The Nineties: When Surface was Depth. Michael Bracewell

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СКАЧАТЬ down to the system. I mean I didn’t get any O-levels or A-levels, and people said, “You can’t go to art school.” So I just got my own form and filled it in.’

      Today, Emin’s detractors serve her cause to as great an effect as her supporters. Her former boyfriend, for instance, the poet and painter Billy Childish, has recently gained a good deal of reciprocal publicity off the back of his old flame by launching his ‘Stuckist’ movement – a loose-knit group of painters who have published a twenty-point manifesto, ‘Against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego-artist’. On the front of this manifesto is a quote from Tracey, supposedly made about Billy: ‘Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!’

      ‘Well, his paintings are stuck,’ says Emin, with disarming frankness, but genuine affection for Childish and his enterprise. ‘This is just one of Billy’s pamphlets – he’s done loads of them, and it’s a good, healthy thing – and a newspapers got hold of it and they know that it’ll make a good story.’

      But when Childish published his stories and poems about his relationship with Emin, she found them ‘hateful and hurtful – particularly reading about all of his sexual conquests – it used to do my head in. But now I see that they’re not about me, they’re about him and his take on life, and he doesn’t come across as particularly admirable.’ And in this, perhaps, one can see the reverse side of Emin’s own artistic practice.

      In a recent television documentary about Emin, the only critical voice in the programme – as the gents of the art world vied with one another to mingle faux-laddish candour with quasi-ironic hyperbole – came from her twin brother, Paul, who claimed to have lost his business contract in Margate because of the controversy generated by his sister’s work. ‘I want to use this occasion to state that I, Paul Emin, have no connection whatsoever with Tracey Emin’s art,’ he stated. And Emin herself, from her Whitechapel loft, admitted that her work back in Margate might find a reception very different from its current fashionability within the art world.

      ‘I would like to show some of my work down in Margate,’ she says, ‘but there isn’t really anywhere to show it. There’s the library I suppose. But it would mean hiring a space and organizing it, and I’m too busy to do that. But it would be interesting, because a lot of my work is about growing up in that locality, and it would be quite interesting to hear the responses from other people growing up there. But it wouldn’t really serve my purpose. What really serves my purpose is having a great big fuck-off show in New York. That’s what serves my purpose.’

      Confession as public spectacle was woven in to the burgeoning obsession with any form of celebrity. As the decade progressed, it appeared that the values traditionally, and even sneeringly, ascribed solely to the tabloid press – voyeurism, sensationalism, knee-jerk morality – were becoming all-pervasive as the temper of the times.

      Applied post-modernism as a sophisticated parlour game had authorized no end of super-whizzy look-Mum-no-hands ways of flirting with tabloid culture, but the principal readership of the endlessly cloning celebrity magazines – as much as the audiences of daytime confession ’n’ conflict TV ‘debates’ – seemed to be drawn, demographically, from the lower-income end of the scale. Thus, the new aristocrats of celebrity culture (as well as the old aristocrats who were just aristocrats, but still got loads of celebrity-space) were kept in place largely by a particular public need for a kind of epic, ongoing soap opera of people who seemed to have more teeth than them and nicer houses than theirs. The celebrities, perhaps, were just another of the Compensatory Pleasures (like extended credit facilities or deli-style sandwich fillings) that people in the Nineties needed to compensate for … living in the Nineties. But one fundamental result of the cultural equation between confession and celebrity would be that the poor, quite literally, were supporting the wealthy.

       Ulrika Jonsson

      Just type ‘Ulrika Jonsson’ into the subject window of your Internet search engine, and you’ll be sent back a lengthy list of sites, all of which promise ‘Ulrika Nude!’ Trawled up from the murkier depths of the web, these sites specialize in computer-manipulated images of celebrities. It’s a kind of cyber-harem that doubles as a somewhat sordid gauge of modern fame. You get the feeling that if you were a celebrity, checking out your virtual profile, you’d probably be pretty miffed to find yourself pornographically pixilated in this way. That said, when you saw the sheer number of people whom these sites have fiddled around with, you’d maybe feel strangely hurt if you weren’t included.

      At thirty-two, Ulrika Jonsson was both defined and misrepresented as a sex symbol. Meeting her outside one of the smarter Windsor commuter stations, sitting behind the wheel of a soft-top Saab, dressed in casual black with Gucci sunglasses, she looks like any off-duty career woman. Neither her image, nor her voice – slightly ‘county’, with the odd dead-drop into New Labour Mockney – seems to hint at media celebrity and part-time wild child.

      Saab lend her the car in exchange for the occasional personal appearance. She wants the estate version so there’ll be room for her five-year-old son’s bike in the back. ‘I drove a Fiat Panda until a couple of years ago,’ she explains, as a dashboard slightly more complicated than the flightdeck of the Starship Enterprise winks lazily into life. And this little fact says a lot about the woman: Ulrika embodies the point where tabloid-hounded TV personality – flashy cars, the Met bar and lots of foreign holidays – meets Home Counties mum: the school run, early nights and swimming lessons.

      On the one hand, you could say that Ulrika’s entire career as a TV presenter and national pin-up has been driven by the juggernaut of her sex appeal. On the other, she has never promoted herself as anything other than ‘ordinary’. The trouble is, Ulrika emits that particular kind of ordinariness that many people also find sexy. She is probably the only prime-time television star to have been photographed wearing an Agent Provocateur négligée while leaning at a jaunty angle against the extension hose of an Electrolux dust-buster. She shares with Felicity Kendal – the star of the terminally domestic Seventies sit-com, The Good Life – the fact that she has been voted ‘Rear of The Year’ in a national poll.

      Ulrika uses the word ‘ordinary’ to describe herself, as though it is the one card in her hand that can’t be beaten. ‘People like me because … Well, they like me, if they like me at all, because I’m ordinary. I suppose that when I started out, nearly twelve years ago, there weren’t a lot of young female presenters. There wasn’t the amount of satellite channels that there are now, and even Sky was only just starting. Now, there are millions of young girls who are TV presenters and they’re on the cover of just about everything. But I do think that I’m just ordinary. And I don’t mind laughing at myself. So maybe I just make people feel comfortable. People don’t really know what pigeon-hole to put me in, because I keep changing my course and I don’t seem to fit into any pattern.

      ‘I’m not quite sure how it all happened for me. I didn’t mind messing around in a crowd, but if there was a serious audience I’d probably walk the other way. Even now, when I do stand on a stage, I tend to be very self-deprecating and take the piss out of myself. Because I feel that I’m almost not worthy to be there, I think that if they can see me laughing at myself, then they won’t laugh at me. We can just laugh at me together.’

      Even as she’s saying this, in the wholly ordinary surroundings of a National Trust tea room in the Home Counties, on a perfectly straightforward Thursday afternoon, another nice woman (middle-aged, mumsy, terribly polite) comes up and asks her for a pair of autographs. ‘We’ve been having a debate,’ the woman explains, ‘and we want to know if you’re Ulrika Jonsson?’ ‘I was this morning,’ Ulrika replies, signing the proffered menus, and then she’s worrying whether the recipients of these autographs will spot that she’s written ‘lots of love’ on one of them and only ‘love’ on the other.

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