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The Truth About You
John Haberin New York City
Gillian Wearing and Face to Face
Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie
Gillian Wearing wants to know the truth about you. She worries about you, honest. It might well be her only subject in all these years of work.
If honesty for her just happens to come with scare quotes, you will understand. Everything else does, too, at the Guggenheim. Besides, if truth in photography and film still has its hold on art and legend, you will understand that, too. But whose truth? Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie all go "Face to Face" with their subjects, at the International Center of Photography. Those subjects just happen to be artists, too. 
And now over to you
Wearing was still a student in London when she started flaunting her honesty, in the most casual self-portraits that she could muster. There was no such thing as a selfie back then, only snapshots, and she had their coarse look down cold. It took her no time to adopt Polaroids as well. No other form is as close to a throwaway, but also as recognizable. The very idea of the instantaneous had become branded. And then in 1992, still in her late twenties, she turned to you.
She turned to you as subject twice over, as sitter and as voice. Her title said as much, Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say, but its redundancy only drives the distance home. That "you" displays your own sign, in your own writing, but does it bring you any closer to the naked truth? From confessions of desperation to pleas for world peace to self-satisfied irony, people assume a role of their own choosing, just as with their clothing. If you are instead the viewer today, you can only shake your head and ask, who are these people? They have become unwilling emblems of honesty and willing clichés.
Wearing loves the truth, so much that she assists in its manufacture. A mother's lips move while her children speak and vice versa, and what could be the ultimate display of empathy drives them that much further apart. People admit to their most costly mistakes and most intimate fears, as Fear and Loathing in 2014. The video looks back to all sorts of manufactured honesty, from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in 1972 to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—with Hunter Thompson in 1971 and again with Terry Gilliam of Monty Python in 1993. Another woman confesses to absolutely everything in 2006, but for the ultimate cliché, daytime TV. Wearing has cast both her and the host and hung the stage set's wall lamp out front.
She has a man play the bully in 2010, but that, too, is a role. He is a method actor, for whom getting in touch with his feelings is itself a methodology. She asks twenty-six people in police uniform to hold their pose for a full hour of silence, in 1996, and of course they cannot. Do they become closer to themselves or to chaos? Need I add that not one is an actual officer? Sacha and her mum, who convert the parent-child relationship into a wrestling match that same year, are actors, too.
Identity, for Wearing, is a fluid concept but a real one. People cannot help but assume it, but they cannot altogether choose it for themselves. It has a social context, which may involve serious trauma. And she wants to empathize fully with the trauma, even if it takes her into further fictions. Homage to the Woman with the Bandaged Face That I Saw Yesterday in 1995 has her restaging the sighting, but also what others make of the woman. I hesitate to call it a collaboration.
More recently, people pose for public sculpture of a "real family," a "typical family," and "everyday heroes," but go ahead and gag. Wearing seems genuinely to appreciate its limits. She has Diane Arbus in bronze, camera at the ready, at the entrance to Central Park across from the Plaza Hotel. She must feel kinship with Arbus, the photographer who coaxed people into revealing the seamier side of New York. It hardly bothers her that the statue comes closest to the dreadful, pandering realism of J. Seward Johnson. But then her entire career veers at once sentimentality and condescension.
Family histories
British art often wears its irony and suffering on its sleeve, as with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Wearing's literalism was plain enough in a gallery survey ten years ago—and forgive me if I link to my review then for a fuller account. Recent "lockdown portraits," in oil and watercolor, grow unaccountably bland. The curators, Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman, sacrifice chronology for works in series in all four of the museum's tower galleries, because so does she. Still, Wearing applies the same jaundiced and exacting standards to herself. She also displays her masks as art.
She calls that daytime TV show Family History, but she looks equally convincing as three generations of her own family—from her cute self at age three to her grandfather, as dapper as 007. She has her "spiritual family," too, in self-portraits as artists she admires, Arbus included. They can be self-aggrandizing or self-pitying—including Julia Margaret Cameron in some of the very first staged photography, Eva Hesse with the manufactured woman's body, a dying Robert Mapplethorpe with his death's head, Albrecht Dürer as Jesus, Marcel Duchamp as himself and his female alter ego, and Andy Warhol in drag. Everyone, Warhol said, can be famous for fifteen minutes, but some are more famous than others. When Wearing calls a work My Charms, you will not be surprised if it is an enormous charm bracelet. Be prepared to be annoyed and charmed.
"All I have is me." Still in search of truth? You might hear it from another woman on camera. Luchita Hurtado hides nothing. As she speaks, she thumbs through work from the 1970s, those colorful diamond patterns that brought her to a wider audience at last, in her fifties. She is trying to explain how they came to be—to the interviewer, to Tacita Dean behind the camera, and to herself.
