Gillian Wearing is a British artist who works mostly
in video. Born in 1963, she won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1997. Mass
Observation has been published to accompany an exhibition of the same name
that will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, October 2002 –
January 2003 and at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia,
September – December 2003. The book
contains two essays, one by Dominic Molon, Associate Curator of the MCA, and
the other by Barry Schwabsky author of The
Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art, along with
68 pages of plates from her work, an artist’s biography and a bibliography of
writing about Wearing.

Wearing’s work portrays people. She is interested in how people live, how
they present themselves, and what they think. 
Her work presents people in unusual ways, upsetting normal
expectations. For example, here is
Molon’s description of the 4 minute piece from 1997, 2 into 1.

"In this work, a middle-aged mother, Hilary,
and her two sons, Alex and Lawrence, lip-synch to recordings of one another’s
voices so that they seem to be describing themselves as the other sees
them." (p. 16)

Maybe her best known work is a
series of photographs from 1992-93, Signs
that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else
wants you to say. Ordinary people
are pictured holding up signs containing their own words, written in their own
hands. An older man stands on a busy
street squinting at the camera, his sign saying, "What is it?". A young man in a suit and tie stands on a
quiet street next to a doorway, his sign saying, "I’m desperate." Equally gripping is Confess all on Video. Don’t worry, you will be in disguise. Intrigued? 
Call Gillian, (1994) in which the participants in a 30 minute video
tell the camera some of the bad things they have done.

It’s a shame that we are not able to
view the videos, since the reader cannot get much sense of their power from
still images. This deficiency makes the
book less interesting to potential purchasers. 
The essays by Molon and Schwabsky are useful, writing thoughtfully about
Wearing’s work and providing a clear introduction to the artist. But they do
not discuss all the work contained in the book, specifically leaving out a
series of photographs titled A Woman
Called Theresa from 1998. Without
explanation or context, these image leave the reader unnecessarily mystified as
to their meaning. There is also no index, making it harder to find information
about the works.

Molon mentions that Wearing is
influenced by important works of television documentary of British live, Franc
Roddam and Paul Watson’s 1974 series The
Family and Michael Apted’s series of documentaries starting with 7 Up (1964) (the most recent documentary
in the series is 42 Up). It’s also helpful to compare Wearing to her
British peer, Richard Billingham. 
Billingham’s book Ray’s a Laugh
showed his parents as they are in their everyday lives, in their difficult
relationship, dominated by his father’s alcoholism and their physical tussles. Billingham’s pictures are direct and moving,
yet they also provoke the viewer to wonder about the action of showing one’s
family to the world in such an unflattering light. Wearing also is interested in alcohol: her 1997-99 23-minute work
Drunk is a three-screen black and
white video projection with sound, and her 40 minute video on six screens from
2001 titled Broad Street both show
people drinking.

"Drunk
presents terminal drunks in a blank white room where their fighting, cursing,
and imminent collapse into unconscious oblivion become an almost
laboratory-like exercise in human observation" (Molon, p. 23.)

Broad Street is about the ritual of a
night out on the town. Wearing’s approach
is far less personal than Billingham’s; she rarely figures in her own work, and
when she does, she normally is in some form of disguise. Her style is gripping yet at the same time
she keeps her distance from her viewer – she is not confessing or trying to
convince her viewer to agree with her. 
There’s also more obvious devices in her work aimed to defuse the
temptation to think that she is simply showing the world as it is; some of her
pieces use actors, and her approach is nearly always to show people in unusual
settings, not simply as they are in their everyday lives. It seems clear that she wants to make the
viewer reexamine her relation to the people portrayed and question normal
assumptions.  

Wearing’s artistic creations do have
political relevance – they certainly draw attention to gender and class issues –
yet they seem more about psychology in the way people relate to others and describe
themselves. She is not subverting our
conceptions of normality, although she does heighten her viewers’ sense of the
bizarreness of everyday life. Neither
is she trying simply to show in existentialist fashion the impossibility of
true communication and the pervasiveness of self-deception leading to
individual isolation, even though those themes do seem present in her bleaker
works. The importance of her work lies
rather in its power in making the viewer call into question her normal
perception of the world. While Mass Observation may not be the best
introduction to her work, it is at least a start, and the associated
exhibitions should bring this extraordinarily provocative work to a wider
audience.

© 2002 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College,
Long Island. He is editor of Metapsychology Online Review. His main
research is on philosophical issues in psychiatry. He is especially interested
in exploring how philosophers can play a greater role in public life, and he is
keen to help foster communication between philosophers, mental health
professionals, and the general public.

Categories: ArtAndPhotography