ELLEN GALLAGHER
EDITED BY JULIET BINGHAM
AxME
WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM CAROL ARMSTRONG, ROBIN D.G. KELLEY, RICHARD SHIFF AND ULRICH WILMES TATE PUBLISHING
CONTENTS
FIRST PUBLISHED 2013 BY ORDER OF THE TATE TRUSTEES BY TATE PUBLISHING, A DIVISION OF TATE ENTERPRISES LTD, MILLBANK, LONDON SW1P 4RG WWW.TATE.ORG.UK/PUBLISHING
FOREWORD
ON THE OCCASION OF THE EXHIBITION ELLEN GALLAGHER: AXME TATE MODERN, LONDON 1 MAY – 1 SEPTEMBER 2013
CONFOUNDING MYTHS ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
SARA HILDÉN ART MUSEUM, TAMPERE 11 OCTOBER 2013 – ?? FEBRUARY 2014
ELLEN GALLAGHER: MYTHOPOETICS AND MATERIALS CAROL ARMSTRONG
HAUS DER KUNST, MUNICH 27 FEBRUARY – 1 JUNE 2014 © TATE 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRINTED OR REPRODUCED OR UTILISED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC, MECHANICAL OR OTHER MEANS, NOW KNOWN OR HEREAFTER INVENTED, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING AND RECORDING, OR IN ANY INFORMATION STORAGE OR RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHERS OR A LICENCE FROM THE COPYRIGHT LICENSING AGENCY LTD, WWW.CLA.CO.UK
PLATES
SIGNS PRESERVE US RICHARD SHIFF
A CATALOGUE RECORD FOR THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE FROM THE BRITISH LIBRARY ISBN 978 1 84976 123 9
READING PICTURES ULRICH WILMES
DISTRIBUTED IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA BY ABRAMS, NEW YORK LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER APPLIED FOR
EXHIBITED WORKS EXHIBITION HISTORY SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY LENDERS AND CREDITS INDEX
DESIGNED BY IRMA BOOM PRINTED AND BOUND IN BELGIUM BY DIE KEURE FRONT COVER: ELLEN GALLAGHER, IMAGE TITLE DATE BACK COVER: ELLEN GALLAGHER, IMAGE TITLE DATE FRONTISPIECE: ELLEN GALLAGHER, IMAGE TITLE DATE ALL ARTWORKS © ELLEN GALLAGHER UNLESS OTHERWISE SPECIFIED MEASUREMENTS OF ARTWORKS ARE GIVEN IN CENTIMETRES, HEIGHT BEFORE WIDTH [FSC LOGO – TO BE PLACED BY PRINTER – AT LEAST 11MM HIGH]W
4
5
READING PICTURES ULRICH WILMES The visual language of Ellen Gallagher is based on three cornerstones that she has developed over the course of her practice: the history of African-American culture in the United States, especially following the First World War, and the delineation of its significance in the present; the conceptual accomplishments of the arts in the 1960s and 1970s; and the notion of the archive as a dialectical linking of form and content. The historical and art-historical threads in Gallagher’s work are interwoven in a multilayered fabric, subverting traditional notions of pictorial media in a sophisticated narrative of picture making. Gallagher refers to a series of large pictures, made between 2001 and 2004, as the ‘yellow paintings’. For her it is simply a label: neither the title of the works nor their main topic. It is rather the most obvious feature of the pictures – defining both their medium and their main attribute. As with her earlier works she continues to challenge the medium, but here she subverts its very definition. Whereas she accepts the perception of the picture as a visual entity, which offers a simultaneous phenomenon, she also denies a simultaneous comprehension, forcing the viewer into a processional reading of the picture. Thus Gallagher’s practice not only reflects a contemporary approach towards the artistic tradition of painterly practice, but also an engagement with the theoretical and philosophical foundations of some of the most influential movements in painting and sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Acknowledging her obvious debt’ to the abstract concepts of the minimalism of artists such as Agnes Martin and Sol Lewitt, Gallagher ‘supplants it by inflecting her own reading of minimalism with a topical irony and wit’.1 Her practice certainly has some foundation in the grid, in which the dialectic between form and content is continually recharged by her perceptive social awareness. ‘It has always been the grid that literally underlies, informs, and shapes Gallagher’s work’, as Catherine de Zegher has written, ‘in her acceptance of its abstraction as a matrix of knowledge, conveying the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the real world, [she] thrusts through the wall, directing her attention to the grid’s potential centrifugal aspect. She conceives the grid as extending outward from the work of art in order to acknowledge a world beyond the frame.’2 The abstraction of Agnes Martin is evident in the yellow paintings, and has previously been referred to as an influential signifier of Gallagher’s visual thinking and practice in the latter’s earlier work. Martin’s delicate surfaces incorporate line, grids and colour to reflect the dematerialised vision of a diaphanous atmosphere. They present open spaces of misty boundlessness, suggestive of the meeting point between sea and sky on the far horizon. Whereas Gallagher’s paintings from the mid-1990s have been described as ‘gorgeous abstract works of deceptive calm, pleasurable sea surfaces’, beneath which lurks a ‘discordant purpose that purportedly carries the kind of political content (read: race) and outward signs of otherness’, the yellow paintings ‘[put] forward a proposition that mixes formalism with goofiness’, provoking the kind of laughter that sticks in the throat.3 The yellow paintings represent a series that Gallagher has been working on over the past decade. So far she has finished five works: Falls and Flips (2001), Double Natural (2002; no.##), Pomp-Bang (2003; pl.##), eXelento (2004; figs.25, 26) and Afrylic (2004; fig.27, no.##). Originally three more were considered, and there seems to be a figurative reason for this number. However, she discovered that the group of five ‘created this sense of a procession’.4 The idea of creating an alignment of a kind of ceremonial disposition was stimulated by her experience of three famous monuments: ‘I was inspired first by the Walls of Babylon at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The way the kingdom and
Figs.25, 26 Installation views of eXelento Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2004 Fig.27 Afrylic (detail) 2004 Plasticine, ink and paper on canvas 243.8 x 487.7 Courtesy Gagosian Gallery Fig.28 Cuneiform inscription of King Nebuchadnezzar II, The Ishtar Gate, Pergamon Museum, Berlin Figs.29, 30 Scene from W.E.B. Dubois’s pageant, ‘The Star of Ethiopia’, Philadelphia, 1916 Fig.31 Marcus Garvey at the Universal Negro Improvement Association parade, New York, 1922 Fig.32 Black Cross Nurses at the Universal Negro Improvement Association parade, New York, 1922
Fig.28 Fig.25
Fig.29
Fig.30
Fig.26
202
203
204
Fig.31 Fig.32
Fig.27
beasts look at you, as you would enter the city walls. I was thinking about taking these ephemeral characters that exist in an interior headspace, as one moves through the frayed and yellowed magazine pages, like discovering a submerged world. These are my walls of Babylon, but the city is more a state of mind, a transformation.’5 The Ishtar Gate is one of the eight entrances to the inner city of Babylon. It is built from bricks, the oldest prefabricated building unit in human history, laid in a perfectly regular grid. The impression on Gallagher seems even more palpable when we look at the fragments of the cuneiform building inscription of King Nebuchadnezzar II, 604–562 BC (fig.28). The other two monuments that inform the yellow paintings are rather more performative and aleatorical in structure. The African-American activists, W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey, both organised mass pageants and parades to promote their ideas and to present a historical imperative for self-determination. In 1913, conceived and written by Dubois, ‘The Star of Ethiopia’ was an enormous production that featured a cast of a thousand performers depicting the history of the race from its Egyptian origins into the present day (figs.29, 30). Based on a kind of temporal staging that was in keeping with the African-American historicism in vogue at that time, ‘The Star of Ethiopia’ also included the mystical (informed, in part, by the context of Theosophy, which Dubois was aware of from his graduate studies in Berlin), and combined völkisch ideology with race history. Similarly, Garvey also built his movement through political theatre, with notions of Ancient Egypt inspiring the ceremonial icons for the accompanying regalia (fig.31). However, Garvey’s style of theatre brought the pageant out of the playhouse and into the street, most famously in 1920, when his Universal Negro Improvement Association staged an enormous parade on Madison Square Garden in New York. The UNIA Black Cross Nurses played a central role (fig.32), not only as a radical militant emblem of change, but also of care. ‘Garvey begins his concept of Parade in Harlem where he would be driven around sitting in the back of a flatbed truck. Dressed in full military regalia and speaking into a megaphone that extended his voice and message throughout the community, he transformed a tradition that develops out of the Caribbean, and in particular Jamaica, called Chant Down Babylon. A speaker in a mobile unit moves through the community speaking for change – a call to stand up against oppression. This small-scale chanting develops into huge crowds in the thousands that march on Madison Square Garden.’6 In Gallagher’s yellow paintings the single units work as a kind of abstract phrasing within the overall pattern. Each represents one syllable in a visual alphabet of signs, referring to archaic forms of written communication and archival documentation. Peg Leg and Nurse Rivers are two examples of the various personalities that determine the reading process and dimensions of the works’ content. Thus by looking at the yellow paintings, we participate in a whole parade of narratives, which have to be deciphered in the context of our own identity in modern society. ‘In the yellow paintings the repeat characters (especially Peg Leg, various nurse characters) are fiction made real. The way historical and fictional characters exist simultaneously in the pageant form. The way history is used in pageantry to illuminate space and time (a way to think through history and race activated by ideas of trans-historical consciousness). “Peg Leg” Bates as himself, as Ahab – fiction with a stake in real relations between the “being” of humans and consciousness.’7 The genesis of the yellow paintings is closely associated with a group of works that Gallagher made in 2001. Preserve (no.