ARTIST PRESENTATION: GILLIAN WEARING

A PRESENTATION OF BRITISH CONCEPTUAL ARTIST GILLIAN WEARING 

BY MIKAYLA GAUTHIER

ORIGINS

Gillian Wearing was born in 1963 in Birmingham, England. She received her BFA in 1990 and it is notable that she graduated at Goldsmiths College where she became one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).

Wearing was 21 when she first acted on her interest in art. She became intrigued by animators painting film cells at her job at an animation studio in Soho’s Golden Square. Upon the animator’s suggestion, Wearing applied to a foundation course at Chelsea where she eventually went on to studying at Goldsmiths.

Wearing is considered lucky for the timing in which she decided to practice art, as her generation overturned the idea that it was next to impossible to have a job as a practising working artist. Gillian Wearing found herself as a part of the YBAs, a famous group of young artists who graduated from Goldsmiths in the late 1980’s that exhibited art together. Soon after her graduation in 1997, she won the Turner Prize for her work, which is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50, organized by the Tate Gallery.

ARTIST CONTEMPORARIES

Gillian Wearing is linked to artists of the YBA including Damien Hirst and Tracy Emins. However, when compared to these artists who often use shock factor in their works Wearing is noted for taking a more subtle approach to her themes.

Damien Hirst, “A Thousand Years”, 1990 = not so subtle

It is said that Wearing has never really conformed to the YBA stereotype; she is modest and polite. Through the use of subtle photographs and films, Wearing examines ordinary people and how they present themselves in public and private spaces.

THEMES

Gillian Wearing explores the nature of identity and the complexities of personality. She uses interview and documentary as apparatuses for her work.  After she graduated from Goldsmiths, Wearing started creating portraits of individuals that revealed their innermost thoughts. She believes that everyone has a secret and her works aim to expose them without necessarily exposing the individual. I wonder if Wearing’s intent is to emphasize the quirks of humanity that are often hidden by embarrassment or fear of confrontation.

Wearing’s work tends to focus on the lives of others. When she steps into the frame, her presence is described to be entirely elusive. The sense of Wearing being there and not there became a theme of hers. Another theme of Wearing is “masks” –literal and metaphorical.

A subject wearing a mask from her “Confess all on video. Don’t worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian…” series, 1994.

She uses masks as a central theme in her videos and photographs which range from silicone mask disguises to voice dubbing. These masks conceal the identity of her subjects and allow them to reveal their most intimate secrets.

WORKS

Wearing’s breakthrough work was a series of around 600 photographs called “Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say” (1992, 1993).

In this piece, passers-by hold up messages they wrote on sheets of paper. Participants include a black policeman who holds up a sign saying “Help”, and a man dressed for a white-collar job holding up the words, “I’m desperate”. These signs allowed for a deep connection to strangers in Britain who would not normally expose their secrets and thoughts so openly to other strangers. This work became highly influential as it was produced before the likes of Facebook and Twitter, which have now made it common and socially acceptable to express personal feelings and comments to the world.

The curator of her Whitechapel exhibition Daniel Herrmann comments, “Gillian coined a number of aesthetics during the Nineties that are mainstream now. She was 20 years ahead of her time.” Gillian’s themes are intriguing to individuals and artists who seek a sense of greater identity.

Dancing in Peckham”, 1994 is one of my personal favourites by Wearing. In this video piece, Wearing dances aggressively in a south London shopping mall, by herself, while shoppers pass her by without intervening. Although Wearing is in a public space, her dance moves are outrageous and remind me of the saying “Dance like no one is watching” despite the fact that she is in a public space.

She dances for 25 minutes in total confidence, to music in her head, while the audio track of the video is of shoppers conversing, vehicle engines starting, and store music clashing together.  It becomes clear that Wearing is completely disengaged with the space she is physically in, and completely involved in the space she created in her head.

Wearing found inspiration for this piece when she was wandering around a jazz show and came across a woman madly dancing by herself.

“This woman caught my eye. She was completely separate. She was dancing not in sync with the music at all. She was caught in the moment.” –Gillian Wearing

Wearing characterises her art as a “type of portraiture” which is evident in her work “2 into 1”, 1997. In this piece, Wearing collaborated with a mother and her twin sons to create an unsettling documentary about their relationships. Wearing filmed the mother and children separately and asked them to talk about each other.

