GILLIAN WEARING: SELF PORTRAITS

(featured in OSMOS Magazine 09)

by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz

When I first encountered My Polaroid Years, Gillian Wearing’s collection of self-portraits made from1988 to 2005, in Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s booth at the 2016 ADAA Art Show in New York, I was wooed and a bit disoriented. Several generations of Polaroids featured the artist herself, but a few seemed to be showing the artist wearing a mask of her own face. I recognized the mask as a recurring feature employed by Wearing, an artist I got to know in 2004, when we worked on her collaboration for PARKETT. I recalled that the face portrayed by Wearing’s mask is sometimes the artist but not always, as in Self Portrait As My Mother Jean Gregory (Album), 2003.

As I have been preparing this introduction, I am reminded of another recurring aspect of the artist’s conceptual practice, which emphasizes that every portrait has characteristics that result from culture and technology as much as nature. The portraits capture not only elements in and of the person, but also themselves portray the social and technical conditions in which the image is made, what might be called,“the performative nature of the self-portrait.”

Many artists use photography to“see” society. But unlike any other artist, Wearing employs social and popular convention as a lens to look at photography itself. At the same time, just as social means have become in some sense the artist’s medium, her subject is also social means.

Reconsidering the vitrine display of 150 self-portraits it becomes apparent that the (now dated) instant Polaroid medium, which was easily accessible to artists and non-artists alike, has allowed Wearing to catalogue herself and her setting unceremoniously and in private.The collection is an inventory of her hairstyles, bedrooms, fashions, and moods. And despite how revealing this becomes as an archive of “looks” the decision to bring them out as a full set suggests something else. Rather than informing us about the past, these captures speak about the present: we see an image from 1988 and immediately think it's a cell phone selfie.Similarly, when Wearing donned the mask costume and poise of her mother, she also made the picture in a manner that implies givens—a studio, a professional photographer, lighting and timing—that would have been part of the conditions under which the vintage source image was made.

In Gillian Wearing’s words:

I started taking self-portrait Polaroids in the late 80’s. They were not intended for anyone to see but myself. They are like early versions of ‘selfies’. I was presenting myself in al ot of the images unaware of the mess in my room or the location I was shooting in. This unawareness was one of the reasons I became interested in looking at the photographs again. I was looking at myself as if I was studying someone else. I rediscovered all these images and was trying to decipher who this person was. There is a similarity in my posing and the poses of a lot of young women you now find on Instagram and Twitter, etc. Whilst thinking we are, or wish to be 'unique' we find that the collective resemble one another in poses that are learned and/or copied from an early age.

The collection My Polaroid Years indicates that what photography makes manifest is not merely the image produced photographically, but something of a residue of the circumstances of when the image is produced; it functions as a marker of convention. Wearing has invoked the term “mode of practice” to refer to the photographic conventions of a particular time and place, suggesting her engagement with photography as a technical and social medium. The integral relationship between convention and portraiture in there-enacted portraits of family members Wearing made of herself wearing masks and posing is not merely in the way she performs cherished moments of loved ones she knows well, but also in the way her performance embodies, “something more than the picture,” that comes to fundamentally determine the portrayed situation. Gillian Wearing’s photographs illustrate the way the genre of self-portraiture evolved from formal studio situations to a prevalence of cameras in the hands of non-professionals, to the composure (or lack of composure) in the space that frames the face. Even when the media she uses pre-dates the most current technologies in circulation, our socially trained gaze projects that popular technology onto the image. Our trained eye keeps up with the times.

Gillian Wearing was awarded the Turner Prize in 1997. She has had a number of recent solo exhibitions, including Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks  at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2022), Life: Gillian Wearing at Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH (2018), and Behind the mask another mask: Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun at National Portrait Gallery, London (2017).

The artist’s exhibition Dancing in Peckham is on view at MoMA PS1 from September 26, 2024 to January 6, 2025.