Buffalo: Albright Knox Art
Gallery). It was painted in 1892 while he was living in French colonial Tahiti but
exhibited in Paris in1893, hence in the colonial empire’s capital, by the returning
tourist artist. It was a portrait of a Tahitian woman, Teha’amana, whom, when she
was 13-years-old, Gauguin had taken formally as a wife – as she and her family
understood the legal and religions ceremony by which the syphilitic Frenchman had
acquired a sexual and domestic servant for his sojourn in the French colony. At 13,
she was close in age to his 16-year-old daughter Aline, to whom he frankly described
the painting and its sitter in his Cahier pour Aline (Gauguin, 1981 [1893]; on this
manuscript see also Gamboni, 2003).
In the light of a court case in Austria in 2011, in which an Austrian woman member of
the far-right Freedom for Austria party had been found guilty and fined for raising the issue
of the Prophet’s marriage to a girl under the age of 13 (she then lost her appeal for freedom
of speech at the International Court of Human Rights in 2018),1 these kinds of questions
were already troubling me in dealing with this painting. Since my analysis, other art
historians have pursued a similarly critical approach to the sexual and racial politics of this
painting and Gauguin’s work in general (Eisenman, 1997; Mathews, 2001). It did so more
recently whilst attending an Opera North performance of Puccini’s opera Madama But-
terfly (1904) once again realizing the significance of the fact that the young Japanese
‘bride’ Choi Choi San purchased by American naval Lieutenant Pinkerton is only 15 at the
time of the arranged ‘marriage’. Puccini’s opera was partly based on a novel, Madame
Chrysanthème (1887), by French author Pierre Loti (1850–1923), whose travels in Japan
had inspired Gauguin to go to Oceania and that also influenced Van Gogh’s Japonisme and
representation of young Arlesian girls in an imagined Japanese mode (see La Mousme
(1988), Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art). He wrote: ‘A mousmé is a Japanese girl
– Provençal in this case – twelve to fourteen years old’ (Van Gogh, 29 July 1888; Van
Gogh, 2009: Vol. 4: 199).
In my theoretical work and writing, the early 1990s were a period of experi-
mentation with transgression against the normal protocols of academic and art his-
torical writing, in part inspired by feminist resistance to the structural abuses of
women across class, race and sexuality so folded into images by canonical artists we
are taught to admire. I was also challenging the orthodoxies and the related gender
and race indifference of the Marxist social histories of art, under whose influence I
had already declared a stand-off with official art history of both the academy and the
museum by concurrent engagement with Cultural Studies, the foundation of whose
Centre in 1985 at Leeds depended on Zygmunt Bauman’s advocacy against a uni-
versity establishment who could not understand the concept of culture as an object of
study: was it not already on campus via departments of literature, music and art and
art history? Emergent Cultural Studies drew on Raymond Williams’ early formulation
that ‘culture is ordinary’:

Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own
purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts
and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions,
and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience,
Pollock 13

contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it
is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow
learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication
are possible. Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the
making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. A culture has two aspects: the
known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and
meanings, which are offered and tested. (Williams, 1989 [1958]: 4)

Williams’ argument that culture is ordinary borrows the anthropological sense of

ways of making meaning, thus debunking the Western elevation of its culture as High
Culture, Bildung: an elevation that is a product of Modernity and the Enlightenment.
Sociology, too, was born out of this shift to the study of the human social processes,
especially qualitative sociological investigation. What distinguishes Cultural Studies
from sociology of culture is spelt out by Williams:

These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through
them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the
most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. . . . We use the word
culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life – the common meanings; to mean
the arts and learning – the special processes of discovery and creative effort. (Williams,
1989 [1958]: 4; emphasis added)

Recognition of the complex and asymmetrical relations between culture as ways of

life and the special processes of creative arts and learning sum up the challenges of
socializing critical histories of art when canonical art history had isolated the creative
arts from ways of life, let alone the materialist processes of production in which such
ways of living were formed and embedded even as they were given lived, social and
imaginative forms. Marxist histories of art have conceived life narrowly in terms of
determination by the social relations of production, also embraced by Williams in his
later work, Marxism and Literature (1977). Like Zygmunt Bauman, Williams, however,
modified a classic Marxist sense of the derivation of life and culture from a determining
economic base by drawing deeply on the writings of Antonio Gramsci (Williams, 1977;
Gramsci, 1971; Tester, 2002) to mediate the hyper-structuralist moment in Western
Marxism in the 1960s.
This term, first coined by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1973 [1953]: 581), refers to an
attempt, if you remember, to reconfigure the legacies of Marx in the light of the horrors
of Stalinist appropriation and distortion (Jacoby, 1991). Western Marxism had to think
with Marx while enabling a socialist form of participatory democracy. Here, the cultural
field had come into view with its own efficacy, modifying any notion of a direct ideo-
logical reflex between base and superstructure. In his chapter ‘Base and Superstructure
in Marxist Theory’ in Problems in Materialism, Williams (1980) elaborated a specifi-
cally materialist cultural theory in a revision of the classic base and superstructure model
to which conventional Marxism remained attached. This enabled Williams to pose the
question that resonated for me:
14 Thesis Eleven 156(1)