She then asks the children to lip sync the audio of their mother, and asks the mother to lip sync the audio of her children, dubbing the voices over each clip. The result is an intense interaction between a mother and her sons who reveal a very raw view of each other. It is intriguing that the family members had to listen to the harsh criticism and comments of their family about themselves, and then participate in lip syncing those comments while being recorded. This work is said to have dramatically changed documentary practices that long for objective truths.

 

INSPIRATIONS

Wearing’s education during her foundation program at Chelsea inspired her appreciation for Old Masters of art. This has been commented on as a surprise, since she belongs to the generation of YBAs who have “shocked their way to prominence during the Nineties”.

She loved Rembrandt because she sensed there was something far richer going on underneath the surface of the oils, that there was somebody really there.

Wearing was also influenced by film such as Michael Apted’s ongoing series of documentaries that began in 1964 called “Seven Up”. Apted followed a group of seven year old British children from widely ranging background who are interviewed in seven year intervals to reveal how their lives have progressed. Wearing has described her method as “editing life”. Her photographs and videos target ordinary people and explore dualities such as the individual and society, voyeurism and exhibitionism, fiction and fact, and public and private life.

 

References:

GILLIAN WEARING: TRAUMA AND THE UNCANNY

Gillian Wearing: Everyone’s got a secret

2 Into 1 (Gillian Wearing, 1997)

Gillian Wearing: ‘I’ve always been a bit of a listener’

Gillian Wearing – Turner Prize winner 1997

Dancing in Peckham, Gillian Wearing (1994)

 

Party Art – Consider Submitting to Nuit Rose

Everyone should consider submitting their party art piece to Nuit Rose, described as “a queer contemporary art event” that takes place annually in Toronto’s Church-Wellesley and Queen West neighbourhoods. This years is happening on June 25, 2016.

A link to their submission guidelines and more information below:

http://nuitrose.ca/call-for-expressions-of-interest/

Submissions are due March 10th!

Conflict Kitchen

Located in Pittsburgh (USA), Conflict Kitchen is a restaurant that serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. Each Conflict Kitchen iteration is augmented by events, performances, publications, and discussions that seek to expand the engagement the public has with the culture, politics, and issues at stake within the focus region. The restaurant rotates identities in relation to current geopolitical events. Past versions served food from Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Palestine, and Venezuela. The current iteration is focused on Iran.

Each Conflict Kitchen iteration is augmented by events, performances, publications, discussions, and workshops that seek to expand the engagement that the public has with the perspectives of people living within each region of focus and their culture. Conflict Kitchen has also given lectures and presentations nationally and internationally at festivals, universities, community centres, libraries, and private gatherings.

conflict kitchen conference

Conflict Kitchen was developed and is co-directed by artists Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski.

Follow Conflict Kitchen on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Lee Walton

Lee Walton is an artist working in new media, social practice, video, performance, net art, drawing, and social media. Walton collaborates with numerous participants and practitioners from diverse fields and across disciplines, and has led commissioned projects for museums, institutions and cities both in the US and internationally. He is also Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Director of Social Practice.

Momentary Performances

On his website, Lee Walton writes: “For Momentary Performances (2008-2010), I used vinyl text on city walls to announce ordinary moments that will take place. These texts are installed throughout the city weeks prior to each performance. Nearly 20 of these public works took place in Minnesota and Atlanta.

After acting out the script exactly on schedule, actors casually disappear into the city as if completely unaware of the descriptive text. Unexpected public is left to wonder about the reality of the serendipitous occurrence.”

 

Birthday Wishes (For Friends I Don’t Really Know)

Birthday Wishes (For Friends I Don’t Really Know) (2002 – present) is an on-going series of intimate videos wishes for people I don’t really know. Personal information is culled from the recipient’s social media feeds and used to create the feeling that we are close friends. These videos are delivered to recipients on the day of their birthday. … These videos also question privacy and how social media is changing the way we define and understand our relationships to one another.”

 

Father and Daughter View the Exhibition

Walton Father and Daughter

Father and Daughter View the Exhibition was an artwork I created for the exhibition “More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s,” at the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC.

