Henry Art Gallery, 543-2280
Through May 4.
The gap between truth and fiction has all but closed, hasn't it? Mostly, I think, because we expect a certain amount of truth in our fiction (based on a true story, ripped from the headlines, the mockumentary) and a dab of fiction in our truth (tabloids). Even with a few years of sophisticated literary theory under my belt, I'm still mildly surprised when actors turn out to be different from the characters they play, and this is only partly because I don't think much of their acting skills, and assume they're working from close to home.
But as long as we can still see a sliver of light, no matter how infinitesimal, in that gap, then there is something left for art to explore. This sliver constitutes an ignored realm of expectation and projection, an unexamined edge that Gillian Wearing has been dissecting for about 10 years, since she first burst onto the London scene with Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say. Wearing does not seem interested in truth, but in our investment in it, and the perception of it.
In 10-16, a work from 1997 now showing at the Henry, Wearing taped interviews with children and then hired middle-aged actors to lip-synch the children's words. It's such a simple premise, but one that contains so many variables that it develops in complexity the more you watch it--exactly the opposite of a punch line. The strangest choice Wearing has made is to use a naked dwarf taking a bath as the face for one of the monologues. It's unsettling, and can direct the whole experience if you happen to walk into the gallery while it's on: It can seem like Wearing is positing some sort of dare, challenging you to listen to the words rather than stare at the dwarf's penis. (If you see the work in sequence, the dwarf section acts more as another in a series of strange choices, including Wearing herself appearing in one clip as a silent interlocutor--just the back of her head and a shoulder.)
This is one reason why if you're going to see 10-16, you should sit through it a few times. It gets you past the dwarf's penis. It also gets you past the difficulty of penetrating some of the British working-class accents, so that once you know what's being said you can focus on how it's being said. It's like a sitcom rerun you've seen three or four times, where you've developed an uncanny knowledge of the actors' bodies and movements and gestures so that the funniness--the awkwardness, the physical comedy--is heightened by the familiarity rather than drained by it.
And in 10-16 you may think the interest lies in the big contradiction, the big way that these two things--the child's voice, the adult's body--don't line up. But, in fact, it's in the little ways: the way one actor turns a child's constant ums into slight but very deliberate popping motions with her mouth and eyes, accentuating them rather than normalizing them. Or the way one child's monologue is divided between two women genteelly eating sandwiches in the yard (one picks at it as though mildly unsatisfied).
The truths of 10-16 are both larger and smaller than what was first uttered by the children--the ideas both grow in and lose stature, the way they do in Michael Apted's 7 Up film series, an obvious inspiration. It's not that interesting that one child says, "I feel like I'm a man in a boy's body"--it's sort of obvious. What is interesting is that in the dwarf's rant about his mother's new lesbian lover, the "big white swan," he pauses in his anger to say, "she didn't look like a swan to me"--the last word in the failure of adult euphemism (and the instability of appearances). What's also interesting is that in every section, in the moment between the end of the monologue and the end of the film, the actors all get a sort of lost and baffled look, as if they have forgotten which they are, adult actor or child interviewee. One knows, somehow, exactly how they feel.
