Interview: Deborah Cherry and Alexandra Kokoli on feminism, British art, diaspora

Deborah Cherry is Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of the Arts London. She writes on contemporary and historical art. Her publications include Painting women: Victorian women artists (1993), Beyond the frame: Feminism and visual culture, Britain 1850-1900 (2000) and Maud Sulter: Passion (2015).

Alexandra Kokoli is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Middlesex University London and research associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. Her publications include contributions to Companion to Feminist Art (2019) and Companion to Textile Culture (2020), and the monographs From the Freud Museum 1991–6 by Susan Hiller (Tate in Focus, 2017), and The Feminist Uncanny (2016). She is currently Leverhulme research fellow for a project on art and visual activism at Greenham Common.

Here, Deborah and Alexandra discuss with BAN Convenor Martin Myrone their recent co-edited book, Tracey Emin: Art Into Life (Bloomsbury, 2020), and the intersections between British art history, curating, feminism and diaspora.

MM. The book you have recently co-edited, Tracey Emin: Art Into Life foregrounds the intersectional aspects of the artist’s performed identities, including that involving her Turkish Cypriot heritage. It asserts, therefore, a crossing or connecting of feminism, British art and diaspora which hasn’t perhaps been much in evidence, at least in relation to British artists with a ‘mainstream’ presence like Emin. Would that be fair to say, and if so, what has prevented such discussion being more apparent previously?

AK: There are many reasons why Tracey Emin has rarely been discussed as an artist of colour and of the diaspora, although she has repeatedly stated that she is descended from enslaved Sudanese people on her father’s Turkish Cypriot side and Roma on her mother’s side. While her art and writing are interpreted as neo-expressionist outpourings, she is simultaneously taken at face value and not

believed. Our book argues that such contradictions are commonly experienced by womxn artists and artists of colour, including much less ‘mainstream’ or ‘successful’ ones than Emin, which is why although the book focuses on one prevalent artist its contents explore the intersections of contemporary art, gender, class, and ethnicity. On the other hand, Emin’s success by commercial art world standards means that writing on her work is kept under strict control.

DC: As Alexandra explains, Tracey Emin’s reputation is closely managed by her dealers through their support for and publication of approved books and catalogues by approved authors who are granted exclusive access to the artist in her various domains. This ensures that commercially-successful narratives remain in place. Over-interpretation of Emin’s creative practice as neo-expressionist revelation diverts attention from more complex issues such as class, ethnicity, race, diaspora. Alev Adil’s essay in our collection is the first in-depth exploration Emin’s Turkish-Cypriot heritage: her essay provides a subtle and delicate unpicking of an often-neglected yet once seen highly visible presence in Emin’s art and writing. Although much has been written about Emin’s personal trauma as a teenager and young woman, Jo Heath’s chapter offers the first sustained discussion of the artist’s approaches to motherhood, pregnancy, abortion and childlessness. Our collection looks at largely unexamined areas such Emin’s early years or the misogyny that underpins some criticism, alongside in-depth examination of her artistic strategies, agile multi-media exchanges and the materiality of her practice – several chapters offer detailed study of individual works of art.

MM. The contributors brought together for Tracey Emin: Art Into Life come from museum and university settings, and several are described as ‘independent’, which can cover all sorts of circumstances – but together they represent the range of positions that people working in British art studies might occupy. The publisher’s blurb notes of the collection that while Emin is well known, her work has not received the critical attention it merits. What do you feel is most necessary, in terms of resources and working situation, to make the criticality manifested in the collection possible?

AK: I don’t believe that most of our contributors think of themselves as working within British art studies, although their interests and expertise include art practices in Britain. I don’t consider myself to be a British art studies scholar either, although living and working in Britain as an immigrant from Southern Europe inflects my work in multiple ways. By ‘critical’ we mean that combination of being both in-depth and independent: our book does not aim to promote the artist’s work and is not endorsed or supported by the artist’s studio or gallery, although we received some invaluable guidance from the artist’s studio, especially Harry Weller, for which we’re grateful. As for depth, in the case of an artist who is assumed to ‘tell all’, consistently and compulsively, we’ve taken

Cover design by Tjaša Krivec

the route of reflecting on and problematising the emblems of that immediacy, such as autobiography (Alev Adil; Mark Durden), performativity (Camilla Jalving), and authenticity (Glenn Adamson), while Jo Heath uncovers the ways in which media cathexis on fixed narratives of Emin’s life makes them inattentive to the artist’s complex reflections on sexual and reproductive life cycles.

