Gillian Wearing, Self-Portrait, framed chromogenic print, 2000 (collection of Sherry and Joel Mallin, New York)
GILLIAN WEARING: WEARING MASKS
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Panel discussion: Thursday, April 21, free with RSVP, 2:00
Thursday – Monday through June 13, $18-$25, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-423-3500
www.guggenheim.org
In her five-minute 2018 short film Wearing, Gillian, British artist Gillian Wearing repeats, “I’m Gillian Wearing.”
But who is Gillian Wearing? In the revealing exhibition “Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks,” continuing at the Guggenheim through June 13, the fifty-eight-year-old Turner Prize winner explores the idea of “Gillian Wearing” through film, sculpture, photography, painting, and installation, putting viewers in the position of asking themselves who they are as well.
Part of the Young British Artists movement of the late 1980s and early ’90s, Wearing focuses on self-portraiture very differently from such near-contemporaries as Cindy Sherman, who disguises herself as real and fictional characters in cinematic and art-historical tableaux as she explores gender and identity, and Lucas Samaras, whose vast output includes an endless array of self-imagery in multiple formats.
Wearing often uses masks — the show was conceived well before the Covid-19 pandemic — on herself and others to challenge who we are and how we are seen. “I do not like to be on this side of the camera. I’d much rather be on the other side of the camera,” she says in Wearing, Gillian. “Watching me being me alienates me from me, and I don’t recognize myself.” In the film, performers, and Wearing herself, wear AI digital masks of her face. “It’s really about putting myself on the line, and that comes from the risk of being judged and laying myself bare to people’s judgments, but . . . such is life.” Those kinds of feelings are not unique to Wearing, particularly in the social media age, when so many people can engage in sophisticated self-display, creating whatever image they want and hiding behind it for myriad reasons.
Gillian Wearing, 60 Minutes Silence, color video projection, with sound, 1996 (Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London)
Spread across four galleries, the exhibition welcomes you into Wearing’s intriguing world, where nothing is quite what it seems. For Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say, Wearing asked strangers on London streets to write down something about themselves on sheets of paper and then photographed them holding up the signs, which now evoke early Facebook posts. “Everything is connected in life,” one man writes. “The point is to know it and to understand it.”
At first, 60 Minutes Silence might appear to be a photograph of twenty-six uniformed police officers arranged in three rows, but it is actually an hourlong video in which the cops try to maintain their position, moving as little as possible. It’s a kind of reversal, since part of a police officer’s job is to keep a close eye on the public, but now we’re watching them. In addition, seeing the 1996 piece in 2022 makes us think not only of the raging controversy over police brutality but also of diversity: We also can’t help but notice that there are only five women and two people of color. In Confess All on Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian . . . , people in masks and wigs share extremely personal stories on a split screen in a large booth, again presaging social media.
But Wearing most often is looking at herself. Me and My Ideal Self features photographs of Wearing placed under glass in a custom frame; on the front panel is an elongated photo of Wearing standing in heels on a wooden box, as if not wanting anyone to see what’s inside. She takes self-portraits of herself as her grandparents, her brother, and other family members, of herself at three, seventeen, and twenty-seven (portraits from fifty to seventy appear on the wallpaper), and of herself as seminal photographers Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Weegee, Claude Cahun, Henry Fox Talbot, and August Sander, the photographer who set out to document German society in People of the Twentieth Century.
There are also video portraits, a collection of masks, a pair of busts of Wearing nearly kissing each other, a prosthetic Wearing head dangling on an immense charm bracelet with other body parts, and Polaroids she took of herself in the 1990s, sans masks. Throughout it all, her eyes, or the eyes of others in masks of her face, are always visible, looking right at the viewer, a performative take on personal identity, memory, and connection.
On April 21 at 2:00, the Guggenheim will host the free, livestreamed panel discussion “Wearing Masks: The Performance of Identity in Contemporary Art,” with senior curator Jennifer Blessing, photographer and musician Farah Al Qasimi, visual artist Malik Gaines, and multimedia artist Colette Lumiere, moderated by Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva.
Given the coronavirus crisis and the ongoing debate over mask mandates as variants keep emerging, Wearing has revisited her 2013 Me as Mask, now taking that wax mask of her face, placing a black-bordered blue mask over it, and having it held up on a stick by a disembodied hand, hollow eye holes staring back at us.
“We all wear masks. We’re all actors,” she says in Wearing, Gillian. “Do you feel that you know me a bit now?” The answer is a rousing yes and no.
DIANE ARBUS
Scholars’ Gate, Doris C. Freedman Plaza
Central Park entrance, 60th St. & Fifth Ave.
Through August 14, free
www.publicartfund.org
online slideshow
In conjunction with the Guggenheim retrospective, Gillian Wearing has gone one step beyond her 2008 self-portrait as photographer Diane Arbus, using the existing photo of Arbus that inspired her picture and transforming it into a life-size statue for the Public Art Fund. The work stands at the Scholars’ Gate entrance to Central Park, in Doris C. Freedman Plaza, on the pavement, not a plinth; she is one of us. The photo of Arbus is part of what Wearing refers to as her “spiritual family,” comprising artists that she has photographed herself in digital masks. As in the photo, the statue depicts Arbus with her medium-format Rolleiflex hanging from around her neck, looking for subjects; she is wearing a dark jacket and white shoes. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,” Arbus said in 1971. Wearing now asks what kind of secrets a statue of a photo might hold.
In “An Interview with Myself,” Wearing’s catalog contribution to the Guggenheim show — which includes a thirteen-inch model of the statue and the Arbus quote “If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic” — she writes about portraying herself as others, “The whole process takes several months, and I liken it to how an actor gets into character. By the time I am in full costume, I lose my actual self a bit. It can be disappointing when the mask comes off and it’s my face again.”
In this case, the mask comes off and it is Arbus, a New York City native who specialized in capturing the daily reality of ordinary folk as well as sideshow performers, strippers, female impersonators, freaks, and others on the fringe. “For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated,” Arbus said. That statement relates to Wearing’s work, and specifically her portrayals of Arbus, in beautifully complex ways.