On entering the large downstairs space of the Whitechapel Gallery to see Gillian Wearing's retrospective show I see, facing me on the far wall, a photograph made in 2000 of the artist wearing a mask, which is a replica of her own face. Self Portrait is the sole visual element in the room that attracts the gaze, an image that, at first glance, might be placed within the discourse and aesthetics of the family photograph, or one taken, perhaps, as a publicity shot. What might it mean to cover up one's features—that which makes us recognisable to another—with an exact copy; to provoke an uncanny consort between the strange and the familiar, the known and the unknown? In most of this main space, however, there is nothing to look at, it is taken up by a number of crate-like wooden cubicles encasing unseen screens, each showing a loop of Wearing's video art. On this first impression I wonder what is being exhibited; what might be veiled, what is yet to be revealed and about how that which is most illuminated may still leave us in the dark.
There are a lot of masks in Gillian Wearing's work. She wears them in photographic depictions of her family, in portraits of herself as Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol. Volunteers wear them
after responding to a classified ad Wearing places in 1994, Confess All on Video: Don't Worry, You will be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian…, or in the 2000 work, Trauma, or her 2009 video, Secrets and Lies. They are worn as disguise—to provoke anonymity in order to facilitate confession. They serve to allow the private to become public; the one who is masked becomes liberated, able to speak freely. The mask is put on, it seems, to reveal something of the subject behind it. Whereas an artist like Cindy Sherman, whose work also deals with performance and disguise, uses her self-image to create what Laura Mulvey thought of as a ‘phantasmagoria of the female body’—versions of femininity that range from the coquettish to the abject, the formless and the obscene—Wearing uses herself and others to reveal the hidden, the unsaid and the unsayable. Rather than employing a postmodern urge to mobilise the idea of the masquerade in order to disrupt and question assumptions of identity, subjectivity, gender and sexuality, Wearing refuses to maintain an ironic distance from herself or her subjects. Not the detached view afforded by the high-gloss fetishised Glanz of the art photograph, but an intimate and confrontational presence. Rather than an attempt to ‘defetishise’ the female body (Sherman's strategy of simultaneously veiling and revealing too much), or to react against the anxiety provoked by it, Wearing occupies the unstable territory that plays on the distinctions between public and private, fiction and reality and self and other.1
The first of these distinctions, between the public and the private, resonates throughout Wearing's work and, indeed, in the experience of viewing it. For example, in the first of the series of confessional videos she made asking for a response to her personal ad, Confess All…, ten participants admit to tales of cruel revenge, burglary, sexual predilections and, in a particularly moving piece, the effects on a middle-aged man of witnessing his siblings' sexual relationship when he was a child. These, essentially private and secret, thoughts are played out repetitively in the public space of the art gallery. To view them is to be complicit in some way—the small spaces in which these pieces are shown, like the space of the confessional booth, create an intimacy that both re-orders the public/private space and mirrors the private nature of the monologues. Are we as viewers engaged in a voyeuristic pleasure? Do we, priest-like, have a role to play in the absolution of the misdemeanours
of the participants, or are we intruding on something akin to a psychoanalytic session, creating an unwanted third, the silent and inactive listener? This parallel with what might take place in the consulting room is highlighted in the thirty minute piece, made in 2000, Trauma. Like Confess All, this sequence of eight monologues direct to camera consists of masked participants revealing often deeply disturbing tales of psychiatric treatment, sexual abuse and parental cruelty. This piece moves away from the idea of confession to something more distressing, more difficult to watch. On the day I saw the exhibition, a number of visitors were moved to tears, another private act, unexpectedly, shockingly, made public. Here the mask, rather than allowing for distance between us and the protagonists of the piece, creates a false sense of security, producing an opposite effect. Things are too close, the terrain, not of the pornographic confessional, but of a raw, unmediated representation—the obscene.
These pieces, as well as the 2009 video, Secrets and Lies, seek to reveal a certain truth behind the masquerades of everyday life and can be seen to follow on from her early and perhaps best known work, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say from 1992—3. In this sequence of forty-eight colour photographs, the artist asks members of the public to hold up sheets of paper on which they may write whatever is on their mind: ‘I'm desparate’, held up by a man in a suit; ‘I am depressed at the moment’, by a smiling woman in a blue dress, ‘Help’, a black policeman. Clearly this work points to the disparity between the public and the private, but also to questions around truth and fiction. Unlike the confessional series of videos, which might be seen to deal with a certain reality (a reality that is not unconnected to ‘reality television’ and programmes such as Oprah) these ‘truths’ seem more fluid, more prone to hyberbole, sloganising or proselytising. Two later video pieces take up this theme—that we can't quite believe what we are seeing and therefore that what we are seeing might not be worth believing—10–16 and 2 into 1, both made in 1997. The first of these uses the actual voices of children from ten to sixteen, which are then lip-synched by actors: the ten year-old talking about his tree house, ‘spoken’ by a middle-aged man on a sofa; the thirteen year-old speaking about his feelings towards his gay mother and her lover, mimed by a naked dwarf in a bathroom. What lies behind
Wearing's choices of mouthpiece for these children? Where can we find the truth? Has she interviewed children, gathering evidence, or does she provide a script? There is something of an acting out taking place, we can't tell whether it's the adult acting out the child's story, or the child acting out the artist's script; it remains veiled, inaccessible to notions of truth or fiction. In 2 into 1, a mother, utilising similar techniques as 10–16, speaks her sons' words and vice versa. So we hear and see one of the boys speaking the mother's words talking about her choice of men, or the mother speaking one of the boys' words talking about how she doesn't try very hard to make herself look presentable. Once again, Wearing is playing on the differences and similarities between the worlds of the adult and the child; to act in the place of the other and to let the other act for them.
The third marginal space that Wearing wants to occupy is concerned with the distinction between self and other and it is through two series of self-portraits that this theme is explored. In the first, made between 2003 and 2006, Wearing becomes the model for a recreation of a number of family photographs. She utilises prosthetics in order to ‘become’ her grandmother, her father, her brother, herself as a three year-old, at seventeen. The titles are telling; not portraits, but self-portraits These images, she wants to tell us, no matter how effective the prosthetics, how good the mask, are always her-self in a mimetic performance of otherness. The photograph as a document of truthful representation is put to the test and the viewer might be compelled to ask just what is being re-presented when the original is itself a photograph and the artwork before us is a trompe-l'oeil. As Lacan tells us in Seminar XI, the trompel'oeil works at the level of the lure; the bunch of grapes that Zeuxis paints doesn't need to be an accurate representation, it only needs to fool the birds. His rival, Parrhasios, however, paints a veil, so lifelike that he is asked by the stupefied Zeuxis what is painted behind it. This is precisely the question we ask of these self-portraits—what lies behind the mask? We, too, are duped by Wearing's artifice—as Zeuxis is fooled by Parrhasios—into conflating self and other, truth and fiction, the representation and the thing itself.2
Laura Mulvey's essay on Cindy Sherman, ‘A Phantasmagoria of the
Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman’ appeared in New Left Review, 188, 1991, pp. 136–150. For a contemporary view that begins to reassess the postmodern reading of Sherman's work, see Hal Foster's recent piece in The London Review of Books, Vol. 34, No. 9, 10 May 2012, p. 12.
See , The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1973, trans. , Penguin Books, 1977 (1994), pp. 65–119.