Gillian Wearing, private I: in her first U.S. museum show, Wearing investigates the complexities of identity, probing the "truth" of self-disclosure, via portrait photographs and videos that employ masks, overdubbing and lip-synching - video installation at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois - Critical Essay

A big photographic Self-Portrait (2000) introduced a wonderful survey of Gillian Wearing's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, but she's not giving much away: her face is almost completely concealed behind a generic plastic mask. It has eyeholes, but the mouth is sealed shut. Not that Wearing is averse to other people baring their souls. On the contrary, the majority of her work, most of it in video, gives its subjects the chance to tell stories that are at minimum personal, and usually deeply revealing, even shameful. They, too, are allowed to obscure their identities, by drunkenness, or putting on masks or uniforms. But inevitably, they disclose a great deal about themselves anyway--and, if only elliptically, about Wearing, and, in due course, us, too.

The short video projection 2 into 1 (1997) features a mother and her two sons, one generation lip-synching the dubbed words of the other. It is hypnotically disturbing to watch a pair of 10-year-old twins take turns speaking their mother's exasperated love for them. "I think Lawrence is absolutely adorable, he's gorgeous, I love every inch of him," Lawrence says, in a slightly raspy woman's voice. "But he's got a terrible temper." Halfhearted affirmations of self-esteem also figure in the mother's monologue, along with deep fatigue, all sounding precociously sympathetic--if not a touch demonic--coming from her children's lips. Equally unnerving is the mother's mimed recitation, heard in the soft, clear voices of clever preadolescent boys, of her sons' accounts of her. We hear their criticism of her driving ("too slow") and clothes ("she doesn't dress too well"), and their complaint that she goes out to clubs too much (slightly disheveled and obviously anxious, she looks like she could use the break). For their part, the boys, baby-faced and natty but incipiently loutish, are hardly ingratiating. A dazzlingly deft expression of the complex pushes and pulls in the mother-son relationship, 2 into 1 is an even more concise articulation of the triangulated relationship between artist, subject and viewer. Treating emotional truth as if it were the coin under the three fast-shuffled cups of a sidewalk con artist, this video pictures the circulation of meaning as a kind of vaudeville act, fast, funny and a little cruel.

While 2 into 1 is highly condensed (it is 4 1/2 minutes long), Trauma (2000), at a full half hour, has more of the format of a documentary. One after another, eight different subjects face the camera and narrate life-altering childhood episodes of physical and psychological torment. One tells of being tossed out of the car during a family vacation and abandoned for two eternal hours, another of years of incestuous abuse. There are the horrors of boarding schools, beatings by parents and humiliation by peers. All the subjects are shielded by plastic masks of their choice, which vary slightly to suggest broad characteristics: male or female; black or white; brunette, blond or gray. (Some of the participants chose masks for similarity to their own appearance, Wearing says; others clearly didn't.) "I wanted the masks to transport you back," Wearing has explained, to a time when the faces "wouldn't yet be marked by what had happened to them. When the only visible signs might perhaps have been in their eyes." (1) And indeed, we do focus on their eyes, which we can see darting back and forth and closing briefly, and also on their chins working as they speak, small movements that become eloquent.

As well as being masked, the subjects are also protected, to a degree, by the formulaic quality of the tales. Wearing herself describes them as "quite watertight," and says that in many cases it was clear "people had worked out their monologues well in advance," with or (more often) without psychiatric help. (2) (The subjects were all volunteers, having responded to a newspaper ad that solicited people who are survivors of "negative or traumatic experience in childhood or youth and willing to talk about it on film." "Identity will be concealed," it promised.) Ample literature on the consequences of trauma describes the experience of self-distancing and unreality that is its signal feature, and the often protracted effort needed, later, to recover the event and repair the psychic gap it created. But there's nothing remotely therapeutic or even cathartic about these monologues; in fact, it could be said that Trauma is staged to exacerbate that sense of dissociation (hence the masks and the similarity in tone and structure of the stories).

The subjects reveal themselves because they seem to feel protected and in control, and Wearing never makes them sound undignified or debased in any way. She simply allows them to speak, uninterrupted and unedited; in some cases, she wasn't even in the room when the camera ran. Similarly, the protections offered the viewer by this anonymous serial delivery are a little deceptive. We've heard stories like these many, many times before. And so, if only as members of the popular media's audience, we, too, have experienced a form of emotional blunting, a kind of damage which, like the effects of secondhand smoke, is comparatively minor, but real.