‘Fear not/To unfold your dark visions of torment’: Blake and Emin’s Bad Sex Aesthetic

Abstract

David Bowie describes Tracey Emin as ‘William Blake as a woman, written by Mike Leigh’ (1997, 24). What connection between them would prompt this catchy sound bite? A certain emotional nakedness, it would seem; a compul- sion to bare secrets and lies. Plus, a transgender aptitude: Emin is able to be Blake as a woman; Blake is able to be a woman in Emin; and Leigh’s films are able to portray raw female emotional experience. Bowie goes on to empha- size, at once, ‘the dawning of late eighteenth-century self-consciousness, that first realisation of self you find in early nineteenth-century portraits’ and ‘the deeply dysfunctional work found at Gugging Hospital in Vienna, the bastion of working“Outside” artists’ (ibid., 24). The link to ‘“Outside” artists’ may have to do with craziness, but also technical skill. Can Blake or Emin draw properly? Or spell properly either? And Leigh, strictly speaking, doesn’t exactly write his films; he’s famous for having his actors improvise, a much looser way to compose. Bowie’s characterization, then, links emo- tional excess and technical sloppiness. Yet the juxtaposition with portraiture suggests a strange combination of naivety with high and deliberate skill. These people make messy art; but successful messy art which ‘realizes’ the modern self.