My Bed is a work by the British artist Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin

Tracey Karima Emin RA is a British artist of English and Turkish Cypriot origin. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs ....

. First created in 1998, it was exhibited at the Tate Gallery

Tate Gallery

The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

 in 1999 as one of the shortlisted works for the Turner Prize

Turner Prize

The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...

. It consisted of her bed with bedroom objects in an abject state, and gained much media attention. Although it did not win the prize, its notoriety has persisted.

The artwork generated considerable media furore, particularly over the fact that the bedsheets were stained with bodily secretions and the floor had items from the artist's room (such as condoms, a pair of knickers with menstrual period stains, other detritus, and functional, everyday objects, including a pair of slippers). The bed was presented in the state that Emin claimed it had been when she said she had not got up from it for several days due to suicidal depression brought on by relationship difficulties.

Two performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi

Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi

Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi are two Chinese performance artists, based in Britain, who work together and specialise in art intervention. They have enacted events at the Venice Biennale and the Turner Prize, where in 1999 they jumped onto Tracey Emin's My Bed.-Life:At the time of the My Bed incident ...

, jumped on the bed with bare torsos in order to improve the work, which they thought had not gone far enough. They called their performance Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey's Bed. The men also had a pillow fight on the bed for around fifteen minutes, to applause from the crowd, before being removed by security guards. The artists were detained but no further action was taken. Prior to its Tate Gallery showing, the work had appeared elsewhere, including Japan, where there were variant surroundings, including at one stage a hangman's noose hanging over the bed. This was not present when it was displayed at the Tate.

My Bed was bought by Charles Saatchi

Charles Saatchi

Charles Saatchi is the co-founder with his brother Maurice of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and led that business - the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s - until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year the Saatchi brothers formed a new agency called M&C...

 for £150,000 and displayed as part of the first exhibition when the Saatchi Gallery

Saatchi Gallery

The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art, opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985 in order to exhibit his collection to the public. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames and currently in Chelsea. Saatchi's collection, and...

 opened its new premises at County Hall

County Hall, London

County Hall is a building in Lambeth, London, which was the headquarters of London County Council and later the Greater London Council . The building is on the bank of the River Thames, just north of Westminster Bridge, facing west toward the City of Westminster, and close to the Palace of...

, London (which it has now vacated). Saatchi also installed the bed in a dedicated room in his own home.

Craig Brown

Craig Brown (satirist)

Craig Edward Moncrieff Brown is a British critic and satirist from England, probably best known for his work in Private Eye.-Biography:...

 wrote a satirical piece about My Bed for Private Eye

Private Eye

Private Eye is a fortnightly British satirical and current affairs magazine, edited by Ian Hislop.Since its first publication in 1961, Private Eye has been a prominent critic and lampooner of public figures and entities that it deemed guilty of any of the sins of incompetence, inefficiency,...

entitled My Turd. Emin's former boyfriend, former Stuckist

Stuckism

Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art...

 artist Billy Childish

Billy Childish

Billy Childish is an English artist, painter, author, poet, photographer, film maker, singer and guitarist...

, stated that he also had an old bed of hers in the shed which he would make available for £20,000.

See also

• Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995
• Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision
  Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision
  Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision is one of the best known paintings to come out of the Stuckism art movement, and a likely "signature piece" for the movement, standing for its opposition to conceptual art...
  
  

External links

• My Bed on the official Tate website: