E8 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.
GILLIA
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
A retrospective
on the art
of disguise
For decades, U.K.’s Gillian Wearing has explored
the pleasures and perils of hiding behind masksBY SEBASTIAN SMEE
M
y daughter has lately
been adopting a
Northern Irish ac-
cent for large
stretches of the day.
The new persona isn’t quite ran-
dom. She’s been watching “Derry
Girls.” She also has a grandmoth-
er from near Belfast. So maybe
her fake (but uncannily accu-
rate) accent is a way of claiming
a distant identity? (Teenagers:
six characters in search of an
identity.)
In truth, though, it doesn’t feel
that way. The accent, which irri-
tates her older brother (a definite
plus), feels more like an escape
from identity into the pleasures
of disguise. When she adopts it,
she instantly loses her 14-year-
old self-consciousness and be-
comes ebullient, quick-witted,
unbridled, hilarious. She be-
comes free.
We should all be so lucky. Our
bifurcated vision of identity sug-
gests that we have an inner life,
mysterious but authentic, and a
social persona, which tends to be
performative, transactional, fake.
The vision implies a whole moral
order.
But as the British video artist,
photographer and sculptor Gil-
lian Wearing is keen to remind
us, it’s not so simple. There can be
joy, goodness and psychic health
in inauthenticity — in affecting
foreign accents, acting roles, don-
ning masks, playing to the public.
Likewise, what we romanticize as
“inner life” can actually be a
cesspit.
Wearing, 58, the subject of a
major retrospective — “Gillian
Wearing: Wearing Masks” — at
the Guggenheim Museum in New
York, is interested in the entire
demented dance. She has a feel-
ing for both the pleasures and
dangers of disguise, and a fasci-
nation with the roles we all play,
whether we want to or not.
In 1992, for a project Wearing
called “Signs that say what you
want them to say and not Signs
that say what someone else wants
you to say,” the artist asked
people on the street in South
London to write what was on
their mind on a sign, and then
photographed them holding that
sign.
Some participants responded
with sunniness: “Best friends for
life!” wrote one smiling couple.
Others took refuge (as the Eng-
lish adorably do when decorum is
threatened) in humor. “A m I
wearing something that belongs
to you?” wrote one person.
“Enough said,” wrote a second.
“Southwark Council hopeless,”
grumbled a third.
Others offered abrupt confes-
sions or stray thoughts: “The last
holiday abroad was nice but I
can’t afford it.” “I have been
certified as mildly insane.” Or
(from a girl with short hair): “I
don’t want to look like a boy.” And
then came the cries for help:
“Give me a job — PLEASE.” “A ll I
ever wanted was love.” And most
notoriously (this sign held by a
blond, youthful man in an impec-
cable suit): “I’m desperate.”
The series, which made Wear-
ing famous, was her first effective
foray into the problem of self-de-
scription. Who are we? Who do
we wish to be? How can we
communicate this to others?
What will happen when we try?
“Signs that say ...” dramatized
the dissonance between our in-
ner lives and the facades we erect
in public. But it also carried the
implication that our actual faces
are those facades. That they are
essentially masks, concealing
other, possibly more authentic
versions of ourselves. No wonder
people stare at t hemselves, mysti-fied, in the mirror.
Maybe that’s how it should be?
“We can only be governed by
people who claim to know us,”
wrote the psychoanalyst Adam
Phillips, “and so we must be able
to hide things not only from other
people but from ourselves.”
That’s where actual masks — and
accents and avatars — come in.
In the context of the wider
culture, “Signs that say ...” acted
like little clumps of snow dis-
lodged from a steep mountain
slope. You could feel the vibra-
tions, sense the coming ava-
lanche.
It came: a thundering mass of
(depending how you saw it) deco-
rum-busting, confessional nar-
cissism or healthy, therapeutic
self-expression. The Brits read it
all as a sign of rampant Ameri-
canization: They linked it to a
malign genealogy that led from
Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of
fame” to Oprah and Phil Dona-
hue, “Survivor,” “Big Brother”
and the Kardashians.
But it was not, ultimately,
about America. It was about the
medium. The medium was the
message. Initially, the medium
was television and the various
formats it spawned, from day-
time talk shows to fly-on-the-wall
documentaries and reality TV, all
of it funded by aspirational ad-
vertising. Then it became the
Internet, smartphones and the
self-publishing software and al-
gorithms of Facebook, YouTube,
Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
These democratizing innova-
tions posed the problem of self-
description in profound new
ways, making Wearing’s modest
but canny explorations seem
startlingly prescient. Even as
they restricted its possibilities
(your Instagram feed is a very
shriveled version of you), they
opened up untold possibilities for
self-invention, for donning
masks, dancing and adopting
new accents.
“We are all actors, improvising
each time we talk to someone,”
Wearing once said. One of her
most insinuating works, a video
called “2 into 1,” offers a twist on
the format of the talking-head
documentary. It shows a mother
speaking to an off-camera inter-
viewer about her 11-year-old twin
sons and then the sons, seated
side by side, talking about their
mother. But Wearing does some-
thing startling: She gets the
mother to ventriloquize the boys
and the boys their mother. The
effect is electrifying.
With casual contempt, the
boys describe their mother as an
annoyingly slow driver, emotion-
ally manipulative and although
loving, generally pathetic. She
describes them, meanwhile (and
remember, we are seeing them
mouthing her words) as “abso-
lutely adorable,” “very bright”
and “beautiful looking.” She only
laments that they can be “quite
cruel” and are prone to “terrible
fits of temper” that can come out
in “a violent way toward me.”
The mother does admit, how-
ever, that one of them has “a way
of putting his finger on the truth”
— namely, that she is a failure.
And she confesses that she must
like being dominated because all
her male partners have been
dominating. The boys, mouthing
these words, seem to flinch, and
all you can think about in this
domino dance of displacement is
the one person we don’t see: their
father. He must be a monster.
“2 into 1,” in the Guggenheim
show, dramatizes the astonishing
disequilibrium that can exist
within love. It also lays bare the
concealed dynamic at t he heart of
talking-head documentaries,
which exploit people’s eagerness
to say things in front of a cameraar
G ILLIAN WEARING, COURTESY OF MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON; TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, NEW YORK/LOS
ANGELES; AND REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELESSOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, PURCHASED