A couple of weeks before Gillian Wearing’s retrospective exhibition opened at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), British Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered his swansong speech to the Labour Party annual conference. Of the numerous achievements Tony Blair claimed for New Labour’s three terms in office, one was the creation of a ‘caring society’ in Britain, in which the living conditions of hundreds of thousands of Britons had inestimably improved. Blair’s government had taken on poverty, unemployment and low wages with, he claimed, considerable success.
Of the many strategies New Labour adopted to deal with the often insidious symptoms of social incohesion was the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO). This granted police powers to apprehend unruly citizens who threatened the social good (including children as young as ten), and deliver varying forms of punishment from fines to prison terms. ‘Asbo’ also entered common speech as a term applied to likely candidates for such an Order, which is how one might regard some of the people in Gillian Wearing’s photographs and videos.
One such Asbo is Theresa, who is photographed by Wearing in varying stages of drunken disarray alongside her assorted lovers, who have apparently penned the accompanying testaments to Theresa’s personality, recounting her propensity for violence, for sleeping with anyone for cash, her failure to wash, her stupidity. The notes, despite their nearly illegible script, barely comprehensible sentences and frequent obscenities, also speak with affection of Theresa’s sense of humour and her loyalty, suggesting that for some of these men at least, she is their ballast in an otherwise hostile society.
Many of Wearing’s works seem to document the emotional and behavioural residue that collects in the kind of society