DC: The book brings together a multiplicity of voices and points of view about contemporary artistic practice, acknowledging the strength and significance of those who speak and write outside as well as within academia.

Criticality entails investigative engagement. Mark Durden, Alev Adil and Glenn Adamson interrogate philosophical and theoretical concepts of authenticity and debates about auto-fiction to examine these strategies in Emin’s art and writings. Camilla Jalving takes up theories of performativity to examine the contradictions of the artist’s myriad stagings of her ‘self’. Gill Perry’s essay offers lengthy feminist reflection on philosophical concepts of dwelling to discuss Emin’s many works that feature huts. These essays disconnect and estrange Emin’s art from the seductively-familiar confessional readings to offer more dense, more complex analysis. Perry addresses trauma, a familiar theme in Emin literature, to offer new reflections on disturbance and uncertainty.

MM. While you both hold academic appointments and publish academic scholarship, you have also engaged in curatorial projects and produced exhibition catalogues. What is your experience of working between the academy and museum or gallery? In the past, these contexts have been opposed (almost as ‘theory’ is opposed to ‘practice’): does that still hold? And what is the role of the art school in the pursuit of art history and criticism now?

AK: My experience of exhibition-making is limited, although the curatorial encompasses more than that. My approach to art history changed dramatically from working in art schools and teaching aspiring artists and art professionals rather than art historians. In my experience, artists are almost always interested

in art by others, not just contemporary art either, but that’s not the same as being invested in the discipline of art history. Survey courses don’t meet the brief, although these are being largely abandoned in the discipline of art history as well. And in my research, although I continue to engage with critical theory and philosophy, I approach art practices and visual activism as thought-and-feeling in material form. And let’s not forget that all writing, including academic writing, is a form of practice unavoidably shaped by affect. In her contribution to our book, Gill Perry interweaves philosophical and artistic reflections on dwelling(s), making it very clear that the two are in a dialogue of equals in both nuance and insight. A bit like Emin’s ‘revelations’, the recognition that art practice is an intellectual endeavour, among other things, is simultaneously taken for granted and ignored. We award PhDs for art practice while at the same time casting some artists into the mould of idiots-savants. I have written about Emin’s designation as a ‘postmodern primitive’ and its intersectional implications beyond the artist herself. Emin and her celebrity have been weaponised in the resurgence of the reactionary right across politics, culture, and civil society, as I explore in my contribution to the book.

DC: For feminism and art histories, so many important interventions have come about in the synergies between academia and museums, independent curators and artistic practice. In the 1970s and 1980s, little known, then unknown works, by womxn artists came to visibility and interpretation through ground-breaking publications such as Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker’s Old Mistresses, exhibitions such as Linda Nochlin and Anne Sutherland Harris, Women Artists, 1550-1950, or Das Verborgene Museum in Berlin started in 1986.

In these same decades Black womxn artists and activists opened galleries, curated exhibitions, wrote key papers and catalogues, created events and platforms, set up publishers to counter the white exclusivity of the mainstream art establishment and white feminism. Lubaina Himid’s Thin Black Line (ICA, 1985) was a landmark. Black students then testified to the lack of teachers of colour in British art schools and universities. Although there have been appointments, there remains a strong need for many more womxn of colour in education, for more action to come out of the talking about racism and decolonising the curriculum. We hope that our supportive publishers, Bloomsbury, will take the bold step of issuing the book in paperback so students and a wider readership can enjoy a more critical engagement with Emin’s art.

MM. What are your thoughts about the state of the political project of art history, as a form of cultural criticism? Does the discipline have any life left in it, given the prominence of other disciplinary perspectives and, perhaps especially, the moral authority granted to many contemporary artists in exploring urgent political questions? Why look at historic art at all?

AK: The present political moment presents a tremendous opportunity for art history to rebrand itself as a discipline with substantial cultural relevance as well as potential for social engagement and even change. We live in a time when protest and activism are predominantly visual and are not only shared online but sometimes take place in social media -- social media is the medium. Art history has also a very important contribution to make to campaigns for the removal of monuments by exploring how frequently public monuments and public art have been opposed and the creative ways in which public dissent has been expressed, including ‘drowning’. Of course none of this is new: feminist art history has always described the field as a discursive space where the roles of both ‘art’ and ‘artist’ were continuously renegotiated and redefined. More like a public square for agonism than an art gallery for quiet contemplation!