##) features a sculpture and a series of sixteen drawings that together can be considered autonomous preparatory works for the yellow paintings. Like those, the drawings challenge the notion of the medium by using various material means to widen formal limitations into the field of collage. The distinctive feature of each drawing seems to be its support, which defines it as a work on paper. In Preserve, Gallagher utilises pages torn from magazines and newspapers. These are reworked in multifaceted processes using a range of media, including pencil, oil paint, pasted texts and plasticine, so that the page itself becomes the support for multilayered
206
207
‘collages’. The dominant motifs are advertisements for wigs presenting different kinds of fashionable hairstyles, modelled mainly by young African-American women. In most of the works some distinguishing features of the models’ heads, particularly the eyes, have been defaced by retouching. The two Ice or Salt drawings (pls ##, ##) are complementary pieces whose title is drawn from the headline of the magazine page. Gallagher uses key words from the advertisements to create a new narrative, which encompasses the reading and reckoning of the whole. This playful approach to the relationship between text and image is taken even further in Aha o girl oo (pl.##), as the phrase from which the title is taken remains legible, whereas the models’ faces, with their brightly rouged lips, are separated from their heads like masks. Some of the drawings incorporate texts reporting on historical instances of racial conflict. Falls and Flips (pl.##) sets up a direct link to the painting of the same title, also realised in 2001. The typed text comes directly from the original headline of the page that Gallagher worked on and refers to Jack Johnson, the first African-American world heavyweight boxing champion: ‘I have collaged over the original image of Jack Johnson standing over a dazed Jim Jeffries with various hairdo’s (falls and flips).’8 On Independence Day 1910, in front of 20,000 people in Reno, Nevada, Johnson beat the previously undefeated white former champion James Jeffries, an outcome that caused race riots all over the country. Johnson was renowned for his extravagant lifestyle, flouting the conventions of the racist society, and his refusal to fight other black boxers in the first five years after becoming the World Champion offended the African-American community. In Ugly Itching Skin (pl.##), Gallagher touches on the issue of mixed-race ancestry. The drawing includes tabloid-style story from the LA Times about an affair between the African-American singer Billy Daniels and the notorious white actress and call girl Ronnie Quillan. The text starts with a remark about ‘interracial romance’ and refers to the famous ‘Rhinelander Case’ from 1925, which centred on the issue of the problematic legal definition of racial features that distinguish a person considered ‘white’ or ‘coloured’.9 The article relates how Quillan slashed Daniels’s face with a butcher’s knife causing a 10inch gash. Probably from the same paper, the advertisement at the bottom of the piece promotes soap and an ointment ‘for relief of Ugly Itching Skin’. The women’s heads in the drawing have been adapted to give them a fulsome appearance, which clearly relates to the story of the actress and the singer. The layout of Magnificent (pl.##) is designed like a newspaper front page. A fragment in the upper left corner shows the heads of an African-American man and woman while the logo beneath is taken from an advertisement for ‘natural products’, which is also used in the yellow paintings. The right side of the drawing is covered by an advertisement for wigs promoting the fact that they are made of ‘human hair’. The text beneath the logo refers to the farmer Charlie Wesley Pollard, one of the victims of the infamous ‘Tuskegee Experiment’. From 1932 until 1972 the US Health Service conducted this clinical trial, involving around 600 African-American men from rural areas, to research the development of untreated syphilis. The authorities told them they were being treated for ‘bad blood’ and offered free healthcare and meals, but the participants were never informed about their disease, which remained untreated. The study was curtailed in 1972 following a public outcry when the story hit the front page of the New York Times. The US Government ended up paying nine million dollars in compensation to the surviving participants, and it was only in 1997 that President Bill Clinton formally apologised to the victims of the study. The Preserve drawings thus present a direct narrative that links images and texts on issues relating to the history of the African-American Diaspora and the development of self-discovery in modern American society. The drawing Yellow (pl.##), in which small portraits of women and men, apparently ID-photos, are arranged on a grid, prefigures the formal layout of the yellow paintings. Here, the eyes are blanked out and the heads
