SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2022 EZ EE E9N WEARING, COURTESY OF MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON; TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES; AND REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES
that would not otherwise be said
— and depend on our eagerness
to hear them.
Even before the revolution in
self-publishing (blogs, social me-
dia and all the rest) ignited the
forest fire now razing civil soci-
ety, Wearing saw how badly peo-
ple yearned for permission to say
cruel things, make ugly faces,
express contempt and humiliate
others. But she is by no means
merely a Cassandra warning
about the perils of the attention
economy.
Like many of the Young British
Artists who rose to prominence
in the early 1990 s, Wearing has
democratic, anti-elitist impulses.
Some of the grainy, lo-tech photo-
graphs in “Signs that say ...” first
appeared in The Face, an edgy,
influential fashion magazine that
inverted the top-down relation-
ship between the fashion indus-
try and young people. Wearing
had ambitions to do similar
things in the art world.
In the second half of her ca-
reer, Wearing’s work has becomemore explicitly about herself, or,
more accurately, about dramatiz-
ing the possibility that her self, as
such, may not exist. She has used
plastic and later silicone pros-
thetic masks and wigs to create
photographic portraits of herself
impersonating members of her
family at different ages. Wearing
has also impersonated herself at
different ages. And for an extend-
ed series called “Spiritual Fam-
ily,” she impersonated many of
her favorite artists, including
Andy Warhol and Marcel Duch-
amp, both in drag, Georgia O’Ke-
effe, Claude Cahun (holding a
mask of Wearing’s face), Meret
Oppenheim, Diane Arbus (of
whom she h as also made a statue)
and Eva Hesse. A neighboring
gallery contains all the masks
displayed like so many severed
heads.
This stage of her career has
been less successful. It suffers,
ironically, from solipsism (ironic
given the strenuous effort Wear-
ing puts into smashing her ego).
It shares with her best work acreepy, claustrophobic intensity.
But the playfulness of dressing
up as others starts to feel a little
manic, and the recent reversion
to painted self-portraits, a prod-
uct of pandemic isolation, though
ostensibly more calming, also
suggests an underlying despera-
tion.
You sense an artist alive to the
pathos in our simultaneous need
to establish an identity and to
escape it. But the works don’t
really go beyond that. They have
nothing like the impact of Wear-
ing’s powerful earlier work, or of
the photographs of Cindy Sher-
man, to which they are clearly
indebted. Where the earlier work
was lo-fi and democratic, the
recent work looks showy and
expensively produced.
But Wearing has a lot more to
give, and it is past time American
audiences got to know her —
whoever she may be — better.Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks
Through June 13 at the Guggenheim
Museum, New York. guggenheim.org.rt
GILLIAN WEARING, COURTESY OF MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON; TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES; AND REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELESWITH FUNDS CONTRIBUTED BY THE PHOTOGRAPHY COUNCIL/GILLIAN WEARING, COURTESY OF MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON; TANYA
BONAKDAR GALLERY, NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES; AND REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELESGILLIAN WEARING, COURTESY OF MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON; TANYA
BONAKDAR GALLERY, NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES; AND REGEN PROJECTS, LOS
ANGELESCLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Gillian Wearing’s “Me: Me,” 1991; “Me as O’Keeffe,” 2018; “Kiss of Life,”
2017; “Best Friends for Life!,” 1 992–1993; an image from the video “Wearing, Gillian,” 2018, in
collaboration with Wieden+Kennedy; and a self-portrait, 2000. The artist, a leading member of the
Young British Artists generation, has a fascination with the roles we all play — whether we want to or
not — and is the subject of “Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks” at the Guggenheim Museum.GILLIAN WEARING, COURTESY OF MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON; TANYA
BONAKDAR GALLERY, NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES; AND REGEN PROJECTS, LOS
ANGELES