Jess Andrews - You make me feel

This essay was written in response to Why I Never Became a Dancer, a video installation by artist Tracey Emin. It explores class and gender identity through an interrogation of whether the artists we admire have a responsibility towards us, and how we must learn to name things for ourselves.

You Make Me Feel (an extract)

Tracey Emin grew up in Margate, in the 70's, in the shadow of Dreamland theme park. She drank cheap cider in the sand and dreamed away summers in her fringed bikini, beneath the razzle-dazzle of the Flamingo Arcade.

I'd hang around cafés, drinking coffee

exploring Margate's Golden Mile.

I grew up in Sunderland, in the 90's. I spent weekends watching the waves crash over Roker Pier, pushing hot coppers through silver slots at Seaburn Amusements. The pavements smelled like stale rain.

The caffs, the bars. Palosa's. The Bali Hai.

In 1995, Tracey made a video called Why I Never Became a Dancer. It opens with a shot of the cliffs at Margate, crinkling like gold foil in the sun. Her name is carved into a wall, built to stop the rocks being eroded the sea.

Lunchtime discos.

Drinking cider,

laying out on the beach.

In Tracey's video, Margate unspools in sepia; the clock tower and the arcades. There are ripples in the sand and a shop under scaffolding. Seagulls gather on the green. There is the sound of Tracey breathing heavily. She is running away from something unseen.

The summer was amazing.

There was nothing to do but dream.

Margate was small and it couldn't contain Tracey. She liked sex and disco dancing. She went twist-spinning in her shimmery boob tube, feeling her body grow hot and supple. She opened up herself for other people, learning the taste of her power, like wet salt.

And then there was sex.

I pointed and flexed my toes in my ballet class on Saturday mornings. I was jealous of the older girls who came in afterwards, in their gauzy Lyrical skirts and glittery ballroom shoes. I was desperate for a pair of those shoes. The best brand was called Jessica, and that is my name.

It was something you could just do

and it was for free.

Tracey knew about names. She embroidered the inside of a tent with the names of everyone she had ever slept with. The art world got angry about it. People confused sleep with sex and intimacy with shame.

Sex was something simple.

In her video, Tracey speaks over the images of Margate. Her voice is soft and sharp simultaneously. She talks about her adolescence; how she learned to move her body in a way that gave her agency.

You'd go to a pub, walk home, get fish and chips, then sex.

I grew older and learned about sex and dancing; the ways they are entwined. Sunderland was small, too, and I expanded myself on dance floors and between people's bed sheets, feeling the thrill of the night on my skin. I tried to know the shape of my new power. It was slippery and uncertain.

It didn't matter that I was young.

Tracey entered the British Disco Dance Championship in 1978. She swung her hips across the dance floor as white heat seared her body. She was going to dance her way out of sad Margate and into London, where anything was possible.

It never crossed my mind to ask them what the attraction was.

I knew.

Sex was what it was

and it could be good; really something.

I went out dancing at the weekends. I spiraled on bar stools and did tequila shots with strangers, relishing the bitterness of lemon. I rippled through dry ice and drifted through cigarette smoke, a half-cut Ziggy Stardust in the dawn.

I remember the first time someone asked me to grab their balls.

I remember the power it gave me.

Men in Margate who had held Tracey's body watched her dance from the shadows. They knew they could not cage her and it made them afraid. Slag, they called her. Slag. Slag. Slag. Tracey ran away from them, out of the dance hall, towards the sea. She lost the Disco Dance Championship, but she went to London anyway. She took twenty pounds, one suitcase and two David Bowie Lps.

But it wasn't always like that.

Sometimes they'd just cum

and then they'd leave me, wherever I was,

half-naked.

I moved to London when I turned eighteen. I took my album recording of the Velvet Underground playing live at Max's Kansas City, the New York restaurant where Patti Smith met Allen Ginsberg in the 70's. I didn't know how to become an artist or a writer, but I believed that a pub job in a glittering corner of the city had the potential to transform me.

But there were no morals, or rules, or judgements.

I just did what I wanted to do.

In the 90's, Shoreditch was full of industrial spaces. Young artists like Tracey moved in and set up studios. They stretched themselves between warehouses and had parties in East End pubs. They established Spitalfields as their home, before All Saints and Nike moved in.

By the time I was fifteen I'd had them all

and for me Margate was too small

and I knew the difference between good and bad.

I got a job in a Shoreditch pub and turned up in my little vintage dresses and winged eyeliner, ready to roll out my appreciation of Georgia O'Keeffe to whoever might ask for it. Nobody did. I spent night after night pulling pints of Timothy Taylor. The pub was too busy for me to speak to anyone. My body had a different kind of currency.

The reasons why those men wanted to fuck me

was because they weren't men.

In 1993, Tracey opened a shop in Shoreditch with her friend, Sarah Lucas. They sold t-shirts and badges with slogans that read, have you wanked over me yet?

They were less.

They were less than human.

To the top, love. To the top. Men rested their glasses heavily on the wooden bar and narrowed their eyes, daring me to refuse. The pub manager shook his head at the overflowing drip tray. His eyes travelled down my body. What a waste, he said.

They were pathetic.

I saw Tracey's video in her solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. I listened to her describe the sexual power in her teenage body as some wild escape from all the shit that was surrounding me.

Sex for me had been an adventure.

The pub manager was Linton and he was thirty-four. He called me names that were not mine; baby, princess, tease. One night Linton got very drunk. He pressed me up against the staffroom wall and shoved his hard, horrible dick into my hand. I pushed him away and was fired the next day.

I was an innocent.

But I was still flesh.

I still thought with my body.

I watched Tracey disco dancing in her denim shorts, pushing those men into words and forcing them out of her. She stirred feelings in me I did not know the names of. They caught in my throat and I almost choked.

But now it was me and dancing.

That's where I really got my real kick

on the dancefloor.

I got a new job in a pub by Spitalfields Market. It belonged to Sandra, who was seventy years old and hoola-hooped on the bar on Sunday afternoons, blasting Tottenham football songs from her jukebox, brandishing a framed picture of the pope. She used to look after the young artists, when they had studios around the corner and no money. They became famous and made her rich. She cleaned the floor in Chanel and went to openings in glittery cardigans, hand-embroidered by Sarah Lucas. I'm your London mum, she always said to me.

I felt like I could defy gravity

My Sunderland mam collected loyalty cards from McDonald's. When they were full she posted them to me, so I could claim her free coffee and drink it on my break.

as though my soul was truly free.

There was a neon light hanging above the women's toilets. It snarled, stand still and rot in violent yellow. The man who made it used to come in for a Carlsberg, his hands blistered and raw where the tubes had exploded. I asked him where he got his ideas. Oh. He took a sip of his drink. They're not mine. I'm just the handyman. It's all Tracey, she's the one with the words. I watched his fingers as he counted out his change. I learned that writing is painful but it illuminates things.

As I started to dance,

people started to clap.

I was going to win.

I was embarrassed by my North East accent. You what? People squinted as I shouted over the bar. I lengthened my vowel sounds and swallowed the words they didn't understand. Tracey didn't seem to care what anyone thought of her. She misspelled all of the words in her artwork and called herself, Mad Tracey from Margate. She was loud and unashamed. She showed the stains on her mattress to famous art collectors and took what most people kept hidden and hung it on gallery walls. She moulded her hurt into drawings and sculptures. She owned her vulnerability and it made her strong.

(full essay to be published online)