On the occasion of British
artist Gillian Wearing’s opening at Penn's ICA
on September 4, 2003, Stuart Semmel proposes an interpretation of
her work through the lens of the exhibition’s title, “Gillian
Wearing: Mass Observation.” Though Wearing presents herself
as a plastic and visual artist with no overt claim to being a social
scientist, Semmel argues that her work poses questions similar to
those that arose in the 30s in relation to the eponymous British
organization, Mass Observation, a commonplace referent in British
cultural discourse.
To plumb the significance of Wearing’s
exhibition title, Semmel provides a historical overview of Mass
Observation as both idea and movement. Arising in a cultural climate
in which the public opinion poll and the documentary were becoming
powerful mechanisms comprehension of the otherwise enigmatic masses,
Mass Observation was founded in 1937 by three British social scientists
who proposed to undertake an “anthropology of our own people
and of ourselves.”
Two main sites of Mass Observation activity emerged.
In London, volunteers were recruited to record the minutiae of their
daily lives and to turn in these “day surveys” on a
monthly basis; in Bolton, volunteers arrived as surreptitious observers
of “Worktown” life, reporting on everything from how
many lumps of sugar laborers used in their coffee to the details
of their romantic liaisons. Collagist Julian Trevelyan and photographer
Humphrey Spender, artists retained as Worktown reporters, were among
the first to vocalize a discomfort with the idea of observing the
working-class community as outsiders marked by socio-cultural and
linguistic differences from their subjects.
Did their work constitute observation by the
masses, or observation of the masses? Although Mass Observation
responded by declaring that the organiza-tion’s activity was
to be understood as the observation “of everyone, by every-one,
including themselves,” tensions
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around the questions
of agency and locus of observation were never resolved.
Semmel notes this tension between the conditions
of observer and observed— now divergent, now convergent—as
a point of departure for the analysis of Gillian Wearing’s
work. Like Mass Observation, Wearing’s role as commissioner
or administrator of narrative is immediately evident.
Signs that say what you want them to say
and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992-93)
is a series of photographs taken by Wearing of passersby whom she
has invited to pose with a hand-written message of their own creation:
a businessman poses with a sign that reads, “I’m desperate;”
a policeman holds up “Help!” In Confess all
on video. Don’t worry you’ll be in disguise. Intrigued?
Call Gillian (1994), Wearing films the confessions of ten masked
people who have responded to her ad in the personal section of the
newspaper. In her video Dancing in Peckham (1994), on the
other hand, Wearing renounces the exploitive position of the artist,
instead assuming the discomfiting vulnerability of the observed
as she dances in public to sound that only she hears in her head,
oblivious to the reactions of those around her.
Wearing’s work, Semmel concludes, unsettles
the foundational assumptions of Mass Observation: that there exists
not only a simple relationship between observer and masses, but
also, more importantly, the possibility of a spontaneous, unorganized
act of mass observation.
Can there be a Mass Observation for our time,
in the age of reality-televised Western culture? If it can be said
that a spontaneous and unorganized act of mass observation was ever
possible, is it possible any longer? By playing with the boundaries,
conditions, and agency of observation, Wearing provokes such questions
as these, at once disquieting and intriguing.
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