For this performance, I scheduled 43 actual father and daughter pairs to view the exhibit each day – precisely from 4:00 to 4:30 p.m. throughout the run of the exhibition. Pairings of all different ages participated. A text piece inside the museum informed viewers of the performance.

The intention of this work was to create a unique, unforgettable art experience Fathers and Daughters. Turning the traditional function of the art museum inside out, the viewing of the exhibition became the art experience. By framing this activity, the event was elevated to the relevance of the artworks in the museum, thus giving value to the ephemeral moments of our lives.”

 

Video Performances

“My video performances are often situational and involve interactions, altercations and musings with (and through) public spaces.”

 

Average Point of Interest

average_point_web

The Average Point of Interest in San Francisco is a piece Lee Walton made where he took the mathematical average of all 287 points of interest according to the Official Visitor’s Map of San Francisco. Using the map coordinates of each point, he found that this “average point of interest” is located on Flint Street off 15th avenue near Corona Heights.

Basil AlZeri

Basil AlZeri is a Palestian artist based in Toronto working in performance, video, installation, food, and public art interventions/projects. His work is grounded in his practice as an art educator and community worker. He explores the intersections between the quotidian and art, and strives for interactions with the public, using social interactions and exchanges to create gestures of generosity.

AlZeri’s performance work has been shown across the Americas.

The Mobile Kitchen Lab

AlZeri Basil artinfo_mobilekitchenlab_01

With The Mobile Kitchen Lab (2010 – present), AlZeri performs simple and generous gestures, inviting his guests to identify the Palestinian stories of land, resources and labour that are built into his recipes.

Initiated in 2010, his durational performances feature live projected instructions provided by his mother, Suad, via Skype.

Hear a radio interview on the project here.

Pull, Sort, Hang, Dry and Crush

Pull, Sort, Hang, Dry and Crush (2014) was an interactive performance involving food crops and their re-plantation. In this performance, wild thyme plants that had been transported over thousands of kilometres were re-purposed through the processes of drying, crushing and storing. AlZeri spoke of the plants’ origin and in so doing re-created the Zaatar mix using his mother’s technique.

 

Life of a Craphead

Life of a Craphead is the performance art group of Amy Lam and Jon McCurley since 2006. LOAC live and work in Toronto, Canada.

Life of a Craphead have presented work nationally and internationally, including at The Art Gallery of Ontario; and performed at many comedy shows including at the UCB Theatre, Los Angeles & New York City. They have also been artists-in-residence at the Macdowell Colony; the Banff Centre; Wunderbar, Newcastle, UK; and Flux Factory, NYC.

 

Musical Road

Musical Road (2007) was a project that involved Lam and McCurley dressing as construction workers and using an industrial concrete saw to cut a series of lines into the surface of Yonge Street, in Toronto. They claim that the vibration produced by cars driving over this obstruction creates music, and that thereby the work is a public service.

 

Drugs in Our Stuff

LOAC Drugs

With Drugs in Our Stuff (2032), LOAC alienates almost all potential markets for its works by adding illegal substances to all costumes and props from past performances. Anyone wishing to buy these artifacts will have to sign a legally binding document that simultaneously acknowledges they are purchasing drugs and so guarantees they will be punished by law.

 

Free Lunch

Free Lunch (2007) was a project in which LOAC used money from a small grant to purchase of one of each item on the menu of a Toronto Chinese restaurant and provided free lunch for anyone who saw their classified listing or visited by chance.

 

Doored

Doored (2012-2015) was a monthly performance art & comedy show. Over the course of four years, there were 30 Dooreds held at Double Double Land — a venue located in Toronto’s Kensington Market — with occasional shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Past shows are streamable here.

Mammalian Diving Reflex

Founded in 1993 and based in Germany and Canada, Mammalian Diving Reflex is a research-art atelier dedicated to investigating the social sphere. Mammalian creates site and social-specific performance events, theatre-based productions, gallery-based participatory installations, video products, art objects and theoretical texts. They create work that recognizes the social responsibility of art, fostering a dialogue between audience members, between the audience and the material, and between the performers and the audience. In all its forms, the company’s work dismantles barriers between individuals of all ages, cultural, economic and social backgrounds.

Mammalian is co-led by a three-director team, consisting of Darren O’Donnell, Eva Verity, and Jenna Winter. Their work has been presented around the world in more than fifty cities.