Hurtado may sound desperately alone, but neither her words nor her paintings are cries of despair. The Venezuelan artist has a reputation not just for geometric abstraction, but also for the inspiration she took from her own body. She looked down on it as she worked and kept thinking about what she saw. She had been smoking, she explains, and images of her smokes made their way into her art, but she was trying to give up smoking not for herself alone, but for someone she loved. And then it hit her: she was relying on and realizing herself.
Thanks to film, she can still do so for a long time to come, even after her death in 2020. She is one of dozens of artists on both sides of the camera in "Face to Face," portraits by Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie. That includes painters, sculptors, writers, curators, and filmmakers along with the photographers, and it multiplies them in order to ask questions. Just for starters, who is that me? Who fashions it, the photographer or the sitter, and just who is using whom? Better yet, is that ever really me?
Those are raises fashionable questions after so much artistry and critical theory, but it might be best not to make too much of them—except for the last, about truth. Dean herself keeps asking, in mash-ups of photography and painting and in films of artists like this one. Hurtado and the interviewer, Julie Mehretu, do their best to drop the artifice. And yet that intimate one-on-one has become four, counting Dean and a stern male looking on (Matt Mullican, also a painter). One can barely make out the reproductions that Hurtado holds in her hands, and their talk becomes more about smoking than art. Mehretu, in turn, a titanic abstract painter in her own right, is not probing but smiling.
Faces and friends
In other words, they are making art, but among friends. It is not a new development. In nineteenth-century Danish art at the Met right now, a circle of friends gathers for a single group portrait. And "Among Friends," selections from ICP's collection curated by Sara Ickow, drives the point home. Andy Warhol has his stellar company, while Henri Cartier-Bresson captures Alberto Giacometti crossing a Paris street in the rain. But then Weegee shoots Edward Steichen, Steichen shoots Beaumont Newhall, who championed Berenice Abbott, who photographs—well, I could go on a long time, but the show already does.
It is an ever-widening circle of friends, to the point of a deeper truth or wilder fiction, and so it is for "Face to Face." The three contributors often turn to the same sitter, with precarious results. In a second film, Dean lingers as David Hockney takes his own smoke, in a studio filled with portraits. He seems unable to rise from his chair. Over time, the tension only rises—and he is still seated when Opie pays a visit for her photograph. Yet her black background promises anything but Hockney's studio or creative act.
The curator, Helen Molesworth, opens with two portraits of Hilton Als, the critic. For Lacombe, he looks poised, posed, and downright glamorous—but then she appeared in a show called "The Glamour Project" and made her name in fashion photography, at Elle. He, in turn, is a lifelong student of images. For Opie, he wears an ill-fitting jacket and cannot be bothered to set straight the pen in his shirt pocket. Even her use of color, as opposed to Lacombe's black and white, signals that Als looks like this in real life. And yet black and white has its own claim to photojournalism, while color has often signaled photography's claims to art.
Both photographers also have sections to themselves. Lacombe watches Louise Bourgeois with one hand on something solid and one in her hair, as if the sculptor had become sculpture. Elizabeth Murray, Lee Bontecue, and Kara Walker stand tall in their studio, more at home the closer they get to their materials, while Maya Angelou has an entire wall for herself as theme and variations, as if caught up in rhythm of her words. Patti Smith might be counting the seconds until she is finally off stage. Is Lacombe reducing each one to her essence as an artist? But then can Nan Goldin have ever felt so happy in her own skin—or Richard Avedon, the creator of cultural icons, so informal?
Opie cannot display her fleshy queer body, but she can make flesh gleam in shadows and studio lights. She can give artists the oval frames of long-ago mirrors and portraits—or background color that cuts them off from everything but themselves and you. If their clothing and their skin tones clash with it, all the better. John Waters, the director, looks all the more in your face blown up to the inside of an ICP elevator. As the doors close, you can only confront his keen eyes and your discomfort head on. This is one clash act.
Lacombe also gained access to Martin Scorsese on set, for artistry in progress. A double portrait has him modestly to the right of Robert DeNiro, one eye on his star. De Niro instinctively plays to his audience, but the director has not quite given up control. Are all three photographers the real performers or the ultimate directors? In their different ways, all three exaggerate no end in search of truth. Can that be why Dean called her film portrait of Hurtado, who lived to age one hundred, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting?
Gillian Wearing ran at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through June 13, 2022, and just outside Central Park through August 14. "Face to Face" and "Between Friends" ran at the International Center of Photography through May 1, 2023. Related reviews look at Gillian Wearing, Tacita Dean, and Catherine Opie in the galleries.