>> EXHIBITIONS
■ Gillian Wearing
Brindley House (Ikon off-site project) Birmingham September 9 to October 8
Family History, 2006, comprises two video installations, one being a large-scale projection of an interview between doyenne of daytime TV Trisha Goddard and Heather Wilkins, who featured as the 15-year-old in the BBC’s flyon-the-wall documentary series, The Family in 1974, which followed Heather’s so-called working-class family going about their everyday lives in Reading. The interview skips merrily through topics such as the transmutation of fly-onthe-wall documentaries into our obsession with reality TV, the changing nature of the British social triad of race, class, and gender, as well as purporting to give us the truth behind the media frenzy that enveloped the series. Unwittingly, one of Trisha’s comments, ‘It’s OK to talk about emotions now’, provides a useful entry point into thinking about the constellation of then and now that Wearing configures in Family History. Before going on to explore this, let me describe the other video component of the installation and the site. In an adjacent room, a small monitor shows a mock-up of Wearing’s childhood front room in Birmingham with a young Wearing lookalike watching The Family amidst the cluttered decor of the 70s. Ironically, this monitor is situated on the stark white wall of the second bedroom of a show flat in Brindley House, a luxury redevelopment of the largest remaining city centre office block of the 70s, while the interview projection, with its set of funky Habitat-like colour and clarity, faces the wood and steel veneer of kitchen units in the open-plan dining room. (It is worth
Gillian Wearing Family History 2006 production still

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mentioning that Family History’s first outing in July was in another luxury development in Reading, The Forbury Hotel Apartments, which overlooks the original Wilkins home.) As fly-on-the-wall documentaries have largely transmuted into reality TV, so abandoned office and council buildings have mutated into property developers’ dreams and the rather crude production values of the flyon-the-wall concept become the glossy production values of the chat show. Wearing’s juxtapositioning is faultless. While the small monitor sequence lasts only minutes and the interview about 40 minutes, at times the simultaneous alignment of theme music creates a strange echo between adjoining rooms and temporalities. Both sequences end with the camera pulling back from the respective set to reveal that the two sets are actually built side by side. The obviousness of this slightly tongue-in-cheek Brechtian moment is tempered by Wearing’s autobiographical investment in the work – she identified with Heather as a child – but also by Wearing’s presence as an invisible documentarist. At moments, the camera focuses in on the Wearing lookalike, as she turns to comment on The Family. She has obviously been asked a question by an invisible interlocutor, but what is more interesting than the critical debate about the objectivity/subjectivity of the documentary filmmaker is that the girl clearly misinterprets what she sees, the onscreen histrionics amalgamating with preoccupations of her own. One is left wanting more of this innocent viewer and less of the hard-nosed Trisha and contemporary Heather, whose repertoire of gestures are the invention of television, their faces permanently animated and ready to receive exaggerated expressions of surprise, awe, knowingness and so forth. However, perhaps reflection on the levels and layers of authentic and fake emotion is part of

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´ Edward Krasinski Studio-Puzzle 1992

Wearing’s point. To give us more of the young girl would be to betray her. Nostalgia aside, Family History seems to provide evidence of the loss of innocent viewing and perhaps documentary film- and video-making, whereby since numerous critiques of documentary’s objectivity, work has to acknowledge its own artifice. The hyperbolic displays of emotion on shows like Big Brother are very different from the gritty realism of The Family, clips of which are interspersed throughout the interview. Although contemporary critiques of realism claim that it is as constructed as the hyperbole of Big Brother, the attempt to frame a reality that might exist in a sphere separate from the screen is very different from the mediatised externalisation of subjectivity that has no existence outside of the frame. By contrast, in one of the clips from The Family, the representation of Heather’s emotional state resonates and signifies beyond the screen. An invisible teacher is giving Heather career guidance. The camera focuses on her resistant silence and unrehearsed angry gestures, which ooze feelings of entrapment, but also prompt reflection on how society shapes aspiration and potential. To a great extent, Wearing’s Family History repeats the externalisation of subjectivity performed in and by the media. But Wearing is smart enough to realise that

critique today cannot be performed from an outside perspective. Critique by juxtapositions is a risky business, but at least it gives the viewer the chance to ask his or her own questions in the gaps left open by media fallout. ❚ Family History is at Maureen Paley, London, October 10 to November 19 and will be screened at the National Film Theatre, London, November 7.
MARIA WALSH is a lecturer in Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art & Design.

´ ■ Edward Krasinski
Generali Foundation Vienna May 12 to August 27
Most of us, especially if we were children in the 60s and 70s, are inclined to overemphasise the significance of what artists achieved then. This overemphasis has a negative effect of draining attention away from the task of understanding more recent times – including the numerically

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