 

Haircuts By Children

haircuts by children 01

Haircuts by Children is a performance about trust, children’s rights, generosity and vanity, where children between the ages of 8-12 are trained by professional hairstylists, and then paid to run a real hair salon, offering members of the public free haircuts. The project invites the consideration of young people as creative and competent individuals whose aesthetic choices can be trusted.

First created in 2006, the most recent iterations of this touring performance took place in Kuopio, Finland (2015) and Whitehorse (2016).

 

Eat the Street

Eat the Street is an intervention into the city, in which a group of ten- to twelve-year-olds makes stops at several of a city’s most notable eateries. They are feted and fed, and charged with offering their brutally honest, uncensored opinions on the food, the service, the decor, the state of the washrooms and the charm of the waiters. For the mere cost of a meal, the public is invited to sit amongst the kids for a front-row view of the youthful connoisseurs in action. The panel of pre-adolescent adjudicators then holds an uproarious awards ceremony where awards are bestowed for everything from “Most Delicious” and “Coolest Chef” to “Least Graffiti in the Washroom”.

 

Please Allow Us the Honour of Relaxing You

Honour_of_Relaxing

Please Allow Us the Honour of Relaxing You occurred during the Open Engagement conference, October 11-13, in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. In collaboration with the First Nations University, Darren O’Donnell organized an opportunity for the participants of Open Engagement to massage the students and staff of the First Nations University.

Please Allow Us the Honour of Relaxing You gently acknowledged that, in our society, stress and relaxation are unevenly distributed and attempted to redistribute some tranquility – if only momentarily.

Slow Dance With Teacher

Slow-Dance-with-Teacher-cropped1-e1353970012242

For Slow Dance With Teacher, 24 teachers from a variety of Universities and schools were available for a slow dance. In the spectacularly lit Great Hall at Hart House, warmed by a blazing fire and a few glasses of scotch, Slow Dance With Teacher let desiring viewers fulfill life-long fantasies.

Machine Project

Machine Project describes itself as firstly a storefront in Los Angeles, but also an informal educational institution, and a loose group of artists and collaborators, but also an incorporated non-profit functioning on donations, members and volunteers .

Soundings, Bells at the Hammer Museum.

Hammer Museum Public Engagement Artist-In-Residence Program: Machine Project, July 17, 2010

The Hammer Museum invited the public to participate in ‘everyone in a place’, a day-long sound installation by Chris Kallmyer. The work was composed of the sounds of visitors wearing bells issued to them upon arrival, and their subsequent wanderings through museum spaces. Bell related sound pieces took place throughout the day, including circulating ice cream carts, an animatronic Bell Santa Gamelan in the museum’s coatroom, a solo amplified-bell performance, and an African bell ensemble.

Admission to the museum was free of charge to all participants.

A Year in the Life of a Coatroom Machine Project
2009-2010

Hammer Museum Public Engagement
Artist-in-Residence Program

Sound curated by Chris Kallmyer
Video edited by Ann Hadlock

Featuring Karina Kallas & Jason Yoshida, Emily Lacy, Joshua Beckman & Anthony McCann,Walter Kitundu & Robin Sukhadia, Chris Kallmyer,Andrew Conrad & Colin Woodford,Derde Verde,DanRae Wilson & Miriam Jones, Kim Free,Jessica Catron & Orin Hildestad, Tommy Santee Klaws, Carmina Escobar, Melinda Rice & Chris Votek, Brendan Carn, Andrew McIntosh, Casey Anderson, Scott Cazan & Chris Kallmyer, Andrew McIntosh & Andrew Tholl, Corey Fogel, Daniel Corral & Isaac Schankler, Luke Storm & Doug Tornquist, Brian Walsh and James Sullivan, Scott Cazan & Chris Kallmyer, and Rats.

Houseplant Vacation: 

From their website, machine project describes their project below:

“The Hammer invites you to give your houseplant a vacation during our August Cultural Retreat for Plants. Throughout the entire month participants plants will be installed in the light flooded linbrook terrace, and presented with a series of readings, performances and musical events for plants. Plant portraiture provided by Lisa Anne Auerbach. We will provide a dedicated (one-way and auto-answering) phone line connected to a loudspeaker should you wish to call in and speak to your plants.”