Full transcript of Gillian Wearing interviewed by Matt Lippiatt at the Maureen Paley gallery in London, July 2006

Matt Lippiatt: Looking at the trajectory of your work, it seems like the more recent work, there’s more control formally. It’s more constructed. A decision has been made about everything in the frame.

Gillian Wearing: Right.

ML: Is that something you’ve been conscious of?

GW: Could you give me an example of what you’d say wasn’t that controlled work?

ML: With the Signs, or even the really early vox pop interviews, you can make a selection of where you’re going to be and who you’re going to speak to but you don’t dress them or build a big set of Regent’s Park. It really is just –

GW: Sure.

ML: Whereas now –

GW: I built a TV set. Yeah. I think I’ve always done a bit of both, but maybe just the very early work was less so. But I think not long after that I was a bit of a – I think I’ve always worked with structures, and even the signs is a kind of a structure, and of course maybe some of the structures have got more sophisticated, like with the TV set. That is the most sophisticated structure that I’ve ever done, because there is a building. It’s a bit like the mask aswell. There’s alot of work that goes in to me wearing my familiy’s masks, so in certain works there is that. Still, you don’t know what’s going to – particularly in the Trisha interview, you don’t know what’s going to be said. There’s no rehearsal, it’s not acted, they’re being natural, so there’s always the chance in there aswell, the chance moment. It really depends on the idea, because I think every idea has to be treated in its own seperate entity, in a way. So I tend to think of an idea and think what’s the best for that. When I was thinking of The Family I didn’t want to just do a straight forward documentary, a kind of talking head documentary. I wanted to think of it in terms of where television does come from the 1970s, and also that idea of people on documentaries, once they have become known, how they then are filtered back through the medium through things like chat shows. Again, think of the idea. It starts off with, “Oh, I want to work with The Family”. But then I have to think about how I’m going to make something that isn’t just turning the camera on and talking. Thinking about how things – in a gravitas sort of way – thinking how I’m going to develop it into something with lots of other suggestions of ideas going on, so you can bring much more to the work.

ML: What about the context of Family History? It has been exhibited in Reading and Birmingham, both relevant to the piece, and now it’s coming to London. Also, have you thought about broadcasting it?

GW: Yeah, we have considered broadcasting it, so that’s kind of a plan that – I’ve left it with Film Video Umbrella so I’ll have to come back to you on that one. We are thinking of approaching to broadcast it aswell.

ML: And that would have the elements of both the sets?

GW: It would have the final pull back which shows both sets because that’s the link that say, “Well okay, this TV set wasn’t just any old TV set.” It was made in conjunction with the room next door. The idea of the room next door is that the little girl playing me looking through the television at Heather, and there she is on the other side. So it’s how the television come into your head, into your world really.

ML: It’s an interesting thing to try to condense in to one single-channel.

GW: Except for that pull back shot. That’s why that pull back shot was made: to actually say what the relationship was between the two. The thing with the Trisha interview is that it will look like proper television. It has all the right camera shots and editing. But then the little film at the beginning that introduces it is sort of saying that this is more than just maybe television. It has a bigger dialogue than that, a bigger resonance.

ML: And how about the difference between screening it in Birmingham and Reading to now that it’s coming to London?

GW: Thinking about installation, just trying to build an installation that, now that it’s in a gallery – obviously, when it’s in an apartment you can bring that idea of the television coming into your home, but this is obviously not an apartment. But I have thought about building a wall. So we’re going to have a wall built with seats that are going to kind of echo the sort of seats that you get in a studio. These kind of half-circular seats, just a row of two, it’s not going to be like a big arena because there’s not the space.

ML: The seats that people always drag over to each other to show that they still love each other?

GW: Oh, not those, no no, because you’re the audience. It’s not the ones sitting on the stage, it’s the audience. And sometimes the audience sit in a sort of semi-circle. We’re not going to actually completely copy the chairs, we’re going to build our own, but they’ll be covered in sort of lime green material so they’ll look quite funky. There’ll just be one row and then another one behind, so you’ll feel that this is something where you are the audience again. I had to change it, but I had to still build an installation to make it – so not to have it just as a projection. The room in front is the little room with the little monitor, and that’s going to be built into the wall. That’s going to be a coloured room, it’s going to be painted a pinky-red or something like that, we haven’t finally decided the colour.

