- Venue
- Maureen Paley
- Location
The 1998 Turner Prize winner Gillian Wearing has kept a low profile. She rarely gives interviews and has not had any major UK exhibitions since the Serpentine Gallery solo show in 2000. Wearing's new DVD installation Family History (2006) at the Maureen Paley suggests that Wearing is still an artist worth keeping in mind.
The Family History consists of two parts. In part one, a girl watches television in a 1970s style of living room. She is watching Watson and Roddam's Family (1974) that focused on the Wilkins, the first reality-television family in British television. In part two, Trisha Goddard, the mother of daytime television, interviews the daughter of the Wilkins family, Heather, now aged 47. In the 1970s, Heather's behaviour was a regular topic of newspaper debates. Heather returns to her experience of the Family series. Although she failed to follow the public opinion of her best interests, she achieved a full-life and a successful career.
Trisha's interview follows a standardised pattern of daytime television. However, Wearing's juxtaposition of the two parts emphasises the viewer's judgemental position of the costumer of reality-dramas. The Family series was produced for the audience that was buying their first televisions and was unfamiliar with reality-television. What once shocked the nation appears ordinary. Today, the reading, watching and judging of someone else's everyday drama is one of the most popular forms of entertainment. Today's reality series from Big Brother to the unruly children of Super Nanny and the indebted adults of Spedaholics attract and entertain millions of viewers every week. In 2005, there were 176 different reality shows in British television.[i] The success of reality-television is based on the power relationship that it creates between its subjects and the viewer who is empowered as the receiver of intimate information. However, Heather's interview with Trisha demonstrates that the viewer is, after all, only given a limited slice of edited reality of odd activities, encouraged by the production team.
The exhibition also includes two new black and white photographs for Wearing's Album series that consists of large self-portraits of the artist's family members. In the new pictures, Wearing poses as her grandparents Nancy and George Gregory. The earlier works include self-portraits as the artist's parents, uncle, sister, brother and herself at the age of 17. Wearing has a long-standing interest in impersonation and masks. In the works such as Confess All on Video: Don't Worry You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian (1994), Wearing's subjects wear masks representing public figures such as Neil Kinnock and George Bush. The Album series recreates the characteristics of Wearing's family, based on the artist's subjective memories and old photographs. The series encourages the viewer to consider one's own family album and the characteristics that are inherited.
Wearing's work is about the intimacies and complexities of human relationships. It reflects society's interests, obsessions and means of communication in the age of reality-television. Moreover, Wearing's exhibition provides as a good introduction to this year's Turner Prize that includes Phil Collins' work. Collins invites people who felt that their lives had been ruined by appearing on reality-television but who agree to tell their story again in front of cameras. The question is whether art about reality-television teaches us anything new.
[i] I Will Do Anything to Get in TV. Channel Four 10/04/2005
