There's a voice on one of Gillian Wearing's videos that you don't want to hear. It belongs to a man who answered the artist's advertisement in the listings magazine, Time Out. The text of Wearing's ad, which also became the title of the work, ran: "Confess all on Video. Don't worry, you'll be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian . . . " Within a couple of hours of the first copies arriving in the London newspaper shops, Wearing found herself listening to that voice on the other end of the phone. He was willing to confess all. Boy, was he willing!
Sitting calmly in his fright wig, he tells of his interests in pornography, the uses he has for it. He explains why he began to make nuisance calls to women, how he finds their telephone numbers in Loot (a free advertisements magazine); he tells of his strategies for making sure his victims are alone when he calls. He explains how interested some people are when he calls.
He concluded the session, says Wearing, by asking, off camera, if he could keep his disguise for further phone activity. Shortly afterwards he began calling the artist herself.
"Not everyone I deal with is even potentially dangerous. Most of the time I'm really dealing with normalness, with just something bubbling under that doesn't quite seem normal," says Wearing. "Religion helps people to understand their existence and, without it, it is very hard to have an idea of humanity. Television and camcorders have encouraged people to believe that they can use these things to be cathartic, that they can use these mediums to stay healthy . . . but I think the confessions are mostly for an audience, they are about your own judgements of these people."
Wearing's art frequently tramps this ground, a territory between fine art and documentary, between flip disposability and moralistic seriousness. Her work often seems to have more in common with pulp television than it does with video art. Despite the frequently anti-art texture of her work, however, Wearing has become one of the most prominent artists in Britain, a fact confirmed earlier this year by her nomination for the Turner prize. Wearing was so much at the heart of the excitement generated by British art over the last few years that one of her images was used to sum up the new school on the poster of the art show, Bril- liant! This group show announced the arrival in the US from Britain of a new generation of artists, which included Wearing, Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread. Wearing does not, however, feel that she or her work necessarily sit comfortably alongside the Britpop big guns. She has, after all, come to art through an extremely circuitous route.
Born in Birmingham in 1963, Wearing left school without any qualifications after a poor academic career. She describes her family as "always at war with each other", and herself as rather inflexible. She had wanted to become a hairdresser like her friends, but settled instead for a course in being a hotel receptionist. When she failed that, she slowly drifted into art. Gopher work at an animation company eventually led her to a foundation course at Chelsea, and a B.A. from Goldsmiths.
Her early experience with the college tutors was good. "It was the first time that I'd met people who were interested, not just in what you did with a paint brush, but in all aspects of you," she says. "They were interested in what made you tick." Eventually, however, the relationship soured. In 1993, she began work on Goldsmith's graduate programme, but was eventually rejected. She was unhappy about the decision, but did not want to get involved in fighting for her place. "I'm not really interested in getting into big arguments with institutions. I think it takes up a lot of energy that could be better used somewhere else." In any case, by this stage, her work had begun to find direction. Latching onto the form of the voxpop format - the media equivalent of bungee-jumping - she had begun work on a series of photographs of Londoners. The series went under the rather arch title of Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say.
Approaching passers-by in Regents Park, and latterly in the streets of London, she offered a piece of card and a felt pen and asked them to write what they were thinking. She then photographed them holding the card. "People can write whatever they want," says Wearing of the on-going project.
And so they do. Two heavy metalloid youths carry signs that read "Guns 'n' Roses" and "Fuckin excellent"; an old woman on a sunny day wrote: "I really like Regents Park". More than once, Wearing approached people sleeping rough around the capital. Handing over the felt tip pens to this group, she received her most extraordinary replies. "Give People Homes there are plenty of them OK!"; "I have been certified as mildly insane"; "Come back Mary, love you". Sometimes people who appear to be far more at ease in their lives produce equally disorientating replies. One man in a neat suit and tie and a with careful haircut, a security pass just visible beneath his jacket, holds a sign reading: "I'm Desperate".
"I'm not really working at an anthropological level, because I'm not really going out there with a particular question. My photographs are open. In the Signs work, for instance, I'm not looking for any particular answer. I'm not looking for a particularly political comment."
Even if Wearing disavows the anthropological content of her images, stressing instead the exploration of identity, her work has frequently been compared to that of Mass Observation, a group of English anthropologists who came together in 1937 to create what they called an "anthropology of ourselves" - a meticulous study of the everyday lives of people in Britain. Their oddly surreal work was later celebrated in the BBC documentary The Lost Tribes of Bolton.
Like that well-meaning group, Wearing's focuses on the everyday and discovers all sorts of rituals, habits and ad hoc religions integrated smoothly into contemporary secular Britain. She is a 1990s flaneuse, Steadicam-ing the ceremonies of air guitarists, stalkers, cowboys, transvestites, finding normality beneath the bizarre just as often as she uncovers oddness hiding beneath the ordinary. Where decades of British style magazines have taught citizens to judge people from their lapels and logos, Wearing proposes a model of urban life in which not everything can be understood by reading the label. Nevertheless, people in Wearing documents still seem to feel that they can discover everything they need to know almost instantaneously. For one video work (which features in the current Projects show at IMMA) Wearing bandaged her face with white cloth and walked the streets of South London with a camcorder. Most people she passed did not seem to notice her, or more accurately, seemed to calculate rapidly that the best approach to this strange figure was to keep walking, or quickly take an interest in a shop window.
In another piece, Danc- ing in Peckham, Wearing appeared in the concourse of a shopping centre and began dancing in silence to music she had memorised earlier - I Will Survive and Smells Like Teen Spirit, were the tunes, as it happens. Again, nobody "noticed" her.
Wearing has not had any shortage of attention, both in the art world and in the London-based media. At the end of this year, however, if she wins the Turner Prize, it may be a little bit harder for the people in the streets of London not to notice the artist. She does not envisage, in any case, that the result will alter the way she works.
"I've no idea what winning the Turner prize would mean. I know that you can't hope for it. I've seen people who think they're going to get it; and I've seen people hoping to get it, but that's all destructive. I can't see it changing things hugely, except maybe a lot of people will go to the shows."
Gillian Wearing is among the contributors to the group show, Projects, at IMMA, Dublin, until October 12th. Wearing's work will be featured in the Turner Prize nominees show, at the Tate Gallery, London from October 29th, while the winner of the £20,000 prize will be announced on December 2nd.
Sensation, an exhibition of new British art, including the work of Wearing, opens at the Royal Academy, London, on Thursday.
