From the Week of Hell (1995)

Tracey Emin

SPUC’s Dr Daniel Frampton encounters six compelling artworks spanning 900 years of art history, including film, and examines each work from an openly pro-life perspective in a unique cycle of short essays that aim to be educational and contemplative – revealing, too, the powerful role art can play in advocating for a true culture of life that speaks truth to power in a world that has lost its moral centre.

This week, Daniel reflects on Tracey Emin’s “From the Week of Hell”.

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Art isn’t necessarily pretty, even if we might like it to be. While my previous selections have all been aesthetically and spiritually beautiful, Tracey Emin’s “From the Week of Hell”, as the title implies, is a depiction of hell conveyed in an appropriately unrefined, ugly way.  

Hell has been depicted before, of course, within the Western canon in which Hell, the place, was regarded as a frightful reality, most especially by the medieval peoples of Europe. Hieronymus Bosch is the most notable exponent of this type of hell: a diabolical landscape of bizarre tortures and even stranger creatures; a theological certainty that dominated the collective imagination of Christendom.

But as Western culture has become increasingly secularised, our notions of hell have gradually turned into a vaguer conception of the “hellish”, more adjective than noun, often referring to an experience or state of being in the here and now.

The artist Emin had such a hellish experience when she had abortions in the early 1990s, taking place within the hellscape of an abortion chamber. But “From the Week of Hell” also depicts a state of being as well as a place, in which both physical and spiritual violence is waged on the human being.

Art reflects the society that has had a hand in its creation. This is very much true of Emin’s art. “From the Week of Hell” appears as a crude scribble, showing Emin naked on the abortionist’s table, alongside the diabolical figure of the abortionist standing over her with what appears to be some sort of abortion instrument. There is a stark truth here in these ink scrawls that appears almost too explicit to bear.

There is nothing refined or accomplished in this image. But this is entirely apt for the terrible subject it portrays. While we may aspire to the beautiful, we should not cover up the ugly, brutal reality that has come to define our modern world – a dark domain, indeed, where the lives of millions of unborn children are made to disappear in circumstances that would defy even Bosch’s considerable imagination.

While Bosch’s images of Hell are fascinating and even at times amusing, Emin’s hell is something quite different. Other artists have portrayed acts of violence beautifully – think of Caravaggio’s “The Beheading of John the Baptist”, for example. But it would be beyond even the capabilities of Caravaggio to create a beautifully poised picture of abortion. Indeed, out of all the gruesome acts that have been depicted throughout the history of art, abortion remains the only act of violence that has almost entirely been denied artistic representation, even in film.

As difficult as it might be for us to take in Emin’s attempt to visualise her “Week of Hell”, then, it does, I think, communicate an essential truth about the act and ethic of abortion that must at some point be confronted, as Emin has tried to do here, reflecting her own encounter with abortion.

Throwing her paintings into a skip, Emin wouldn’t paint for two years after her abortion. “I couldn’t stand the smell of oil paint… It made me feel really sick. I stopped painting.” When she did finally return to her art, her art would be “about memory… but memories of violence and pain”, including abortions in 1990 and 1994.

While Bosch’s hypothetical Hell appears eccentric and far-off, Emin’s hell is a hellish reality for women and their unborn children, a hell that is at once immediate and horrifyingly real. Even if we have not personally encountered this hell, we must look – yes, do look. For that is one of the purposes of art, to make us look at those inconceivable horrors, those everyday hells that lurk just around the street corner in an ostensibly safe suburb.

Read last week's article by Dr Daniel Frampton here.