What are the implications of this general analysis for the analysis of particular
works of art?
Dismissing most art and literary analysis as basically a theory of consumption, Williams
argued that such approaches not only ignored ‘the practices of production’ that were then
overlooked, but real social conditions of production were believed to be secondary.
Williams redefines art as an activity and a practice and, ‘in its accessible forms, although
it may in some arts have the character of a singular object, it is still only accessible
through active perception’ – we have to ‘to discover the nature of practice and its
conditions’. This is not the same as the Marxist sociological emphasis on the components
of economic, social and cultural. ‘I am saying that we should not look for the components
of the practice but for the conditions of the practice’ (Williams, 1980: 48). How do
particular works of art function if they are not just symptomatic inscriptions, yet are
shaped by the conditions of production?

As we consider the nature of particular practice and the nature of the relation between an
individual project and a collective mode we find that we are analysing, as two forms of the
same process, both its active composition and its conditions of composition, and in either
direction this is a complex of extended active relationship. This means, of course, that we
have no built-in procedure of the kind which is indicated by the fixed character of an object.
We have the principles of the relations of practices within a discoverably intentional
organisation and we have the available hypotheses of dominant, residual and emergent
[forces in culture at any one time]. (Williams, 1980: 48–9; emphasis added)

There is no cultural unity of an epoch.

What we are actively seeking is the true practice which has been alienated to an object, and
the true conditions of practice – whether as literary conventions or social relationships –
which have been alienated to components or to the background. (Williams, 1980: 49)

Now I have quoted from Williams as just one example of a certain kind of cultural
theory emerging from within the arts, attending, however, to the relations with and in the
socio-cultural frame which was important for those of us in cultural analysis, trying to
bridge art history and cultural studies while exploring this larger concept of the social
and the cultural for which Williams then provided remarkable resources. Williams gave
us the means to understand practice and its social conditions as well as what the practice
made us understand about processes of those conditions by demanding analysis of the
modes of transformation and mediation. This would align with T.J. Clark’s insistence on
the work a work of art does with the ideological materials it inevitably deploys and
reconfigures, and the working is what analysis must read: ‘[Art] works that material; it
gives it a new form, and at certain moments that new form is in itself a subversion of
ideology’ (Clark, 1973: 13; emphasis added). This raises the question of form, the
conventional modernist art historian’s concern, and formulation, my specific concern
drawing from an earlier cultural analysis of the image as socio-cultural index developed
by Aby Warburg (Pollock, 2013).
Pollock 15