ML: So that’s the one –

GW: That’s the one with me when I was younger, commenting on the programme.

ML: In that scene, you’re depicted watching on your own. Was that how you experienced it, or did the Wearings watch The Family as a family?

GW: I don’t have any recollection of watching it with the rest of my family. We had two televisions where I lived so you could always escape to another room and have the television on something that you wanted. Someone else asked that question before. I only remember taking in the information. I don’t remember any comments from – That’s way I have it in isolation. I don’t remember any member of my family ever commenting on it to me, so I can’t actually picture myself with anyone. That’s why I just put myself in there.

ML: Because you and Heather are both shown isolated from your family it’s like making concrete that identification, which is usually intangible, between someone in the audience and someone on television. Materially you are much closer to the people in your household.

GW: Yeah. The thing about these programmes was that sort of idea of relating. I did strongly relate to Heather, and that’s why I wanted to kind of talk to Heather more than anyone else in the family. Because there was the idea of a bond there. She looked like a friend of mine. There was this identification that was, yeah, as strong as someone that was like my friend. That’s why I thought that this was not that dissimilar to people that I know. Also, because people within this documentary were giving away alot more than people tend to give away in their normal life anyway. Especially in the seventies. I mean, now, in retrospect they’re probably holding on to more then than they would now because every sort of decade seems to be more – this idea that more can be revealed about what’s in your life and what your problems are, but they were very seminal for the time. And very exposed for the time. There was a relation that wasn’t like anything else on television. There was just no one being that open. If it had been a one-off documentary it would have come and gone and then been forgotten. Because it was a series it’s like you get these building blocks of getting to know someone, like you would in real life. At the beginning you probably don’t think that much of them – well, not that you don’t think much of them. You know, they don’t kind of settle in your mind or your memory, but then week after week they build up, which is like getting to know someone. It’s a bit like how Big Brother works now because they think they know people because they’re watching constantly. At the beginning you just think they’re just people, you can’t identify. It’s the same with any programme. That’s what’s quite interesting about the idea of serialising things, a bit like I suppose how soaps work, if you just watch a soap – I haven’t watched Coronation Street for ages, but if I just turn it on it means nothing to me, it just leaves me cold. But if I watch it constantly, all those little nuances start to have big resonances.

ML: It sometimes can happen in as little as fifteen minutes, can’t it. If it’s a good story line you can very quickly stop thinking about them as actors and actresses.

GW: Yeah, but I think sometimes you have to almost like follow the path of the series to really know what these things mean in the big scheme of how life works. Like how when you say something it has an impact two weeks later. That’s what was quite interesting about this documentary, that it was a serialisation and that’s why it was (inaudible) in that sense.

ML: Do you think at the time when you were first exposed to these things that are now always referenced as big influences on your work, 7 Up, The Family and Mass Obseration, do you remember – Did they seem significant at the time?

GW: No.

ML: Would people have said, “Oh yes, Gillian loves The Family.”

GW: No. I think when I started thinking about them again was probably more like the 80s. Even then, because I wasn’t doing video in art school, I did paintings, I didn’t really think – I think it wasn’t until my thirties – when I actually started doing video then I realised that that was significant. It was almost like I had to start doing something similar to realise how significant it was. All I remember then, I suppose it’s like when you smell bread you understand where you were in a certain part in your life. It was a bit like that, maybe a bit of an epiphany when I started to – That’s when I started to realise that it was important, probably about 1990 actually.

ML: I remember realising that - we didn’t really watch documentaries but it would be a treat for us once a year to hire a video camera, but we always did really constructed performances scripted weeks in advance.

GW: Oh really? Your whole family?

ML: No, not really. Usually just me and my sister and friends. It was a really big thing, but it’s only now that I’m starting to realise its significance. We never ever filmed ourselves as ourselves.

