History and Drag
Ellen Gallagher in Conversation with
Cheryl Kaplan
Her works combine
formal austerity, an examination of African American history, and
subversive wit. For over a decade, the American Ellen Gallagher has been
attracting international attention with her drawings and paintings. Cheryl
Kaplan had a talk with her about children’s games, one-legged
comedians, and fatal experiments.
Ellen
Gallagher, from the series "DeLuxe", 2005,
Deutsche
Bank Collection, © Ellen Gallagher, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Zürich London
Ellen
Gallagher has been living near ports most of her
life. Currently, she splits her time between Rotterdam and New York, where
she’s been exhibiting at Gagosian
Gallery since 1998. In 1995, Gallagher rose to quick acclaim at the Whitney
Biennial. Her best-known works, drawings like Preserve, DeLuxe,
and her large-scale paintings, include archival imagery generated from
magazines like Ebony, an influential lifestyle magazine created in
1945 for the African American market. Ebony
broke cultural ground and included advertising that featured black models
driving cars, using hair products, and drinking soft drinks.
Gallagher’s
paintings and drawings feature complex and quirky interventions, like a
series of plasticine floating eyes or re-configured wigs that sit
surprisingly on top of advertisements. Her visual commentary annotates the
past and infiltrates the language and behavior promised in the ads. In Mr.
Terrific, Gallagher has outfitted the protagonist of a hair cream ad
with a wild yellow wig hat that also doubles as a mask. The ad promises
that "Johnson’s Ultra Wave will make you really proud of
your hair." In this case, the products invented by Johnson were created by George
E. Johnson, not Johnson & Johnson
. In 1971, Johnson Products would become the first Black-owned corporation
listed on the American Stock Exchange. In creating imagery that draws from
both a real and invented archive, Gallagher escalates the advertising
"promise" presented as a cultural "truth," letting the viewer confront and
re-examine misinformation.
Ellen
Gallagher, eXelento, 2004 (detail),
Courtesy
Gagosian Gallery
|
Ellen Gallagher, from the series "DeLuxe",
2005,
Deutsche Bank Collection,
© Ellen Gallagher, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Zürich London
Gallagher’s
work is about American identity and how that identity is confounded, then
"straightened out" and often left in conflict. Her work strikes back to
the Middle Passage
, the longest and most dangerous journey slave ships took from the West
Coast of Africa, where slaves were boarded under the worst conditions and
sent across the Atlantic to be sold and traded.
The
tension in Gallagher’s paintings and drawings gains its strength through a
gentle, but tough volley between Minimalism’s
austere lines and Gallagher’s lexicon of archival images. "When I listen
to techno or hip hop, I think of jazz. It’s all about minimalism…by way of
jazz. It’s all very spare and very hard. When you think of Donald
Judd, you can also think about Miles
Davis." While Minimalism is about the relationship of materials, space
and the viewer, Gallagher’s relationship to this movement and to jazz
allows for unusual visual eruptions. Her delicate grid structures have the
touch of an Agnes
Martin line and the unflinching determination of a Minimalist grid.
Gallagher teases the surface of her work, using a process of omission and
addition to burrow in, as she retrieves and re-directs information. She
invokes characters, some historically based and others irreparably
altered. Her cast is active and agile, letting Gallagher doggedly pursue
schisms in human behavior.
Cheryl Kaplan: The Preserve
drawings use plasticine forms. The shapes reminded me of Colorforms,
a child’s game made of vinyl in bright, saturated colors that peeled off
and stuck to a figure. I used to stack up fifty Colorforms on top of each
other.
Ellen Gallagher: A friend and I made clothes out
of paper, stapling layers to dolls. They’d look like Boli
figures – African objects built from accumulation and ritual.
Ellen
Gallagher, "DeLuxe", 2005,
Deutsche
Bank Collection, © Ellen Gallagher, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Zürich London
In using the
plasticine wigs, you adjust a pre-existing image, respecting or violating
the form.
What appears to be a magazine
page is always altered. I begin with an archive used first in Preserve,
where the literalness of the page was important; then it developed into Falls
and Flips (2001). The paintings are built with a grid, but unlike the
mute 1960s grid of minimalism, my grid refers to map-making or a
navigational chart; it activates the space. I’ll enlarge details or cut
them until they’re seamless, making a fake ad or using real ads, scanning
them so you can’t tell the difference between the original and the
alteration. The surgeries are about invasion and abstraction.
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