“We are all just actors trying to control and manage our public image, we act based on how others might see us.”
― Erving Goffman
Between 1992 and ’93, British artist and Turned Prize winner Gillian Wearing created“Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say”.
Gillian asked 500 people in the UK to write their immediate opinions and thoughts on a sheet of card. She then photographed the participants holding their signs.
What would they reveal about our public and private lives?
“The Signs series foresaw the age of social media and the possibility of having a platform so that everyone can perhaps have a voice, and give expression to their inner thoughts – positive and negative though that may be.”
– Gillian Wearing (via)
“When I started my signs series in the early 90’s, I didn’t realise that people would be so amazingly open to me, a stranger, and the text they wrote broke through the barriers of how we perceive someone we don’t know. So if anything it has taught me not to rush to judgement on others, to allow someone to speak first and to listen, we sometimes forget to do the latter. My overwhelming experiences have been really positive; there is a lot of humanity in the world.”
– Gillian Wearing
“In 1992, we were still being fed this line that British people are reserved and don’t like to express what they are feeling. The idea of Signs is that if you approached anyone they would have something interesting to say. I never picked people. If they grasped the idea I was making art rather than a survey, then they tended to be intrigued.”
– Gillian Wearing
“And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.”
― Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
You can buy a book of her signs here.
Via: Whitechapel Gallery, Wallpaper,
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