BRAND NEW: MASS OBSERVATION - GILLIAN WEARING (3531)

Mass Observation

Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing has emerged as one of the foremost British artists of her generation, creating video installations and photographic works that document the shocking, amusing, and tragic stories and behaviour of the ordinary people of Britain. Winner of the prestigious Turner Prize in 1997, Wearing has exhibited extensively around the world.

Wearing's work often uses the techniques of documentary film and television to frame the words and actions of people, generally Londoners. Her work Confess All on Video. Don't Worry, You Will Be Disguised. Intrigued? Call Gillian. (1994), included in this book, presents people confessing personal aspects of their lives on video in response to a classified advertisement from a London newspaper. Each person wears a mask, making his or her often disturbing story that much more bizarre. Also included are such celebrated pieces as Drunk (1999), an alternately unsettling, comical, and heartbreakingly poignant thirty-minute video installation focusing on terminal drunkards whose lives are completely dominated by their addiction; and Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992-93), a multi-photograph work featuring people that Wearing stopped on the streets of London and encouraged to hold up signs inscribed with the first thing that came into their heads: a young homeless girl holds a sign saying "Give people houses there is plenty of empty ones OK!"; a smart young businessman's sign reads simply: "I'm desperate." The work has achieved the rare feat of crossing over into the visual vernacular, copied by advertisers, familiar to everyone.

This full-colour monograph, covering the period 1992 to 2002, represents the most eagerly anticipated, up-to-date, and incisive survey yet published of Wearing's painfully affecting art: art that holds an exacting and often unbearable mirror to the absurdity, ennui, and anxiety of everyday life, demonstrating the maddening impossibility of ever truly understanding the complexity of the human psyche.

Hardcover - 120 pages