In the book that I gave to Zygmunt Bauman I was continuing my long-term explo-
ration of the phenomenon that is the name ‘Van Gogh’. My project has been to elaborate
a complex Marxist and feminist understanding of the dynamics of his failed modernist
project in the late 19th century in terms of the encounter with, and his response to, the
disruptions and anxieties created by industrial capitalism in both urban and agricultural
society. Far from exemplifying the progressivist thesis articulated by modernist art
history’s notion of the avant-garde, Van Gogh and his peers represent a deeply con-
servative reaction to, not a progressive socialist or anarchist recoil from, capitalist
modernity (as in the case of Camille Pissarro), of the kind that, however, becomes the
ground bed for nationalism and fascism and was complicit with colonialism (Pollock,
1998).
As a Marxist social historian, T. J. Clark had taken on the analysis of this moment of
art’s relation to the consolidation of industrial and metropolitan capitalism in the 19th
century and given it a severe shaking by indicating that artists of the modernist tendency
were seeking, but ultimately failing, to penetrate the illusory veil of appearances – the
fetishism of the commodity – with which capitalism warps our understanding of its own
real relations and processes. Aligned politically in the 1960s with the Situationist
International, Clark retrospectively traced the genealogy of ‘the society of the spectacle’
(Debord, 1970 [1967]) to Paris in the 1860–90s to his own post-war present, registering
modernist attempts to inscribe aspects of lived modernity into art while failing to find the
means to signify its capitalist character, thus becoming complicit with its spectacular-
ization and their own aestheticization.
My intervention involved looking at the 1880s generation of Gauguin and Van Gogh
that followed Clark’s topic – namely Edouard Manet and the Impressionists in the 1870s.
I identified a deeply conservative reaction against capitalism that was inscribed by those
artists such as Gauguin and Van Gogh whom art historians treat as the heroic con-
tinuation of a visually inventive avant-garde initiated by Manet. Clark argued that what
has been hailed as modern art can be shown to have failed its engagement with capitalist
modernity and, in my case-study, we see how Gauguin the artist withdrew to what he
imagined were pre-capitalist societies in Brittany and then a colonized Tahiti. Van
Gogh’s nostalgia extended to his art historicist and imaginative entry into the world of
mercantilist capitalism of the 17th century in Holland by identifying with the art of that
century (Pollock, 1998).
This is getting too art historical. So why have I had to tell you all this? Zygmunt’s
response to my book was: ‘I didn’t understand a word of it.’ Now, I am prepared to admit
to a certain complexity in my sentence structure which good editors and long-suffering
collaborators have the wit to shorten and simplify. I do think that vocabularies of dif-
ferent disciplines can become specialized and the arguments over-intimate with internal
debates. Cultural Studies was, however, a critical interdisciplinary project. I do not think
his response was just that.
His word blindness before my text went much deeper into one of the questions for this
issue. We are exploring interdisciplinary legacies of the thought, work and writings of
Zygmunt Bauman as one of the major cultural sociologists of the late 20th and early 21st
century, and I seek to do so for the arts and humanities as well as for the larger socio-
logical project of cultural hermeneutics.2 As I have described in my own academic
16 Thesis Eleven 156(1)

biography, I overlapped with Zygmunt Bauman and with Janet Wolff in Sociology and
art historian T. J. Clark – he was the Professor of Fine Art between 1975 and 1979, with
whom I came to Leeds to work in 1977 – in the later 1970s as we were all trying to
produce social and cultural analyses of all forms of culture including the arts and
humanities, drawing on what might be called the structural theories of social formations
but not necessarily holding systematically to sociological models (Wolff, 1993). There
should have been common ground.
In 1989, Zygmunt Bauman made academic history with his book Modernity and the
Holocaust (Bauman, 1989). What makes it important in this context is that he focused on
a historical event but created for it a sociological analysis, thereby demanding sociol-
ogy’s recognition that history changes its, sociology’s, own terms of practice and fields.
In passing Bauman’s linking of his long-view of the rationality of modernity and
racialized industrial genocide revealed another dimension in the critical
re-conceptualization of the modernity thesis and the undermining of its progressivist
fantasy with which we, in social, feminist and postcolonial histories of art and cultural
studies, were deeply engaged. The related project, Modernity and Ambivalence
(Bauman, 1991), moved from an ethnic or racializing concept of the Jewish condition to
casting the Jew as the critical figure of the stranger and the outsider, the stranger being, in
this Jewish case, the other who has come to stay (Bauman, 1991: 59).3 In Bauman’s
novel analysis of the dynamics of racism and toleration, assimilation and its failure in
Modernity and Ambivalence, I immediately perceived a structure through which to
theorize the condition of the Woman, women, or if you prefer, femininity in patriarchal
society as well as more extended theories of migrancy and racism. Trapped in
ambivalence, the stranger seeks to fit in with what the presence of the resident stranger
effectively produces as the insider, whose desirable qualities inspire the incomer to
mimic the ways of the insiders, who then turn into gatekeepers because inclusion cannot
be permitted; it would efface the envied privilege that draws the stranger to attempt
assimilation Thus, as Bauman so memorably put it, ‘When, at least, it [assimilation]
seems to be within their grasp, a dagger of racism is flung from beneath the liberal cloak’
(Bauman, 1991: 71). Violence is ever present, imminent and, it seems, structural.
From this arcane domain I want to track the cultural sociologist, the sociologist of
culture, back to art and the art world, which is to be read as the site of the social and life
processes of liquid modernity as symptomatic in his book The Art of Life (Bauman,
2008). I focus on a chapter called ‘We, the Artists of Life’. Bauman there explores the
proposition that, in this current generation, life is no longer a Sartrean project, as it was
for Bauman’s generation. It is lived as a work of art. The kind of art, however, is
determined by the kind of liquid modernity that conditions life (Bauman, 2000; Davis,
2013).

