Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 is, like The Bed, one of Tracey Emin's most notable works. Always linking his art to the intimate and political, the British artist revealed this installation also known as The Tent in 1995, at the South London Gallery. This emotional tent presented, as its name suggests, all the people with whom Tracey Emin slept, slept, stayed up, from her birth to the creation of her work. Her family, friends and former boyfriends were as much included in this collection of names as her lovers, the strangers who crossed his path, and even numbered fetuses, in reference to his abortions.
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The names of these 102 people, who once nestled in a bed beside him, were sewn into the inside of this tent, recalling the shape of Shell Cave, in Margate. On the ground, we could read the quote: “With myself, always myself, never forget.” “These are people I fucked with in bed or against a wall, or slept with, like my grandmother. I lay in his bed and held his hand. We used to listen to the radio together and fall asleep. You don't do that with someone you don't like and aren't interested in.”detailed the artist about the profiles that populated his work.
Among these elected officials, we found among others the name of her ex-boyfriend Billy Childish, with whom she stayed for a while, as well as that of her boyfriend at the time, Carl Freedman. “One review was really funny, the journalist wrote something like: 'She slept with everyone – even the conservative!'” Tracey Emin had confided. Freedman was the organizer, alongside his collaborator the artist Damien Hirst, of the exhibition inaugurating The Tent.
Burn Baby Burn
The story of this emblematic work of Tracey Emin's work could end there, but no. The work no longer exists today because it was destroyed alongside two other of his works during the fire at the Momart warehouse in London in 2004. Emin had refused from the start to sell The Tent to the collector and advertiser Charles Saatchi for a simple and good reason: she objected to his election ads for Margaret Thatcher that he had produced because in her eyes, Thatcher had committed “crimes against humanity”. Saatchi insisted and finally managed to buy the installation through intermediaries, for three times its initial price.
Following the fire, the artist never wanted to reproduce it for the art dealer, even when the latter offered him a million pounds Sterling for a new exhibition: “I had the energy that inspired me ten years ago, I have neither that inspiration nor that inclination now… My work is very personal, people know that, I can no longer create that emotion, it 'is impossible', she explained to the BBC, specifying that she nevertheless reconstructed a few pieces for a retrospective in Edinburgh in 2008.
The work survived a decade in the advertiser's collection before disappearing. If Tracey Emin expressed, at the time, her disappointment at the public reactions, contemptuous of the works of art which perished in this fire, she declared that it was necessary, rightly, to take a step back. “The news comes between bombed Iraqi weddings and deaths in the Dominican Republic from flash flooding, so we need to put it in perspective,” Tracey Emin replied to Guardian.
And it’s still not over – I promise, it’s almost the end of this article. In 2005, Stuart Semple collected the ashes of the fire, comprising the fragmented remains of these forever burned works. The artist divided these remains into eight plastic boxes stamped “RIP YBA” – referring to the initials of the Young British Artists movement to which Emin belonged. In the form of a memorial, Burn Baby Burn was therefore imprinted with the tent of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. The destruction of the work then inspired the Dinos brothers and Jake Chapman, who said they had recreated it, but the press suspected at the time a publicity stunt by the White Cube gallery.
