Fascinated by other people’s lives, Gillian Wearing decided from the outset to place them at the very centre of her work. During the early 1990s she went up to pedestrians in the street, inviting them to write down on large white cards anything they wanted to say. A surprising number unburdened themselves. And their responses, ranging from baffled aggression to painful vulnerability, were captured in a series of colour photographs in which the writers hold up their words like poignant public confessions.
With hindsight, we can now see how clearly Wearing caught the spirit of the decade in this early work. Now that people queue up to expose themselves on TV shows like Big Brother, the possibilities for turning the private into public entertainment are greater than ever before. But Wearing, to her great credit, has never sought to exploit them. Her concise and lucid mini-retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery enables us to chart the Turner Prize-winner’s development. And in her early works, she stops well short of invasive tactics.
A woman with a bandaged face walking down the Walworth Road captivated Wearing. She longed to talk to her but felt, no doubt rightly, that it would “ruin the mystery”. So instead of filming the unknown figure, Wearing decided to bandage her own face and assume the woman’s identity. Or rather, she presented to the camera her notion of what the real bandaged woman was like.
Although Wearing was profoundly influenced by her childhood exposure to TV documentaries and talk shows, she retains the right to work in a far more free and unpredictable way. Sacha and Mum, a 1996 video projection occupying an enormous single screen in the Serpentine’s central space, may have been based on a woman’s authentic account of her desperate, love-hate relationship with her mother. But Wearing employed actors to assume the roles, filming it in a heightened, neo-Expressionist style disturbingly reminiscent of silent cinema. The fierce concentration on close-ups and distorted camera angles reinforces the alarming struggle between the two women.
Wearing further removes it from documentary realism by running the video backwards. Alternating between violent hair-tugging and tearful embraces, the insidious family conflict becomes even more stylised. It resembles some macabre ballet, and the fragmented soundtrack gives the entire work an almost unbearable emotional intensity.
In her more recent work, though, Wearing has consistently entered into direct, lengthy collaborations with the people who excite her interest. The most commanding Serpentine exhibit is a three-screen projection called Drunk, the product of her involvement with a group of South London street drinkers. At first, they responded with too much enthusiasm, turning her film sessions into a bottle-strewn brawl.
Then tragedy intervened: Lindsey, a woman who was in the artist’s view “outspoken, loud and violent, but also had a wicked sense of humour”, died soon after Wearing filmed her.
Hence, perhaps, the elegiac mood of Drunk. Cans and bottles in their hands, young men wander erratically across the three screens. The backdrop is studiously neutral, removed from any attempt to recreate the urban locations where they usually hang out. Sometimes all the screens are empty, sharpening expectations that something is about to happen. And then tension grows, as one swaggering man deliberately taunts his mates, goading them into a fight. They tussle and fall to the ground, while someone tries to pacify them. Others look on stunned, incapable of doing anything except sit and booze.
After a while, melancholy comes to predominate. A terrible sense of lassitude hangs over everyone, suggesting that Wearing’s view of the drinkers has been overwhelmingly affected by Lindsey’s death. They all seem doomed, and at one point the greatly enlarged figure of a solitary young man takes up all the screen. Eyes closed, he has collapsed on the floor with one leg slung over the other as loosely as a doll.
In Drunk, the people filmed by Wearing are subjected to prolonged, painful exposure. But most of the time she prefers to veil them in disguises. The process began in Confess All, one of her landmark works from the mid-1990s. Each confessor wore a grotesque mask. Now, in a new work called Trauma, the people all don masks of relatively uncrazed adolescent faces. Their expressions are deadpan, but underneath we can glimpse a grey beard and sagging chins that disclose the wearers’ true ages. They all responded to an advert Wearing published, asking for anyone willing to talk on film about “negative or traumatic experience in childhood or youth”. So the masks, as well as protecting their anonymity, transport them back to the age when they suffered their pain. Entering a confined room, and straining to hear their muttered recollections, we find our sympathies engaged by one of the most fearless, observant and compassionate artists of our time.
If Wearing’s commitment to photography and video is reaffirmed by this survey, Shirazeh Houshiary emerges from her Lisson Gallery show with an altered way of working. It offers a profoundly meditative experience. Houshiary established her reputation in the early 1980s as a sculptor, and only began working on canvas a decade later. The dark, brooding images she produced then seemed closer to drawing than painting. Although they recalled the all-black squares and rectangles of Malevich and Ad Reinhardt, further inspection revealed a fascination with cloudy circles. But there was nothing nebulous about the way Houshiary executed these remarkable works. Minuscule graphic marks were formed into Arabic words, reiterating words like “truth” or “I am breath”.
Houshiary had succeeded in arriving at a delicate fusion of Western art and her native Iranian culture. The concentration she required to achieve such poised, meticulous work must have been formidable. It was bound up with her interest in Sufi mysticism, and the belief that the essence can only be approached if your mind is emptied of all everyday thoughts.
A similar feat lies behind the work in the Lisson show. But this time, with one dark exception upstairs, all her exhibits are luminous with whiteness. Most of them are executed on canvas, and rely on a highly personal mixture of aquacryl, silverpoint and graphite. Yellow pigment also plays a part in several works, but the initial impression on entering the gallery is of intense, pure light. At first glance, some look like all-white monochromes but these images repay prolonged scrutiny, and they gradually impart subtleties that may not be apparent at first.
They evade, for one thing, any attempt to define them as paintings. Viewed near-to, some of their surfaces seem exquisitely etched, as if made with the fine point of a print-maker’s needle rather than brush or pencil. Everything remains suggested, not stated. We find ourselves tantalised by these infinitely mysterious works, and wonder how on earth Houshiary executed them. They often appear to have been breathed on to the canvas. Rather than resulting from a process of deliberate mark-making, they hint at more trance-like procedures. Houshiary executes them on the floor, moving round each canvas with steady, contemplative deliberation. Drawing in graphite still provides the foundation, but the words visible before have now vanished altogether. In their place, we find delicate hints of cloud formations enlivening an otherwise pale, empty sky, or thin concentric circles.
These are remarkable works, sensitive and resolute in equal measure. Houshiary prefers to whisper her way of looking at the world rather than shout it out loud. But that does not mean her work lacks strength. At a time when our eyes so often feel bombarded by clamorous images wherever we turn, a visit to her limpid exhibition is more necessary than ever. It cleanses our vision, enabling us to leave the gallery purged and invigorated.
- Gillian Wearing at the Serpentine (020 7298 1515) until October 29; Shirazeh Houshiary at the Lisson Gallery (020 7724 2739) until October 29
