Edward Hopper | Morning Sun | 1952
Tracey Emin | My Bed | 1998
ARTIST AND SOCIETY
An examination and comparison between
Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun and Tracey Emin’s My Bed
*this essay was the final assignment for Kingston School Of Art's Level 4 students*
Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun (1952) and Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) both tell a story about their respective alienation. Perhaps the best way to appreciate the art of Edward Hopper and Tracey Emin is not to look at what is present, but to go beyond and understand precisely what is absent means, this is perhaps the point of isolation. I will delve deep into this idea later in the essay. In the case study of Hopper and Emin’s respective works, I examine the relationship between the artists and their society as dialectical reactions, more specifically the existential being of an individual as a response to the gaping absurdity of their own existences.
Edward Hopper's Morning Sun is melancholic. The painting depicts a woman (modelled after the artist’s wife Jo Hopper) in a pink, silk dress, revealing her thighs and arms. She sits in a crouched position and gazes out at the window, directly facing the bright sun while contemplating in reverie. A seemingly simple picture, that is what spectators see. But one must ask what the woman sees. The spectators were misled by the title of the work which suggests that she is a direct spectator of the sun, yet the sun is not there. There is an illusion in the idea of presence and absence. In fact, in Hopper's other work, the sun is represented by the light that it shines, not its physical presence. Light in Hopper’s work exists as an abstract object itself. Art historian John Hollander remarked: ‘(the light in Morning Sun is) a formidable presence, an image of the meditative gazer's mind as the cast shadow on the bed is of her body.’ (1981) It is invisible, only by the contrast of hot and cold colours the painting provokes the sense that the outside is warm, the inside is cool, the spectators were granted a belief: that the sun is there, it exists as an omniscient entity, the subjects are affected by its presence. Yet what is invisible shall retain its invisibility for a reason.
This notion that I called 'invisibility', this same concept is explored by Immanuel Kant in Critique Of Judgement (1790), under the different name of 'the sublime'. 'Whereas natural beauty conveys a purposiveness in its form making the object appear', wrote Kant, '(…) without indulging in any refinements of thought, but simply an apprehension of it, excites the feeling of sublime'. Certainly, Hopper's craft and attentiveness to compositions, colours, and contrasts, may result in the picturesque, 'beautiful' result that we see in Morning Sun, but there is something sublime, that transcends what the spectators see, yet is quite out of reach. We might say that the form is merely the decoration of the formlessness, or in Kant’s words: 'the object lends itself to the presentation of sublimity discoverable in the mind'. In my view, this is what defines Morning Sun's sentimentality. The function of form is only to make the subject simply appear. There must lie a sense of formlessness under the materialised form of the painting that brings forth an intimate connection between spectators and the work. This is because physically, there is an existential disconnection between the spectators and the woman, she does not exist in the same world as the spectators do. She is a representation of a real being, while the spectators are real beings (assuming that being real is the ability to be aware of one’s own self that is capable of perceiving and being perceived). But there is an intangible connection, that even though we are incapable of directly interacting with the woman, there is still an intimate, dialectic reaction that brings forth the feeling of sublimity. In Morning Sun, the light finds presence in its very own absence, like how the presence of alienation is the absence of something quite intimate, quite transcendent. This is what I meant by writing 'not to look at what is present, but to go beyond and understand precisely what is absent means.' The absence is universal.
It is also universal that when we walk on the streets full of the presence of others, sometimes we feel an absence that grows within us, a disconsolate emptiness. It evokes the same feeling when we examine Morning Sun. I mentioned in the previous paragraph that there is an ‘existential disconnection between the spectators and the woman (in Morning Sun)’ - we exist in the world as a being, that is full of 'thingness', our thoughts, our emotions, our actions, yet we are put into a world of 'nothingness', or at least a perceived nothingness because even though we are capable of perceive another being, for that being is not us. In the same way, when we look at Hopper's Morning Sun, within us there is a system of representation (Hall, 1997), that recognizes images (the woman), concepts (the concept of alienation), and non-verbal languages (her posture), yet there is a terrifying vast of nothingness in between. Since ‘the sublimity is discoverable in the mind’, it can be argued that it is not the sun that the woman is gazing at, she is rather facing her own being, contemplating her isolated existence while confronting that nothingness. Spectators look at the woman the same way the woman looks at the sun, it is our surrender as a physical, existential being condemned to face nothingness. There is a divorce between a human as an existing being and the outside world that exists as ideas (and representations of ideas), that we are forced to experience life not directly to life, the same way the window provides an illusion of freedom, while the woman isolated in her hotel room, piercing through the window to perceive the sun.
In Tracey Emin’s My Bed, the idea of being, either to ‘be’ in the midst of absence or the absence of being in itself, resembles that of Morning Sun. It is a brutal representation of vulnerabilities, with spectators relating to the messiness of depression, loss, and heartbreaks. The work represents the emptiness that follows Emin’s own heartbreak, showing the mess of a bedridden, self-destructive bender: used condoms, empty vodka bottles, crumpled-up bed sheets. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Being And Nothingness (1943): 'It is certain that we cannot escape anguish because we are anguish.', the same way Emin is My Bed, it is her own anguish, she cannot escape the bed, because it is her. There are some similarities that can be made between this installation and Hopper's painting - both have a bed, both beds were used by a woman, and both depict a certain womanly hopelessness in an alienating urban society. The similarities do not stop there. Albeit, the most prominent similarities between the two work is that they act as the artists’ responses to society, and the alienation of modern life, by contrasting their existential position as small, vulnerable being confronting the vast, chaotic movements of life, using pain as their medium. They make art that spectators can relate to. This strikes a very familiar chord with Sartre's 'existentialism is humanism' view.