GW: Yeah.

ML: We were quite protective of that in a way.

GW: Right, yeah.

ML: So, the newest work is on the Album photographs.

GW: Grandparents, yeah. I’ve got the contact sheets here.

ML: In these and Family History there are elements of the present combined with representations of the past.

GW: Yeah, I’m quite interested in the past and present.

ML: I notice that slightly more in the newest work. I was thinking about how television has become more nostalgic about itself, and the internet is also becoming a real field for nostalgia – lots of old TV stuff, lots of ancestry.

GW: Yeah. I think there will always be that sort of interest in history, because I think people become interested in history, even their own personal history, by the time they hit their thirties I think, because coming up to that point you don’t think of it because you’re always going forward. I think by the time I was about 32 – 33 I started thinking about making work which was related somehow to my past, or the idea of the past. Even if it was my past, or anyone’s past. It’s quite a hard thing to somehow realise without it falling into that kind of slight nostalgic trap. Not all my projects, but quite a few of my projects recently have had that element of looking back, but not – obviously, particularly with The Family. For quite a while I’d always wanted to do something, and I’d tried to work with someone else, but it was that idea of their past having been very significant somehow. Obviously with The Family it is because they’ve had their past recorded more than anyone of that generation. That’s their huge family album to them, and just the impact of being so famous. Does that kind of mark your life more than anything else because it was recorded, and is that more important? I was thinking the other day, how people now in generations to come will be able to have photographs that go back generations and generations of their family. I think that’s really fascinating because I come from a generation where it goes back a couple of generations. You actually have photographs of your great grandparents. But in the future people will just have these amazing albums, where there’ll be able to trace back a couple of hundred years of what people looked like. I just think that’s fascinating. It’s only now. I don’t know if it’s media that’s actually created the fascination, and also the internet because it makes connections. And all these kind of connections are made, people can find out much more about their own history as well as history in general. I think in many ways it has aided it, but as much as a photograph has. Because you hold something, and someone says, “That’s your great -”, someone you’ve never met. It means something just because it’s a photograph, somehow. But if someone told you that your great great grandparent lived there, somehow it doesn’t have – It almost gives it content that someone actually has this thing, an object, a photograph. And how now we do live through the media, where once they were seen as very extraordinary novelties, now they are seen as something sort of grounding people, who they are. That’s what’s quite interesting about The Family, because in some way it sort of encapsulated them, whether they wanted to be encapsulated or not, that’s the way they were read at the time. I think for some it was really a struggle, and for others they really enjoyed that process of being filmed, because no one ever experienced that lack of privacy before.

ML: It’s interesting with the participants of 7 Up. The director’s had to maintain this delicate relationship with some of them, and others have really embraced it as a part of their life.

GW: And some of them pulled out as well, didn’t they. I didn’t see the 49 Up actually, I would liked to have seen that. Or was it 50-something Up? That was last year, or something.

ML: I think 49 is the most recent.

GW: Right.

ML: But yeah, quite often someone would drop out for one, and then return for the next one.

GW: Yes, and you wonder if it’s somehow that they’re starting to think what it means historically. I think I’d find it very scary if someone was following me for seven years, because then I’d feel like I had this deadline to have a story between to make it worthwhile being filmed somehow.

ML: And you don’t want it to be a sad story.

GW: No, exactly. And there are some very sad stories in there, so yeah. You want it to be a happy ending, because everyone wants - that’s the thing about images and media, people want - and lives, people think in Hollywood terms sometimes that there needs to be an ending in someone’s life – that there needs to be a good story in someone’s life for there to be an end. That’s the sort of compulsion when you think of something like 7 Up, you think of this sort of compulsion for what the ending is going to be.

ML: Yes. I really thought that at the end of Sex and the City. After all those series, in the last sort of three episodes they all got boyfriends.

GW: Right. (laughter)

ML: It was as if we couldn’t quite bare the idea that maybe they’d never find, you know.

