By Alex Juvelekian | Staff Writer
In a way or another, a piece of art’s success is always correlated to its reflection of reality. For instance, fiction – whether it be sci-fi, realistic fiction, etc. – shines due to its ability to dissociate the receiver from the reality they live in, while music creates an ambiance within which the receiver is able to project the experiences they go through, helping them deal with them with more emotion. Tracey Emin, a considerably controversial British artist, understood the task that art requires of her and completed it with perfection. Emin had a very troubed childhood, entailing instances of assault and trauma, which constitute the root of a series of explicit installations throughout her artistic career; however, her repertoire stands out mostly with her laundry-drying installation titled My Bed, which she put for projection in 1998 at Tate Britain in Liverpool. My Bed is a piece that Emin put together to give an unfiltered, untouched view of what her bed looked like after not leaving it for days in a row, due to a deep crippling depression following a bad break-up. The detail in this piece plays a great importance, as every small component of the installation plays a part in portraying the state she was in; from cigarettes to empty vodka bottles, pregnancy tests, condoms, the list of intimate items she includes in the piece is too long to fit in a sentence. Emin’s aim behind this graphic piece was to address the topic of mental illness headfirst, in the most straightforward and uncensored way. Her display of such an intimate scene goes to show that she had nothing left to hide, and that going through episodes of that sort is a phenomenon that everyone is prone to and is definitely not something meant to keep as a secret. In fact, an adequate representation of the public opinion regarding the piece was the comment that the buyer had to leave on it. German businessman and art collector, Count Christian Duerckheim, bought My Bed for a whopping £2.5 million, as he mentions “I always admired the honesty of Tracey, but I bought My Bed because it is a metaphor for life, where troubles begin and logics die.” As short as it is, Duerckheim’s one sentence review of the piece wraps up its essence; the perfect representation of what life truly is happens through a raw display of the lowest of points, the ability to escape those points, and eventually embrace them.