The proposition life as a work of art is not a postulate or an admonition (of the ‘try to make
your life beautiful, harmonious, sensible and full of meaning – just as the painters try to
make their paintings or musicians their compositions kind’), but a statement of fact that life
cannot not be a work of art if this is a human life, the life of being endowed with will and
freedom of choice. Being an individual (that is being responsible for your choice of life,
Pollock 17

your choice among choices, and the consequences of the choices you choose) is not a matter
of choice but a decree. (Bauman, 2008: 52–3)

Liquid modernity produces a generational division in ideologies (Mannheim, 1952),

but here Bauman uses art as metaphor:

Those of the past generations would probably have been thinking of something of lasting
value, imperishable, resistant to the flow of time and caprices of fate. Following the habits
of the Old Masters they would meticulously prime their canvases before applying the first
brushstroke, and equally select the solvents to make sure the layers of paint would not
crumble as they dried and would retain their freshness of colour over many years to come if
not for eternity . . . The younger generation though would seek the skills and patterns to
imitate the practices of currently celebrated artists – the ‘happenings’ and ‘installations’.
(Bauman, 2008: 54–5)

He continues:

Both generations (past and ‘new’) imagine works of art in the likeness of the particular
world whose true nature and meaning the arts presumed and hoped to lay bare and make
available to scrutiny. That world is expected to be made more intelligible, perhaps even
more fully understood thanks to the labour of artists. (Bauman, 2008: 55)

Digressing into a fascinating study of the sociology of generations (Mannheim, 1952),

Zygmunt Bauman, admitting his generational perspective, places the old myth of the
discovery of the unknown genius and the rise to fame and fortune – see the famous book
by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz on the legends and myths of the artist (Kris and Kurz, 1979) –
in his liquified generational schema.

True, it is mostly the practitioners of fine arts (or more precisely those not too numerous
lucky people whose practices courtesy of a sudden award of celebrity status have been
classified as ‘fine arts’ with no further argument) whose fables of a miraculous rise from
rags to riches are bathed in limelight and publicly applauded and admired. For instance, the
story of a girl who used to sell for two pounds apiece glass ashtrays worth 50p, adorned with
photographs of pop idols cut out pell-mell from newspapers and glued to the bottom in a
slapdash manner . . . A girl biding her time in a drab little shop on a drab little street in East
London – until one day a limousine stopped in front of that shop carrying a great art patron
destined to transform her unmade bed into a priceless work of high art in the manner of the
fairy godmother of Cinderella-story same, fable to conjure up a carriage dripping with gold
out of the pumpkin. (Bauman, 2008: 69)

This passage is the heart of my paper. It jumped out at me, distracting me from the
flow of the argument. I recognized the artist in question: Tracey Emin. I have coded
some of its phrases, including the use of the term girl and the sharp if not sarcastic tone
linking a degraded fine arts based on luck to celebrity culture. The ‘girl’ in this story was
30 years old at the time of the episode to which Bauman is referring. She was an
enterprising artist working collaboratively with Sarah Lucas to create the basis for
continuing as an artist. I was intensely distressed by Bauman’s terms and the
18 Thesis Eleven 156(1)

implications: A girl in a drab shop in a drab street selling things she made badly,
suddenly raised to wealth and celebrity by the rich man in an executive limousine –
gender switching the fairy godmother and industrializing the magically transformed
pumpkin carriage – who then made an artwork out of her own grubby bed and sordid
bedroom. Surely this is the stuff of Tory newspaper despair at the death of real art such as
we find in the following reviews:

‘Tracey, you go on and on in an endlessly solipsistic, self-regarding homage to your-

self . . . Tracey, you are a bore . . . This tortured nonsense can’t go on. It isn’t my job to
criticise you as a person, but to comment on the art you make. But you leave no space for
that. There’s nothing to see in your work but you, your mood swings, your sentimentality
and your nostalgia. It’s all so mawkish, so cloying. You set us all up to put you down. You
put yourself down so we’ll set you up. And you pre-empt all this in your sessions with
yourself on the sofa, to make us love you all the more. I’m not playing any more. (Adrian
Searle, The Guardian, 19 October 1999)
My Bed is probably the most notorious work in the oeuvre of British artist Tracey Emin
(b.1963). First shown in 1998 at the Tokyo Sagacho Exhibition Space, and in New York’s
Lehmann Maupin gallery the subsequent year, My Bed became best known through an
exhibition at Tate Modern in 1999 as one of the shortlisted works for the Turner Prize.
Because of its appearance, the work immediately gained much media attention and caused a
lot of debate. (Georgina Adam, The Art Newspaper, 6 May 2017)