DC: The concerns that prompted our book are part of and indebted to intersectional studies and attention to diaspora in recent art history. Dr Alice Correia’s research on ‘Articulating British Art Histories’, the major project on Black Artist and Modernism led by Professor Sonia Boyce, the transformations to Art History with the editorship of Professor Dorothy Price and the recent bursary awards of the BAN are changing the field.

MM. What about the relationship between art history and contemporary practice more specifically? I ask this particularly of Deborah, whose scholarly works has ranged from Pre-Raphaelite art to the present day. Looking at your extensive published output gives the impression of passages or segues between the art history of historic art, feminism and diaspora. To what extent has there been continuity between the work of the 1990s and the work you are doing now, or have there been, instead, ruptures or even self-revision?

DC: What connects Alexandra and I are long-standing interests in art made by womxn. A contemporary artist, Maud Sulter, challenged me to write about her work and the art of womxn of colour when I was curating Painting Women at Rochdale Art Gallery in the later 1980s. And moving to University of the Arts was transformative.

Contemporary practice is closely connected to the art of the past. While Tracey Emin is routinely positioned as ’neo-expressionist’, Emin is deeply aware of and refers to a much wider range of historical art as the distinguished artist and print-maker John White (who taught Emin at Maidstone) points out in his essay on her early work. It is White’s careful, patient looking based on his own deep understandings of the making of art that reveals an extensive tissue of art historical reference in Emin’s art.

AK: I was very fortunate to have Deborah as my PhD supervisor at the University of Sussex in the early 2000s, who introduced me to intersectional feminist art history. My earlier training was in comparative literature, so Deborah’s version of art history always seemed ground-breaking and urgently political to me, entirely free from the staid associations against which the discipline is still fighting. As a teacher, one of the first things I try to do is highlight that most of the art practices of modernity were pitched as interventions within the history of art as it was understood in their time, if not always vanguardist breaks with it. It is difficult for anyone new to art history to conceive of an artwork that they’re accustomed to seeing on tea towels and biscuit tins as revolutionary at the time of its making, the fate that Walter Benjamin did not experience but foresaw and against which he argued in his famous essay on reproducibility. As for selfrevision, I tend to think of most scholarly work along these lines, with every new article or book reflecting, building, and hopefully improving on the previous one. It is not always as explicit as revising a specific piece of writing, although it’s interesting to note that three of the chapters in Tracey Emin: Art into Life are revisions and expansions on previously published work (Mark Durden’s, Deborah’s and mine), while Jo Heath undertakes the essential work of updating and complicating narratives of reproductive femininity in reference to an artist who is now in middle age and child-free. Revisions may become necessary for obvious reasons for researchers who work on active artists, but they are also suggested by changing social contexts, changes of mind, and generative encounters.

MM. In thinking about addressing art critically, in an interrogative mode, is the category of British art helpful in any way, or is it, with its many negative or exclusionary connotations, only limiting?

AK: It is not a category that I often use as I am not sure that it best describes the range of art practices in this part of the world, from my perspective. I find it both narrow and vague, and in many cases simply not pertinent. On the other hand, conveying the conditions under which art is practised, shared, and discussed can be useful: I see a lot of North London in the work of my students, for example, in the built environment, the ways they inhabit it and how they move through the city, but aspects of their postdigital and often diasporic experience also come through in varying degrees and in different ways. When art institutions employ the term ‘British art’, they don’t always do it because they’re convinced of its currency but because it holds a place in the taxonomies in which they still operate. Using the term ‘British art’ also frames discussions within a history that requires on-going interrogation. Some of the activities of the British Art Network test and question Britishness, including the Britishness of ‘British art’, and even aspire to overhaul the taxonomies to which it belongs and which it helps maintain.

DC: Our collection is critically engaged with investigations of the national and transnational across Europe and globally. What it means to identify and to be identified as British is under intense pressure. The challenge is to sustain and advance projects that examine the role of slavery or imperialism in Britain’s histories and heritage, despite distracting controversies. And to value womxn’s lives more than the survival of statues and to work to ensure that creative practice and creative agency by womxn are investigated and conserved for the future.