Tracey Emin.

TRACEY EMIN MUSEUM

Gustave Courbet has a lot to answer for. The Painter's Studio, 1855, his monumental autobiographical allegory, put the artist right at the center of the universe, and sanctioned the most extravagant kind of self-mythologization. Thirty-two-year-old Tracey Emin may seem a bit young to be opening her own museum, but that is precisely what she has done, having taken a five-year lease on a retail space near London's Waterloo Station and turned it into a combination artist's studio, gallery, and shop. The Tracey Emin Museum is open to the public only on Thursday and Friday afternoons, or by appointment, but most days the artist can be spotted working away in the back. The displays will continually evolve, yet one element is to remain constant: Emin's only subject is herself.

This being 1996 and this being Britain, the whole, somewhat egotistical enterprise is spiced with self-lacerating, sardonic wit - and there's a feminist twist as well. The museum is located in a grim street in a run-down area of the city. Inside the plate-glass window, a tacky neon sign, drenching the space in bloody pink light, announces "The Tracey Emin Museum." As visitors enter the space, which consists of a single split-level room subdivided by a partition, the artist gets up from her chaotic work table to greet them.

A video piece - a pathetic sequel to Fame entitled Why I Never Became a Dancer, 1995 - drones endlessly. The video tells of Emin's teenage years in Margate, a seaside resort in Southeast England that has seen better days. Wobbly, fragmented shots of the town - the beaches, the pier, the backstreets, and a main street that is called the "Golden Mile" - vie with a voice-over that is at once wistful and angry.

The story is rudimentary: during her early teenage years, Emin hung out with boys, and had casual and ubiquitous sex with both friends and strangers. When she entered a dance competition, hoping it would be her big break, her former lovers publicly humiliated her by shouting "slag." The video ends in apparent triumph, with Emin dancing alone in a chic London studio. The narrative may sound sensationalist to some, but Emin manages to make the piece hit home, her camera work and the voice-over conveying much of the frustration and anger that are part of small-town life. "Sex was something simple," she says with defiance. But as soon as she rationalizes, her morale collapses: "It was free, less than human, pathetic."

Splotchy monotypes in Prussian blue ink, extensions of her video memoirs, line the walls. These are done in a crudely schematic style, but the prickliness of Emin's marks makes the images appear to itch and smart. One imagines sand getting in everything, pigeons pecking at everything, salt eating into everything. Her panoramic Golden Mile, 1995, resembling a late work by Raoul Dufy fashioned from barbed wire, contains an awkward tangle of flealike bodies hinting at hasty open-air sex.

In all of these tenuous images, human beings are small, weedy, indeterminate. The single full-page close-up is a crotch shot, a scrawled pastiche of Courbet's L'Origine du Monde (The origin of the world, 1866). This appropriated image may represent for Emin a wry, perhaps bitter invocation of the humiliations of her teenage years, but some twenty years later it is clear that she has assumed control of her own destiny.

- James Hall