‘Out of it’: drunkenness and ethics in Martha Rosler and Gillian Wearing

This essay examines two significant representations of drunkenness by women: Martha Rosler's conceptualist 24‐panel photo installation The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974) and Gillian Wearing's recent 23‐minute video Drunk (1997–9). In line with her own critical writings, Rosler's photo installation problematizes the ‘documentary’ ethos in photography. The work resists any straightforward depiction of alcoholics and attempts instead to set up a ‘poetics of drunkenness’ in terms primarily of its text panels. By contrast, Wearing is shown to return to an almost forensic representation of the phenomenon of drunkenness. The ethical problems raised by this are the main concern of the essay. In the final analysis, it is argued that Wearing's work is best understood in the context of a very specific gendered discourse around drug dependency and rudery in the production of the so‐called ‘yBas’ of the 1990s. Risking appearing to be ethically insensitive or aesthetically anachronistic, her work mobilizes the inarticulacy of its drunken subjects in order to allegorize processes of social mourning.