"I AM THE PERSON ...": THE COMPLICIT WORK OF JANE AND LOUISE WILSON.

"I am the person who smashed your door I was not well I have a psychiatric illness if you want to contact me see overleaf." So reads the scrawled note that forms part of Jane and Louise Wilson's early photographic installation Construction and Note (1992). While not always as overt, the presence of an authoritative voice other than the authors' is a recurrent feature in their work. It is clear that the voice belongs to someone actively or implicitly involved in the action portrayed in the Wilsons' photographs and films. Although sometimes it passes, like a thrown voice, through the person of the author, its utterance is never that of the author as first person. It never speaks to the viewer as self-determining recipient of information, but rather as a participant. From its modestly-staged beginnings to more recent elaborate productions, the work of Jane and Louise Wilson draws the viewer into a relation of active complicity.

Even as it develops, the Wilsons' work remains consistent. Their approach involves looking into the crevices of the collective unconscious, embodied primarily in architectures of oppression and menace. Such spaces include a motel room in New Jersey, into which the artists peer like forensic scientists intent on understanding the inconsequential grouping of familiar but denatured objects in Routes 1 & 9 North (1994), and the equally decrepit if grander Viennese hotel room featured in Crawl Space (1994). Both of these works consist of large-format color photographs, the latter accompanied by a video. In 1995 they adopted the format of large-scale video installations accompanied by photographs or sculptural elements as a different method of exploring the same space. Three such works were exhibited at London's Serpentine Gallery: Stasi City (1997), which portrays the abandoned headquarters of the Stasi, the secret service of former East Germany; Gamma (1999), which portrays the equally desolate (though rather be tter maintained) decommissioned United States air force base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, England, formerly the site of a powerful feminist culture of resistance; and Parliament (A Third House) (1999), recently commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery, a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of interior views of the Houses of Parliament.

Each of these three works operates in the same immersing manner, surrounding the viewer by projecting floor to ceiling videos onto all four walls of a constructed room. The images are predominantly architectural, comprised of simple pans of empty spaces. By turns, the artists focus on telling details of the scene, or on long shots emphasizing the locations' scale. These projections butt up against each other, without a frame. They appear to fold in and out of one another along and across the four walls in a constant, dizzying kaleidoscoping progression. Occasionally one of the artists will make a discreet appearance, her dress and comportment in keeping with the historical moment conjured up by the scene.

Though overwhelming either in their grandeur or their lavish decrepitude, such places never assume the clinical austerity of comparable imagery such as the work of the German artists Bernd and Hula Becher or Reinhardt Mucha. The reason lies mainly in the Wilsons' refusal to allow their sites to speak for themselves however pregnant with cultural symbolism or internalized iconography they may be. Instead they insist on using these sites as locations for their own highly personal, narrative, performative interventions. The Wilsons mobilize their chosen sites to create moments of compelling and delightful interaction.

Perhaps this effect is related to the fact that the work is not made by a single artist but two people. Born in 1967, Jane and Louise Wilson are twins who chose at the beginning of their careers to work together. As students at two different art colleges, they often collaborated and finally exhibited the same degree show at two separate locations. In 1990, they jointly enrolled in the Master of Arts course at Goldsmiths College of Art in London. Their collaboration is a pragmatic and effective one, remarkable only for its lack of pretension or airs. There is no sustained division of labor, no precedence, no false modesty. They can still surprise each other with individual comments about the work, but do not allow contradiction to settle in. Both artists commonly, in the presence of the other, refer naturally to "my work" and what "I" want to achieve with it, rather than falling into the often affected partnership language of the married couple/collaborative duo. There is none of the tense melodrama that acco mpanied the work of Ulay and Marina Abramovic (which has interestingly survived on an international level as Abramovic's solo work); none of the coy collaboration of Gilbert & George. And yet, the fact that the Wilsons are simultaneously two and one is implicit in the impact of their work. Its effect is more akin to that of single artists who have consciously split from collaborations--Alighiero & Boetti or the Wilsons' London contemporary Bob and Roberta Smith--to distance what gets said from the ego-driven utterances of the solo artist.

The figures of Jane and Louise Wilson often appear in their work, but always under the influence of some external force. This force may be overtly coercive--drugs or hypnosis--or it may be more ambiguous, like the force of gravity acting on a pair of the twins' legs as they dangle down from the top of the frame in both the early Construction and Note and the more recent Stasi City. It may also be the equally unarguable genius loci that compelled the artists to wear uniforms in Gamma in keeping with the military history present in the subject matter. The impact of these interventions is both gently humorous and profoundly affecting: humorous in the way they puncture the solemnity or the too telling drama of their chosen sites; affecting in how the artists themselves, the protagonists and instigators of the work, adopt the role of participants every bit as put out and put upon as the locations themselves.

While in their early projects the Wilsons had to stage their scenes, importing props and doctoring the rooms in which they photographed, more recently they have exercised their intervention primarily in the choice rather than in the tailoring of a site. This has led them to the seat of the British government in the case of Parliament and to the icon of American desire, Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Graveyard Time (1999) (a work shown in the Turner Prize finalists exhibition now at the Tate Gallery in London). The limitations often placed on the Wilsons' manipulation of a site have always been an issue, even in the New Jersey motel room, but room for maneuvering in their recent work is non-existent. As a result, there is a strong sense of the artists working with the space at hand, their sensitivity to its nuances and their complicity with its secrets as filming in the Houses of Parliament and in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas was only allowed outside of public hours. By definition, then, they are presenting images o f well-known public buildings that reveal their private and more enigmatic sides.

Inevitably with such an approach, the Wilsons are required to call on help from a variety of sources. In some instances, individuals with bureaucratic responsibilities at the sites have become key and willing participants in the productions. In Berlin they were allocated a former English translator for a East German newspaper as a guide during their work in the Stasi headquarters, while at Greenham Common the Ministry of Defense assigned an ex-military engineer to accompany them around the site during both their research and their shooting. Both men became key facilitators of the works concerned. The Wilsons have worked with the same cameraman for a considerable period of time and they deliberately keep their production teams to an absolute minimum number. The controlled and directly fabricated nature of their artwork, even in these days of elaborate production in high-tech media, is of crucial importance to them. For all its ambitions of technique and content, their work must, in their words, "seem like not hing, but mean something," a refreshing reversal of mass-media priorities.

GREG HILTY is Director of Arts at the London Art Board.