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Emin is screaming: Empathy as affirmative engagement in Tracey Emin's Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1988)

This published article constructs a reading of Tracey Emin’s short film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children as an affirmative encounter. It argues that the affective resonance of the film is not located solely at the level of what is represented, but is the occasion for an empathic encounter between artist-as-artwork and viewer-collaborator. By focussing on empathy as a critical response to Tracey Emin’s film, this article presents an alternative perspective that challenges the dominant interpretation of her practice as autobiographical and confessional. In contrast to such approaches, an empathetic reading such as the one proposed in this article, requires that the author affirm the experience of the artist/subject rather than treat it with suspicion, thus refusing to be bound by the parameters of conventional art historical critical models that centre on the veracity of Emin’s work (did the event she speaks of really happen, is her art autobiographically accurate?). The article therefore presents a new argument about Emin’s film and proposes an alternative direction of enquiry that deploys theories of empathy, developing a working definition of empathy that takes its cues from the affective pull of Emin’s film. It thus challenges the dominance of ‘representation’ as a way to understand art in favour of approaches that place affect and emotion at the centre of enquiry. The article argues for the productiveness of an approach to art works based on empathy research that has heretofore largely been confined to the realms of counselling, psychotherapy and social and developmental psychology.

An initial version of this article was delivered at ‘The Embodied Intellectual: “Impression” and “Contact” as Political Currency’ at the Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, Ideas, conference organised by Inter-Disciplinary.Net (Budapest, May 2008).