Tracey Emin was part of a loosely associated group formed in London in the 1990s
labelled in the press the YBAs: Young British Artists.4 The cultural sociology of their
formation is a topic for serious cultural analysis, by doing which we could come to
appreciate the strategic moves of a group of mostly working-class artists who have
indeed made good as a result of critical changes to the economy and structures of artistic
production in the wake of Thatcherism and what we now name the neoliberal market-
ization of culture. Theirs is a case study for Williams’ conditions of practice, for sure.
Far from being mythic in the Cinderella sense, Emin’s dedicated work and self-
fashioned outsider persona figure for us issues of class, migration, difference, and
gender that could be studied in relation to both Bauman’s formal sociology and what is
increasingly emerging from the use of his own approaches in the exploration of his
experiences of forced migration and racial exclusion as affective and biographical lin-
ings to his analytical sociological studies of ambivalence and the stranger.5 This group of
artists were the product of the progressive effects of once free access to art education.
Their work demands understanding of the emergence of conceptual art practices that
changed the materiality of art and opened it to engagement with lived experience and
social processes. Conceptual art was deeply invested with new possibilities for both
social critique and narratives of lived experiences, ways of life, we might say in Wil-
liams’ terms, even bringing into our analysis Raymond Williams’ fine reading of the
democratization of culture effected unexpectedly and dialectically by a once new
technology such as television. It was a technology invented without a presumed content
that became a cultural form in the dialectic of disseminatory technology and both bor-
rowed and invented forms of cultural practice and expression. Williams makes his case
Pollock 19

by pointing to the role of TV drama (and its expanded stories) in changing the hitherto
limited class exposure to theatre (Williams, 1974).
East London, before the 2012 London Olympics regeneration, was an abandoned area
of cheap studios and cheap living where, for six months in 1993, Sarah Lucas (b.1962 in
Holloway, London), fine art graduate of the Working Men’s College (1982–3), the
London College of Printing (1983–4) and Goldsmiths College (1984–7) and Tracey
Emin (b.1963) in Margate to Romanichal-descended and Turkish Cypriot parents,
studied Fashion at Medway College of Fashion (1980–2), fine art at Maidstone Art
College (1984–7) and gained an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (1987–9),
set up shop. The Shop was an example of the same kind of enterprise that had led Lucas’s
fellow student at Goldsmiths, Damien Hirst, to bypass the system and exhibit his fellow
Goldsmiths fine art students in an empty Port Authority building in the Surrey Docks,
East London, under the title Freeze (1988). The conceptual artist and tutor at Goldsmiths
College Michael Craig-Martin wrote of this event:

I had always tried to help my students in any way I could, particularly in those first years
after art school. I knew from personal experience how difficult it was – I never had things
come easy. I did the same with Damien and Freeze. I encouraged people to go and see
the work. I would never have done this if I hadn’t believed the show was of exceptional
interest – why waste people’s time? It amuses me that so many people think what happened
was calculated and cleverly manipulated whereas in fact it was a combination of youthful
bravado, innocence, fortunate timing, good luck, and, of course, good work. (Brian Sherwin
‘Artspace Talk: Interview, 16.08.2007’; no longer available)

Hirst had got sponsorship from both London Docklands Development Corporation
and a major developer, Olympia and York, all indicative of changes to this area to come
and the increasing financialization of the art world.
This clearly exhibits Bauman’s thesis in one sense that, even in the 1990s, Generation
X took on the conditions of their practice and created a new model that might be con-
sidered an instance of classic liquid modernity: an enterprise-led, capitalist speculative
project with signs already of the coming gig economy as the conditions of life.6 It was
their way of finding access to a means to make a living as an artist but their art was not
without content. The irony, of course, is that within those conditions of practice there
existed advertising magnate and art collector Charles Saatchi whose own enterprise, his
collection and gallery with its distinctive buying policy, took up the Freeze artists and
catapulted several of them (but significantly not all) to rapid notoriety and financial
security. Six of the 16 were women: Angela Bulloch, Anya Gallaccio, Abigail Lane,
Sarah Lucas, Lala Meredith-Lula and Fiona Rae, and all have remained practising artists
with the majority becoming well-respected and well-known.
So, I have to come now to the work Bauman was disparaging in the citation above: Tracey
Emin’s My Bed that first exhibited in the Tate Gallery, London, in 1998 when Emin was
shortlisted for the Turner Prize.7 The understanding and analysis of this work, which was
met with much negative comment at the time and an ironic performance intervention by two
Chinese artists who jumped on the bed and had a pillow fight, has been radically revised. It
has now been acknowledged by critical feminist studies of the narratives of women’s
20 Thesis Eleven 156(1)

