Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee at the Musée d’art contemporaine

Gillian Wearing's facial features

By: Lauren Consky

Posted: 3/18/03

Gillian Wearing is a social spectator who digs into the idiosyncrasies of humans with her artwork. Her current exhibit, Mass Observation, at the Musée d'art contemporain was inspired by a group of British sociologists in the 1960s who observed the British masses in a time when one studied exotic people. Her art is accessible yet poignant. She is an artist who goes into the social field and works with everyday people to create documentary-style conceptual art. "A great deal of my work is about questioning handed-down truths," Wearing has said. "I'm always trying to find ways of discovering new things about people, and in the process discover more about myself."

Wearing questions how much we can determine about someone's personality by looking at a person's face and facial expressions. She makes a point to show that the face does indeed determine one's personality. In "Self-Portrait 2000", Wearing takes a photo of herself wearing a mask. It is intended to be deliberately misleading because one cannot establish what she wishes to express. The use of the masks is not a new phenomenon; the photo is an allusion to Oscar Wilde's The Truth of Masks, whereby he explains that the mask conceals, yet allows for more. In fact, one may be more truthful through the use of a disguise.

Wearing exploits this idea in "Trauma", where she allows people to choose a mask and confess on video. Through the concealment of people's identities (with only the eyes showing), her subjects talk about things that they normally wouldn't. It is unnerving to see tragic and depressing stories told through dispassionate masks. At the same time, however, the mask is liberating in a sense, because it allows the people to say what they want, and not what others want them to say.

The artist forces the viewer to look at everyday people and events through a new lens. For example, in her 1997-99 work, "Drunk", she compels her viewers to observe, on three giant screens, the street drunks of East London. Wearing invited the vagrants into her studio, and asked them to act as they normally would. Juxtaposed in front of a white background, the viewer is required to focus solely on the peculiar behaviours of the men and women, without the distractions of the usual street bustle.

Her art is well-recognized in Britain, where she won the Turner Prize in 1997 for "60 Minute Silence", a life-size video of three rows of police officers posing for a picture and forced to stand still for an hour. The piece is an endurance test, where the men and women fidget like little children. The chef-d'ouvre comes near the end, when the most rigid policeman lets out a scream of frustration

Wearing allows everyday people to participate in the political and cultural commentary with her work, "Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that someone else wants you to say, 1992-93". She randomly photographed people on the streets of London who had written the first things that came to mind, such as a business-attired man holding a sign that reads, "I'm desperate". Another quite humourous one was "Thought about being a gigolo but I'm worried about the health risks". Her idea was later adopted for a Volkswagen advertising campaign.

In "10-16 (1997)", a mother and her two impertinent boys' voices are switched. Wearing explores the psychological exchange between the mother and the boys. The effect is one that is creepy and psychologically charged.

Wearing's subjects have their roots in the everyday and the real world, and have experiences which are often left out of art. She claims that her work is: "Not in any way an argument against the idea of high art, Minimalism or anything like that, it's not set up against that, or rebelling against it. When I began taking photographs I thought they might work better in magazines, in a journalistic sense, rather than as art." This frankness and accessibility allows her art to appeal to a mass observation.