Mattress, Beds and Modern Art
Our mattress and beds are for most of us places where we sleep and relax, but one artist has certainly caused some restless nights with her exhibition, My Bed.
Mattress and beds may seem like innocuous places for the majority of us. But when you consider the importance of a mattress and the role beds play in our lives, it's no wonder that artist Tracey Emin has chosen beds and mattresses as a major theme in her art work. Our mattress and beds are where major events in our life take place.
Mattress, Beds and Art
Getting a good night's sleep impacts on our physical as well as our mental health. In fact, research has shown time and again links to poor sleeping habits and sleep deprivation to serious diseases and an increase in accidents on the road and in the workplace. But our mattress and beds aren't just important for regular and routine sleep. The artist Tracy Emin highlights the fact that our beds are places where we struggle with a range of emotions encompassing love, sex, birth and death. As well as beds being crucial to our well being, a mattress can be a place of high drama and of life changing events, as well as places where our subconscious battles with the waking world on a nightly basis.
The Bed: The Controversy
Whether it's sweet dreams or scary nightmares, the mattress as a symbol clearly has the power to provoke and inspire. Tracy Emin, the notorious winner of the Turner Prize best known for her exhibit My Bed, provokes endless column inches for her work. The Bed was unmade, featuring a dirty mattress, used condoms and blood-stained underwear. The mattress that featured in The Bed was exhibited at the Tate in 1999 and still has notoriety today.
Jumping on the Mattress – Is it Art?
Our mattress and beds should be places of comfort – temples to sleep. The bed in Emin's exhibit was the same mattress she got up from after being confined to her bed for several days after a suicidal depression. But not everybody appreciated her use of the mattress – beds are not traditionally considered great artworks (unless a naked beauty is painted, lying on the mattress!) Emin's conceptual work was certainly lost on two performance artists who famously jumped on the mattress in the Tate. Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi leaped on the bed to, they said, 'improve' on the artwork before having a pillow fight in the gallery. They called their performance: Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey's Bed.
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