extreme experiences (Merck and Townsend, 2002) while also being appraised in the context
of questions of migration, race and nationalism (Cherry, 2002). Recent exhibitions of My
Bed at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, My Bed/JMW Turner (October 2017–January
2018), highlighted its presence as a sculptural object, while Emin also placed the work and
herself in conversation with other working-class British artists such as William Blake
(1757–1827) and specifically the Romantic drama and enlivened paint surfaces of also
working-class J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851).8 Interviewed about the making of My Bed for
that installation in Margate, Tracey Emin answered to the question: ‘Was there a decisive
moment when you came to the idea that it was an art work?’

No, it was immediate. I got out of bed and I looked at it and I just thought, ‘Wow.’ I just saw
it in a white space, I saw it out of that environment and, subconsciously, I saw myself out of
that environment, and I saw a way for my future that wasn’t a failure, that wasn’t desperate.
One that wasn’t suicidal, that wasn’t losing, that wasn’t alcoholic, anorexic, unloved.
(Interview, 2017 Turner Contemporary, Margate, https://www.turnercontemporary.org/
exhibitions/my-bed)

With My Bed, Tracey Emin turned one of her life’s great low points, a bedbound
drinking spree, into a theatrical arrangement worthy of Jacobean tragedy: a violent mess
of sex and death. Amid the yellowing sheets there are condoms, a tampon, a pregnancy
test, discarded knickers and a lot of vodka bottles. It’s also very kitchen sink. That blue
slab of carpet speaks of lonely rented rooms. (Sherwin, Skye, 2017)
Art historically, and culturally, Emin’s My Bed has a place in a genealogy which
brings me back to the 13-year-old Teha-amana by Gauguin, itself a knowing reference to
the vast bed in Edouard Manet’s painting of a white woman and a black women in a
prostitutional scene: Olympia (1863, Paris, Musée D’Orsay), that both eroticized the
white body and denied any but servant status to the brown/black body, and so we can
work backwards down a chain of images in Western art where we encounter repeatedly
the raced and gendered other – the topic of the book I gave to Zygmunt Bauman. Emin’s
work also articulates the specificity of gender, age, and sexual vulnerability of young
women that is overdetermined by class/race/age positioning. Emin herself inhabits a
culturally othered space alongside those of class and gender. More importantly, she
formulates an image for this social and psychological space and its positional vulner-
abilities in a post-conceptual art practice as well as affecting drawings and prints.
This brings me to a film work by Tracey Emin that I would have loved to have
explored with Zygmunt Bauman in precisely the terms of his cultural sociology. In an
oral presentation of this article as a lecture, I could simply now show a video recording of
the 6.34 minute super8 film made by Tracey Emin in 1995, now in the collection of the
Tate (film, super8, shown as a video projection, colour and sound, 6’32”). In a sense, just
showing/seeing/witnessing it did the work.
It was self-explanatory in terms of the themes and threads I have so far drawn
together. In written form the direct moment of seeing and hearing, and slowly coming to
grasp the affective freight of the filmed video over its six minutes is not possible. If the
reader has access to the internet, I would encourage her/him/them to stop and watch it for
themselves. It is titled Why I Never Became a Dancer.9
Pollock 21

