Gillian Wearing, Whitechapel - review

The key to unlocking the work of Gillian Wearing is found not in art history but in reality television. Not so much the tabloid fodder of the 21st century but the tough stuff from the Sixties and Seventies, like Paul Watson’s fly-on-the-wall documentary series The Family, which Wearing watched while growing up in Birmingham. Always at the grittier end of the Young British Artists (YBA) spectrum, she is in essence a documentary film-maker and photographer, her work weaving around the line that documentary treads between fact and fiction.

As you enter Wearing’s Whitechapel retrospective, the sole work in view is Dancing in Peckham (1994), in which she dances wildly in a shopping centre, lost in the music in her own head. Otherwise, you feel like you have wandered backstage in a film studio, bathed in coloured spotlights, with various closed sets behind wooden boards — she leaves you under no illusions that as well as being art, her work is artifice. But with everyday subject matter and the very real people who are often her protagonists, she constantly muddies the waters.

The exhibition eschews chronology, so you can choose which of the sets — containing her videos rather than stages — you explore first. I began by walking into Prelude (2000), easily the most solemn and harrowing of Wearing’s films. It features Lindsey, one of a group of homeless people and street drinkers Wearing filmed in 1999.

Wearing was fascinated by Lindsey’s outspokenness and occasional bursts of violence, but when she sought to film her again two weeks later, she discovered she had died of cirrhosis of the liver. Over silent, slow-motion shots in grainy black and white of Lindsey chatting and drinking Tennent’s Super, with a cigarette tucked behind her ear, her sister’s voiceover recalls the grim facts of her death, its aftermath and the fractured family relationships that may have contributed to her descent into alcoholism. Prelude is the least playful of Wearing’s films but it does bring her themes, and the awkward problems of documentary, into sharp focus — not least the viewer’s own unease at witnessing a real person’s story, and in this case, a tragedy, becoming a work of art.

The show never reaches the same unmitigated bleakness but it is punctuated by exploitation and abuse. In Sacha and Mum (1996), which helped Wearing win the Turner Prize in 1997, two actors portray Sacha, dressed in her underwear, and her clothed mother in an ordinary living room, where, between moments of affection, Mum repeatedly pulls Sacha’s hair, throws her to the ground and grabs her face. The video is shown in reverse, so the mother’s laughter and Sacha’s shrieks are all the more excruciating, but their movements seem as balletic as they are violent.

Surreal or absurd strategies often confuse the real-life content in Wearing’s work, not least in the key series of works shown here in small booths, like pop-art confessionals.

The first of the series is titled after the advert Wearing placed in Time Out magazine in 1994: Confess All on Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian… It features 10 people in wigs and masks recounting tales of crimes and misdemeanours, often of a sexual nature — visits to prostitutes, revenge on a two-timing cad, obscene phone calls to strangers — but then a man talks about encountering his brother and sister “snogging” and the confused feelings that have since scarred his life. In using a self-selecting group of people, Wearing focuses on what compels people to tell these stories and, of course, the human fascination with other people’s lives.

Trauma (2000) takes the same strategy to much darker effect. Where the random masks of Confess All on Video add a surrealist frisson, the uniform style of too-small children’s masks on adults in Trauma only makes it more unsettling. Secrets and Lies (2009) was the film for which Wearing first used the coloured booth format, but its presence here labours the mask-and-confession format unnecessarily, however compelling the stories.

Confessions also dominate other works, such as the mid-Nineties series of photographs, Signs, where people hold up their innermost thoughts on pieces of card, and also in the monologues at the heart of the video 10-16 (1997). The latter features real interviews with young people being lip-synched by adults — one of two works using the technique, alongside 2 into 1 (2007), in which a mother and her twins lip-synch each others’ interviews about their relationship.

With their often hilarious disjunction between sound and image, these are almost brilliant works. I say almost because, however much these are seen as seminal videos, I have always felt the execution lets them down.

Clio Barnard’s The Arbor (2010), a film about the playwright Andrea Dunbar featuring interviews with her family and friends performed by actors, proved that uncannily accurate lip-synchs can be tremendously moving. And when Wearing gets it right, as in the middle-aged woman in 10-16 lip-synching to a soft-voiced 12-year-old from a “lovely” home and school who thinks abortion is murder, it is superb. But too often it just fails to be convincing enough.

With two decades of work behind her, Wearing has clearly reached a turning point in her career. Her first decade was more prolific and focused than the last, though a sequence of self-portraits reconstructing family photographs and a series of images of her posing as her artistic heroes are among her best work. Both groups use elaborate silicone masks, painstaking illusions that falter at the eyes, where Wearing’s gaze insistently meets the viewer’s.

But her other recent work is uneven: last year’s feature-length film Self Made is not shown here, but in a related film, Bully (2010), the documentary real-life connection seems over-contrived. Elsewhere, a film looks back to Dürer and a photograph to Dutch Baroque still lifes, while small statues act as miniature monuments to everyday heroes.

This is a well paced, beautifully installed show, but it suggests that Wearing, having made some of the defining works of the YBA era, is deeply uncertain about where to go next.

Gillian Wearing is at Whitechapel Gallery, E1 (020 7522 7888, whitechapelgallery.org) until June 17. Open Tues, Wed, Sat-Sun 11am-6pm, Thurs-Fri 11am-9pm, closed Mon; admission £9.50 (concs £7.50).