Working to meet the continuous hard deadlines of a weekly magazine, it can be a challenge to set aside time and space for free thinking about art outside of an editorial context. The desks in the art and photo departments at the magazine are decorated with a rotating array of postcards, clippings, and photo collages; personal images that inject a little inspiration into the day. One object that has been on my desk for a while is a postcard of Gillian Wearing’s photograph “Everything Is Connected in Life, the Point Is to Know It and to Understand It.”
Wearing, a multi-disciplinary artist, graduated from Goldsmiths University of London in 1990, and quickly became part of the loose affiliation of artists known as the Y.B.A.s (Young British Artists), which also includes Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, and Damien Hirst. In the early nineties, Wearing began work on a series called “Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say” (1992-1993). She asked people on the street to write whatever they were thinking on a card and hold it up, and she photographed the result. Private life and public opinion are inverted in these pictures, and the results are honest—sometimes painfully so—and often very funny, as with the photograph of an elderly man with a sign that says, simply, “ME.”
Influenced largely by the British documentaries of her youth, Wearing continued to explore themes of confession, voyeurism, and the representation of self through photographs and what are often labelled confessional videos. In 1997, she won the Turner Prize for two video works, “60 Minutes Silence” and “Sacha and Mum” (1996).
Below is a selection of photographs from the series.
All photographs by Gillian Wearing, courtesy of Maureen Paley, London.