GW: Yeah. Even when I was watching The Office I thought it was a bit sad when they did the Christmas party and Ricky Gervaise got the girlfriend. I thought that was a bit sad that they kind of went for an ending, because I think what was so great about something like The Office actually was that there was no real – everyone was going to be sort of stuck in this office (laughter) and that’s what most lives are actually like, aren’t they. They are sort of more of the same every day. They sort of make something extraordinary, because you’re in that everyday, run-of-the-mill – that somehow the characters become extraordinary. But I thought it was sad that he made it so much of a happy ending, that he’s got this nice looking girlfriend and they go off into the sunset. (laughter)

ML: Can I have a look at these? (contact sheets of the grandparent Album photographs)

GW: Yeah, sure. I’ll show you which ones I’m using. That one there for the grandfather, and that one there for the grandmother.

ML: And these are going to be really large format?

GW: They are, yeah.

ML: They are amazing masks, aren’t they.

GW: Yeah.

ML: When you choose out of these (the photographic images) –

GW: Oh, I’ve got hundreds actually. These are the two that I chose out of I think thirty-something taken on this one (grandfather) and about forty taken on this one (grandmother). Forty roles of film, that is.

ML: Gosh.

GW: And it’s just always something in the position and the way the eyes are faced. Everything has to kind of work. There’s this one (laughs at one of the images).

ML: Is it partly which ever is closest to the original photo?

GW: I think it’s just having its own essence. It’s kind of how it, you know, how the lighting looks, how the expression – the thing with these masks is sometimes they can distort quite easily. Sometimes they do distort in some of the photographs.

ML: How many of the images in the series are of people before you were born?

GW: These are before I was born. My mum, my dad, I think that’s it. Four of the adults. And then my siblings, they are obviously not.

ML: And these are the first set of grandparents?

GW: Yes.

ML: And these are on your mother’s side, or your father’s side?

GW: Mother’s.

ML: What was the thinking behid that decision, or are there more to come?

GW: Well, first of all, I don’t think I’ve ever – that there was ever a photograph of my father’s father because he died at thirty-something, so I just don’t think there was ever a photograph of him. And his mother, there isn’t any really good quality ones. They’re always in the distance, so it would be quite hard to do that. I mean, maybe if I find some that – I’ve looked, but there’s just not many that – I’ve got one of her sitting at a christening with a cup of tea but it’s at such an odd angle that it would be difficult to get the physical – And she died also when I was very young. I knew this grandmother very well actually. He (maternal grandfather) died before I was born as well, but they had good photographs taken of them so that’s obviously easier to work from.

ML: So you never knew them. If you found images of another generation back, would you be interested in extending the series?

GW: I’ve got to check with my mum. There might be one of my great grandmother, so I’d like to maybe go back as far as my great grandmother, but then I’m stuck. (laughter) But that’s what made me thought about the other day, about how people in the future will be so lucky with sort of layers and layers of – if, obviously, if families keep in contact – but, for me then it all becomes a – and also, now people will have records of people where as we don’t really often – my mum can tell a bit about her grandparents but they wouldn’t have anything to give my mum about who existed before.

ML: What was your family’s response when you asked if you could use their images?

GW: It was sort of... (pause) There wasn’t really any particular response really. It was just, “fine” and, “yes”.

ML: In college that often seemed to be the feeling generally, that people are quite relaxed about that sort of thing really.

GW: Yeah. There’s no sort of, “Why?!” or anything like that. (laughter)

ML: I was thinking, by always going back generations, it kind of positions you and your generation as the end point.

GW: Yeah.

ML: How would you think about – could a next generation enter this work? I was thinking about how Marc Quinn used his own child in his work. I’m wondering –

GW: How to take it forward.

ML: Would you use your own children?

GW: I haven’t got any children. (laughter) If I had, I probably would actually.

ML: Really?

GW: But it depends how old they were. Yeah. I did me at three years old as well, so I’ve been able to do one of a young face. So, if I had I would have definitely done that. Ultimately, what’s so interesting about doing those photographs is how the style of photography changes, and how you go from this formal portrait to this sort of snapshot image. But even now, formal portraits don’t look so formal anymore do they, because people have learnt to relax a bit more in front of the camera because everybody’s got digital cameras where before people would be very very well posed because it was an incredibly special occasion to have a photograph, but now it’s not a special occasion to be photographed.

