Twenty Years in the Making: Tracey Emin’s My Bed, 1998–2018

This chapter examines the making of My Bed (1998), the artist’s signature work, over twenty years. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s writing on the social life of things, three distinct chapters in the social life of this art work are identified. In its first chapter My Bed took its place on the global exhibition circuit, in Tokyo and New York in 1998 and in London the following year. Its second and third chapters each opened with the sale of My Bed in 2000 and in 2014, events Appadurai classifies as tournaments of value.This chapter traces the exhibition histories of the work, noting that in each chapter My Bed has been marked by its variant installations in the arrangement of its elements and in its curatorial presentation. Initially (and again in Tracey Emin; Twenty Years (Edinburgh 2008), My Bed was presented in dialogue with the artist’s multimedia output. In its later chapters it has been extracted from the artist’s oeuvre: in its recent re-appearances at Tate Britain (2015), Tate Liverpool (2016) and Turner Contemporary (Margate 2017) it has been inserted into narratives of British art through juxtapositions with Bacon, Blake and Turner. My Bed’s engagement with the concerns of its contemporary moment, migration, diaspora, the shape of Europe, and homelessness, evident in its London showing of 1999, has been replaced with a trans-historical valency that retains a close dependency on the artist’s autobiography.