Silent and grainy, Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995) visually returns us to the
Kent seaside town of Margate in 1976–8. The sound of running and heavy breathing
accompanies the camera’s unsteady move into an image of an old school. Overlaid is
the voice of the artist telling us she hated school and left at 13. What follows is a
traverse of the town by means of the increasingly visually poignant evocation of a
once much frequented and important port at the mouth of the Thames that was in
radical decline and desolation during the 1970s. Across this hand-filmed landscape,
Tracey Emin tells of her teenage years that culminates in a moment of potential
success in a disco dancing competition, the winning of which might have been her
passport out of Margate. That dream is brutally crushed by a circle of men in their
twenties chanting the ugly words men use for the women they freely sexually abuse
and then publicly shame for having been their sexual partners. What lies behind this
hateful scene, and is revealed by Emin’s deadpan Kent-accented delivery, is the
vulnerability of a working-class teenage girl who explored the world freely, enjoying
her discovery of sex, sharing fish and chips on the beach, and dancing. Emin’s
experience is not that of the groomed and bribed and then abused young women of
Rochdale (2008–9) and Rotherham (late 1980s to 2010s) and many other cities of
Britain (Newcastle, Keighley, Huddersfield, Oxford, Peterborough, Aylesbury, Bristol)
in sex abuse rings that have been scandalously revealed and prosecuted since 2010
(Dearden, 2017; see House of Commons, 2013). Dyslexic, failed by education in an
impoverished and neglected small town environment, Emin had made herself a life
and dreamed of a future through her skill and joy in dancing. What came back to
‘violate’ her was the men’s double standard, the naked brutality of their desire to hurt
her through the sexist hate speech. ‘Slag! Slag! Slag!’ they chanted, and these words
destroyed her concentration and her dream. The word is defined as ‘a lewd or pro-
miscuous woman’. There is no corresponding term of abuse that women can utter
against young straight men taking their casual sexual pleasure with underage girls.
Emin’s teenage years coincided with slow but rapidly accelerating changes to atti-
tudes towards women as sexually active and the sexual mores of women in Western
Europe and North America for which the contraceptive pill, first released in 1960 in the
USA and then in 1962 (for married women only), has been considered a precipitating and
facilitating factor. While she personally symptomatized an attitude on the part of women
that we have the right to our sexualities, the cultural attitudes of a small town in Britain
were clearly not at the forefront of the sexual revolution. Thus, Emin’s six-minute video
contains sociologically rich material for research into the uneven process of cultural
transformation of gender and sexuality, not all of which has been imbued with feminist
concerns. For instance, I would argue strongly that the increasing pressure on women for
compulsory sexual availability and intensifying self-sexualization which darkly lines the
sexual revolution is not to be confused with feminist analysis and politics of sexuality,
gender, and embodiment and rights to control over our bodies and desires. The rights to
determine one’s desire and one’s body are, however, complex and hotly debated even in
feminist theory and politics (Vance, 1984). Feminist strategies do not aim at the current
misnomer ‘empowerment’ for women when it so often means exposure to ‘slaggifica-
tion’. The teenage Emin did not have feminist theory or politics as a resource. Looking
back from the mid-1990s to retell the tale of ‘why she did not become a dancer’, her
22 Thesis Eleven 156(1)

audio-visual narrative becomes a sociological jewel as well as a profoundly affecting

work of art. The mature Tracey Emin can condemn the men for their willingness to have
sex with an underage girl and then publicly shame her at the point of her own jouissant
display as Terpsichore (the muse of dance and music). She says she left Margate. The
rest is her history.
In Why I Never Became a Dancer, with the almost two-minute ending sequence of the
film, however, Emin shares her bittersweet and very real personal triumph over the
callous boys of Margate she then names one by one: ‘this is for you’. Now, she is a Royal
Academician and Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy Schools, an inter-
nationally recognized artist who has represented Britain at the prestigious Venice
Biennale in 2007. In the mid-1990s when she concludes her video, she is in her own large
and airy studio space, dancing alone and joyously to You Made Me Feel Mighty Real
(1978) sung by American disco/R&B singer Sylvester before a shot of a bird winging its
way across the sky. Look at me now, free, myself and dancing.
I conclude with this video by Tracey Emin – an artist so clearly the target of his
passing remark quoted above – because it explains why Zygmunt Bauman did not
understand a word of my book. It was because of its focus on the problematic of gender,
of sexual difference and its complex articulations of class and racialized difference that
placed a politics of sexuality and sexual abuse at the heart of culture as both ways of life
and of the arts and learning defined by Williams and the art of life defined by Bauman.
These still remain vivid life issues on campus and in society.
Tracey Emin’s video is neither trite nor banal. It speaks its lived truth in a deceptively
direct but knowing art practice she created using vernacular materials in a skilfully
deskilled formulation. In its structuring of image, voice and narrative timing, it also
effects a transformation of the social conditions of her life and its production. Hers is an
art of her life that achieves a gravity and grace.
My feminist work as an art historian and cultural theorist was, it seems, forever a
closed book to Zygmunt Bauman. I say it here with regret, even as I find myself deeply
indebted in my work to the extraordinary depth and breadth of his work, and specifically
to his clarification of modernity and its structural racialized violence towards the
stranger, to his revelation of the ambivalence at the heart of modernity so rich for
feminist thought about the place of women in universalizingly masculinist patriarchal
cultures and, above all, for the diagnostic concept of liquid modernity, which I introduce
constantly to art historians still ignorant of Bauman’s resource for going beyond Walter
Benjamin and Georg Simmel or Fredric Jameson.
I would, however, have loved the space to argue the Emin case, and share what
feminist, queer and postcolonial art history has made of its differenced and differ-
encing (Pollock, 1999) concept of ‘art’ in its conditions of practice in the contem-
porary, liquid, social ways of living, conditions of living that critical artistic practices
so often seek to make intelligible to us through formulation and affectivity. With
Emin’s work, we might even dare to say that these share with Zygmunt Bauman’s
later prose style a vividness drawn from the colloquial everyday. Culture is both
ordinary and extraordinary.
Pollock 23