ML: Or when it is a special occasion it’s all very retro, like those make-over photographs where it’s all deliberately very artificial. People like snapshots because they think it’s more candid.

GW: And also you can edit them and you can take loads and you might get a photograph you want to use where before some people would never show – they’d be too horrified with what they got back from the two weeks going in the post (laughter) that’s what we had to do years ago when you had photographs developed. You’d send them off to a place called Tudor and then get them back, and sometimes they’d get lost in the post aswell. Not that I ever did, but I had friends who would cut themselves out of photographs if they didn’t like what they looked like. I’d be interested to keep that photograph that I didn’t like of myself, just to see what it would look like in the future because I always think there’s a future and you’ll have a different opinion of that in the future.

ML: Recently I saw some photographs of myself that I remember at the time being absolutely horrified at and wanting to cry that that was what my face really looked like, but now I look and think, “You looked fine!”

GW: Exactly. (laughter)

ML: What a shame. I should have relaxed. ... This one, I’ve got “rude question (?)” in brackets but –

GW: Rude? Okay. (laughter)

ML: How do you think shyness has sort of affected your work and your life? What’s your experience of shyness through your life? That’s really general, but...

GW: It is, isn’t it, but, um... it’s very hard to look at yourself, looking from the outside looking in, and be able to give – It’s actually helped, made me less shy, but then you can easily crawl back into being...

ML: Can I put something forward?

GW: Yeah, ‘course you can.

ML: I was reading the Phaidon book, and I experienced alot of your work, also Family History, as like, “Oh no,” it’s a real accusation to my personality type which is exactly the kind, you know the sociologists that Trisha refers to, who will try to speak for other people, categorise people, understand people –

GW: Yeah.

ML: - and as a child I talked too much. I felt like it’s almost like the wisdom of reserve and shyness in a way that by giving the opportunity to other people, in a very constructed way, but to speak, rather than trying to analyse them -I don’t really know where I’m going with this but –

GW: No, that’s very good. That’s a very nice way of putting it. I’ll have to try and remember that myself. (laughter) No, it’s nice sometimes when someone can articulate better than you can yourself. I mean, part of my shyness goes back to also not feeling that I could articulate that well. It took me a long time to speak properly, I might have said that in some of those catalogues as well, and so I always imagined that all the interesting things are going to be said by other people anyway. Not that, “Woe is me,” but I just think that there’s a lot of interesting – alot of people who are over-looked say really interesting things as opposed to people that normally commentate on television. I’m always quite shocked – slightly non-sequiter – but I’m always quite shocked on those kind of I Love the Seventies programmes, things like that, they always ask people who really are not that interesting to comment just because their celebrities, yet there’s really lots of interesting people out there who would have something far more fascinating to say but they’re not celebrities, and I always find that weird. If I was doing those programmes – I never know why – I would never just ask a celebrity to comment just because they were there at the time and because they’re well known. I find in this culture that we give more voice to people who’ve had the voice before as opposed to – it’s a very strange thing that.

ML: But people who are known from reality TV aren’t professional performers so in a way they are like famous everyday people. Or maybe they were at one point.

GW: I think fame changes people so radically, that’s the strange thing isn’t it. I mean, even with the reality of Big Brother - but I think also that the selection process now is very different maybe from 2000 when it was more like people that probably hadn’t had a slight entertainment history, where now I think most people probably have done a bit of something in the media before they go on Big Brother, so there’s a slight change in emphasis. There’s people that have been in bands, there’s people that have been on the periphery of almost that kind of media world. I’m slightly going off the point now, I don’t know what point we were on. I find that all fascinating. I still find that very interesting, though. But going back to your comment on shyness – going back slightly off the radar – I’m trying to think how it’s... (pause) I’m trying to think of something that sounds as good as what you said, which is quite hard now! (laughter)