time will tell......: August 2008

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Research

Movie
High Fidelity
Year 2000

"What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"

Research

Sacha and Mum

Of mother daugther relationship- A push becomes a hug when the video is reversed.

Sacha and Mum, 1996.

Single-channel video projection, approx. 00:04:30,

Dimensions Variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director's Council and Executive Committee Members: Eli Broad, Elaine Terner Cooper, Ronnie Heyman, J. Tomilson Hill, Dakis Joannou, Barbara Lane, Robert Mnuchin, Peter Norton, Thomas Walther, Ginny Wi. 97.4571. © Gillian Wearing.

Gillian Wearing has regularly explored the boundary between the public and the private in her video and photographic work. Influenced by the British documentary filmmaking tradition, Wearing has frequently used real-life individuals as her subjects. For the series that first brought her notice, Signs that say what you want to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992–1993), she photographed strangers on the street holding handwritten placards that advertised their thoughts, feelings, and anxieties. In subsequent video works, she documented the intimate confessions of people who masked their identities through various means: in 10-16 (1997), adult actors lip-synch the prerecorded secrets of adolescents; in Trauma (2000), adults wearing plastic masks with generic children's faces divulge traumatic experiences from their youths. Wearing has also examined the private sphere of the family. In her video Sacha and Mum (1996), she directed actors and manipulated the editing process to create a film that explores the complex, contradictory nature of a mother-daughter relationship. Sacha and her mother share an intimate moment as they smile and hug in a bedroom, yet their embrace slowly shifts into a tussle. As love and aggression blur, the mother begins to tug, pull, and otherwise physically dominate her daughter. Sacha's odd vulnerability and her mother's aggressive volatility are underscored by the speeded up video, which quickens their gestures, and the distored sound track that transforms their speech into anxious gibberish. By the film's end, it is unclear whether Sacha is a disturbed person whose mother is trying to calm her, or if the mother is a disturbed aggressor from whom Sacha is trying to free herself.

Research

Frustrated Expression

60 Minutes Silence

Gillian Wearing

Turner Prize winner 1997

Unlike those she beat to claim this year's Turner Prize, Gillian Wearing is more interested in live people than dead ones or dead matter. She says that her some of her main formative influences were the 1970s fly-on-the-wall documentaries such as The Family and much of her work uses video and photographs to focus on the conflict between established behaviour and what people do on impulse. Wearing uses real people, usually from where she lives in south east London, to create her art. One such example is 60 Minutes Silence, which at first sight is a lifesize photo of 26 police officers. Eventually, the viewer realises that the work is a video - the officers are trying to remain still and quiet for the full hour but the strain gradually builds and they shuffle and flex. The Daily Telegraph's Richard Dorment describes how one officer succeeded in remaining near-motionless the whole time until told that time was up. He then "lets out a yelp of relief that you can hear all over the gallery. The moment is like a dam bursting. His final, cathartic, joyful cry is one of the great moments in the history of recent British art." Confess all on video...Those officers were all volunteers, as were the people Wearing recruited in 1994 after placing an advert in a magazine's personal column. The advert, which became the title of the work, ran "Confess all on video. Don't worry you'll be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian ... "
As it says, Wearing covered her 10 volunteers in wigs and masks and recorded their tales of theft, revenge, betrayal and sexual perversion.

The Turner Prize winnerBut Wearing is not out to exploit people for the sake of it. Dancing In Peckham, for example, was based on having seen a woman dancing wildly at a concert completely unaware that people were making fun of her. "Asking her to be in one of my videos would have been patronising," Wearing said, "So I decided to do it myself." The artist therefore danced to the music of Nirvana and Gloria Gaynor - music which was heard only in her head - for half an hour in a Peckham shopping centre while the ordinary British public walked past, un-noticing or ignoring. The BBC gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Tate Gallery in producing this page - in particular the use of material from its book, The Turner Prize, by Kate Button.