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. See: https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2018/10/austrian-woman-s-conviction-for-calling-
prophet-muhammad-a-paedophile-upheld.html 29/10/2018
2. See the paper by Mark Davis in this issue of Thesis Eleven.
3. See the papers by Bryan Cheyette and Matt Dawson in this issue of Thesis Eleven.
4. The first use of the term ‘young British artists’ to describe the work of Hirst and these other
young artists was by Michael Corris in Artforum, May 1992. The acronym ‘YBA’ was then
introduced in 1996 in Art Monthly magazine (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/y/young-
british-artists-ybas). For a very critical reading of this group see Stallybrass (1999); feminist art
historian Alison Rowley has developed a very different reading in relation to class in British
culture (Rowley, 2104, 2015).
5. See Cheyette and Wagner-Saffray in this issue of Thesis Eleven.
6. See Bryant in this issue.
7. It was bought for £150,000 by Charles Saatchi and was auctioned in 2014 by Christie’s for
£2.5 million.
8. For deep critical social and feminist art historical reading of this work see Cherry (2002). The
abstract of this article on UAL Research reads: ‘The essay innovatively contended that, despite
the artist’s distinctive anti-intellectual stance and the themes of much critical writing, her works
are embedded in wider issues of migration, cultural transmission, and diaspora, and that they
engage in complex questions of cultural difference. It departed from the populist and bio-
graphical readings of Emin’s art and of this particular piece. The essay demonstrated how, at the
Turner installation, ‘My Bed’ was accompanied by works that highlighted these issues of
migration: a textile piece with its imagery of the Union flag drew attention to contemporary
debates about national identity. Adjacent video pieces highlighted and projected the artist’s
ethnicity, her divided and doubled familial and cultural background. The essay located ‘My
Bed’ within debates about Britain’s social fabric and relations, notably sleeping rough in public
spaces, which has subsequently all but disappeared. It also contextualized ‘My Bed’ within the
debates about what was perceived as rising migration into Britain. Setting a historical frame for
the work of the debates of the mid-late 1990s about ‘fortress Europe’, the borders of Europe, and
Turkey’s admission to the European Union, the essay argued that the Turner installation equally
engaged with questions of European identity, mapping a contested space of complex identities
from its western border to its east-most extension (http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/1391/
accessed 4 January 2019). See also Merck and Townsend (2002) for a wide range of studies of
Emin’s works.
9. See: https://vimeo.com/79687251; or, https://www.artforum.com/video/tracey-emin-why-i-
never-became-a-dancer-1995-49262.

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Author biography
Griselda Pollock is professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for
Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds. Her most recent publications
include Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory (Yale, 2018); Griselda Pollock & Max
Silverman (eds) Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war
Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts (London and New York: Berghahn, 2019) which is the
fourth in a series of studies of the aesthetic politics and cultural resistance to ’the concentrationary
universe’: Concentrationary Cinema (2011), Concentrationary Memories (2013) and Concentra-
tionary Imaginaries (2015); ‘Is Feminism a Bad Memory or a Virtual Future?’, differences:
26 Thesis Eleven 156(1)

A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 26:4 (Summer 2016), pp. 27-61; ‘Action, Activism, and Art
and/as Thought: A Dialogue with the Artworking of Sonia Khurana and Sutapa Biswas and the
Political Theory of Hannah Arendt’. e-flux journal (2018) no.92. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/
92/204726/action-activism-and-art-and-as-thought-a-dialogue-with-the-artworking-of-sonia-
khurana-and-sutapa-biswas-and-the-political-theory-of-hannah-arendt/; ‘Knowing Cruelty:
The Negation of Death and Burial in SS Violence’ in Nicholas Chare and Dominic
Williams, (eds) Testimonies of Resistance: Essays on the Sonderkommando (London and New
York: Berghahn, 2019).