bedecked with yellow strands, mirroring the hairstyles of the two models in the lower right corner. Gallagher’s commitment to the execution of the yellow paintings is extremely high. The process of making the works is both complex and laborious. In each painting, the foundation for the pictures, which are of equal size, is a regular grid of 396 fields formed of 12 rows and 33 columns. Each field is filled with fragments of advertisements from old magazines aimed specifically at African-American readers. Thus they are important clues to some of the discussions and processes in the twentieth century that furthered radical developments and changes in the 1960s and 1970s. Gallagher has amassed a huge archive of such magazines, cataloguing not only the torn-out pages but also the excised fragments. This provides the artist with an inexhaustible resource for her pictorial work, which she exploits in various ways. Even more importantly, it constitutes the framework for her research and artistic practice. The magazine clippings comprise small ads as well as cut-outs of certain details, often the heads of models promoting a specific product. All of the fragments are scanned and printed before being processed. Gallagher focuses her interest on significant parts of both images and texts, and the same fragments are often used repeatedly: ‘I approach each painting in this series with a new core group of fragments. Although I also re-use fragments from previous paintings as mentioned above, I want to get the fragments to relate to each other, either as a visual pun running across several fragments, or even a kind of narrative sequence might develop throughout a particular row, or across rows.’10 Once again, she excises the same specific details, especially those that individualise a person’s appearance, as in her earlier and related works. Such acts of violation evidently evoke traumata carried both consciously and unconsciously. Gallagher enhances the alienation of the individual appearance by ‘constructing yellow plasticine forms over the glued down grid’11 of the fragmented images. In most cases she forms bizarre wigs, which the pictured models now seem to have been promoting, but sometimes she shapes masks that hide the faces almost completely. ‘There is the material and it has historical implications, but it is also about my own intervention in that material, my present-day reading of the material – my selection and editing. The invention occurs through the selection of fragments. The edit foregrounds my own (mis)readings of the historical material. This falsification creates friction and energy. Maybe this is not a reliable archive, as densities and expansions get created through the selection and cutting and additions. Some readings get closed down and hopefully some readings become more visible, more open.’12 Though distinct, the yellow paintings are closely related in their form and content. The works are constructed so that they can be read in sequence like a book, row by row, from top left to bottom right. Each single unit is a unique invention that subverts the repetitive nature of the linear conception. In these paintings, Gallagher creates a visual alphabet of hieroglyphic signs following a whole range of styles whose rationale seems impossible to decipher. The narrative within each painting is charged by the references to characters that are both historical and fictional. This opens up a whole field of allusions, fused in the rows of fragments. In the grids of her yellow paintings Gallagher repeats certain motifs and content, until the repetition forms a narrative of its own. The soft and easily malleable material of plasticine reminds Gallagher of prosthetic possibilities: ‘The plasticine forms [allow] a gestural reading of both the pages below and the prosthetic field above like a lens that could bridge … the several jangled chords that are present throughout these pages.’13
NOTES 1 Okwui Enwezor, ‘Ellen Gallagher’, Frieze, no. 28, May 1996. 2 Catherine de Zegher, ‘The Grid as Playground or the Creativity of Limits’, in Jeff Fleming (ed.), Ellen Gallagher: Preserve, exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center 2001, pp.58–60. 3 Enwezor 1996. 4 Ellen Gallagher, email to the author. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 The case involved Kip Rhinelander, who had sued for an annulment of his marriage, claiming that his spouse had ‘misinterpreted herself as white’. See Robin D.G. Kelley, in Jeff Fleming (ed.), Ellen Gallagher: Preserve, exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center 2001, p.15. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.
208
209