The most interesting difference between the two artworks is that in Hopper's work, the issue with women and isolation is represented by a presence of a female subject, while in Emin's work, the very same issue is represented by the absence of a female. The representation of a female is done by the dematerialization of the female as a concept. This is ‘the obvious opposition to form, the high degree of personal and emotional engagement' (1969) as Harald Szeeman wrote. The concept of a woman is represented by nothingness, the absence of a touchable, vulnerable subject, yet the brutal vulnerabilities of being a woman loom in this work. Yet, 'we still do not know how much less 'nothing' can be.', wrote Lucy Lippard (1997). My Bed is the usage of ‘nothing’, in order to represent ‘everything’. Yet the spectators still know that this bed was occupied by a woman, not by her presence: like the idea of the sun in Hopper's painting, the existential being of a woman is represented by what has separated from the woman herself. It is the used condoms that lie on the floor, the little puppy that suggests the owner of this bed has a feminine side, and the lifeless pair of leggings that seemingly camouflage on the unfolded sheets. Emin’s My Bed is Hopper’s Morning Sun, taking the physical presence of a woman away and replacing it with what she represents. Emin is not ‘there’, but she allows herself to be ‘seen’. An extract from psychiatrist R.D.Laing’s The Divided Self (1962) resonates with Emin’s work: ‘In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others.’ To put it shortly, to exist and to be aware of one’s own existence, is to permit oneself to be seen. Emin accepted this risk when displaying My Bed, her very permission to be seen by spectators is her permission to accept potential pain, as a homage to her past and to her own existence, her pain of being raped when she was 13 and her two abortions when she was 18. Emin’s work, in short, is about the acknowledgement of danger, of being gazed at, yet being brave enough to accept that very danger.
In My Bed, it is evident that the formlessness of her work is what Emin expects spectators to appreciate. It is certainly not a pleasurable experience to look at used condoms and period-stained clothing - the spectators were not expected to be gratified when looking at the installation. Critic Adrian Searle from The Guardian wrote: ‘the piece was endlessly solipsistic, self-regrading homage (...) Tracey, you bore me.’ Tate Liverpool curator Darren Pih even remarked: ‘it resembles a crime scene.’ But what Emin accomplished was the complete rejection of form, and through that also the rejection of empirical beauty to maximize interactivity with spectators. In Kant’s words, this is when ‘the mind has been incited to abandon sensibility, and employ itself upon ideas involving a higher purposiveness’. By refusing to rely on giving spectators the aesthetic pleasure that we are seeking when visiting an exhibition, Emin is also indirectly refusing us mere empirical delights, forcing spectators to perceive beauty without the external aesthetic phenomenon: colours and composition. Instead, we are given a cacophonic yet brutal portrait of female pain. Because pain is not harmonic, nor it is aesthetically pleasing: pain instead is violent and structureless, yet it solidifies us as who we are. Of course, pain can only be understood through one’s own experience, nobody can understand our own pain more than we do ourselves. But My Bed is about opening ourselves, with wounds that might or might not have healed, we realise that even though we are still very much alone in our sufferings, no matter how dreadful or agonizing, we are capable of being alone in our journey to heal. Even though Emin is in pain, it is her own pain, she can choose what to do with it. My Bed in a way is about choice, and Emin chose freedom, to solidify her existential position as an independent woman, capable of making her own decisions.
The voyeuristic vulnerabilities of Morning Sun also explored the idea of feminine pain, but the pain in Emin’s My Bed is more agonizing. No matter how sorrowful, how empty, how isolated the woman in Morning Sun is, she is still a representation, her existential being is a translation of her essence through the Hopper’s perception. As visceral as Morning Sun is, the painting is done by a man as a separate entity from his wife that is the subject. It creates a distance, which is deliberate in the case of Hopper. But that same approach would not be ideal for My Bed. The installation is confrontational, it is personal, the bed and everything that is around it are a portrait of her own being, and her contemplation of existing in the world as a woman, through the point of view of her own self-awareness as a woman, not through the gaze of a man. Unlike Hopper, the isolation in Emin's work is not melancholic, it is dreadful.
While Hopper's work is refined, Emin's work is raw. Still, both artworks despite their differences in style and approaches, are interesting examinations of human conditions, specifically the conditions of being alive. Both artists exist as an individual who is willing to expose their respective vulnerabilities, using the response of society to form a dialectical person-to-person connection.
Bibliography (in order of appearances)
Hollander, J., Hopper And The Figure Of Room, 1981
Kant, I., Critique Of Judgement, 1790
Hall, S., The Work Of Representations, 1997
Sartre, J., Being And Nothingness, 1943
Sartre, J., Existentialism Is Humanism, 1946
Szeeman, H., Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, 1969
Lippard, L. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, 1997
Laing, R.D., The Divided Self, 1962
Other readings:
White, K., This Edward Hopper Painting Has Been Called One of the ‘Ultimate Images of Summer.’, Artnet, 2020
Cohen, A., Tracey Emin’s My Bed Ignored Society’s Expectations Of Women, Artsy, 2018
Meis, M., The Empty Bed: Tracey Emin and the Persistent Self, 1998
Foucault, M., The Father’s No, 1962
Tracey Emin, Wikipedia
Edward Hopper, Wikipedia
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