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BEATS OF LOVE 

180. Tracey Emin: a second life  & Nigerian Modernism: art and independence

A TATE double-header began with the predictably packed blockbuster Emin exhibition.

No sooner are you in than a big screen recounts her teenage time in Margate. I'd seen excerpts of Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995) on the South Bank show and felt the revenge footage a little hollow in its mockery. I still do. 

She was the most endearing YBA artist, the one we could relate to. And it was a blessed relief to reach My Bed (1998), the most compelling conceptual self portrait bar none and the reason for her lasting infamy. Everything else was a little less tender than I'd hoped and less fearless. That said, not taken on standalone merit but shot through the prism of a personality cult, the work is engaging and not without reverence.

The effect was that when I visited my favourite spiritual space, Rothko's Seagram Murals (1958-59), I was a little less transported than usual. Fortunately, I immersed myself in Nigerian Modernism after a strong coffee a little later. Work I'd only encountered in books suddenly gained vibrancy and purpose at scale, its pro-independence fervour made visceral by sheer size.

The Zaria Arts Society room, a melting pot of learning and leisure, is wild. The Black Orpheius magazines look so now but it's the paintings which radiate the colourful essences of a nightlife that first introduced us to Fela and the original fat bottomed girls. Whilst Ben Enwonwu's impressive room contained the expressive and dizzyingly rhythmic Monotony (1948), causing me to enthuse, I had to listen to the missus, who most admired the work of Nike Davies-Okundaye. 

It is fitting that, long after the Tate double-header ended, this trailblazing woman who valued the workshop culture of passing on folklore tradition should reverberate around my head, reminding me of Emin's textile-influenced work. Though they work in vastly different mediums and cultural contexts, their work is highly personal and evocative. Their motifs hold personal significance and are not merely decorative. Both are part taught but self-developed, which is why they're so original, I guess. 

European tutors encouraged individual self-expression rather than imitation, which makes a work like Davies-Okundaye's ultra-vivid The Finger that Feeds Never Lacks (1979) even more remarkable. Created long after the tutors had fled the civil war of the late sixties, it epitomises a constant need to create inherent in nearly all artists. 

It was only later, on the tube home, that Davies-Okundaye's work quietly reframed everything I'd seen, lending Emin's pieces an emotional charge I hadn't felt standing in front of them.