Ellen Gallagher Katalog

ELLEN GALLAGHER: AXME

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

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FOREWORD CHRIS DERCON DIRECTOR, TATE MODERN

We are delighted that the exhibition is able to tour following the London presentation to Sara Hildén Art Museum, Finland, and Haus der Kunst, Germany, to reach a broader international audience. We are extremely grateful to the curators and colleagues at our collaborating institutions for helping to realise and support the exhibition. At Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, we thank Riitta Valorinta, Director, and Sarianne Soikkonen, Curator: Exhibitions. At Haus der Kunst, Munich, we thank Okwui Enwezor, Director, and Ulrich Wilmes, Chief Curator. Working closely with Ellen Gallagher, each institution has sensitively shaped the exhibition for its own galleries and audiences.

American artist Ellen Gallagher (b.1965), whose extraordinary artistic achievements span two decades, is one of the foremost painters of her generation. We are thrilled to present this survey exhibition at Tate Modern, the playful title for which, AxME, references black vernacular language and its history, engages with graphic form and meaning, and elicits one’s curiosity. This exhibition is a unique opportunity to address Gallagher’s expanded painting practice, bringing together significant works from the early 1990s to the present day. Her paintings, collages, drawings, sculptures, animation and film installations shift between abstraction and figuration, drawing on a wide range of sources, from black popular culture and social history, to literature and archival material. In her work, Gallagher questions what it is to be a modern subject, examining the centrality of race in the formation of the modern world, alongside simultaneous developments in modernist abstraction.

The support of a number of committed donors has been critical to the successful realisation of this exhibition. My sincere thanks go to Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman for their extraordinary generosity. I should also like to thank the Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam, The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Tate Patrons, Tate International Council and the Tate Americas Foundation for their important support.

This exhibition has been made possible by the provision of insurance through the Government Indemnity Scheme. Tate Modern would like to thank HM Government for providing Government Indemnity and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Arts Council of England for arranging the indemnity.

Gallagher, who was born in Providence, Rhode Island, currently divides her time between Rotterdam and New York. She has a long-standing relationship with the UK, from the first solo presentation at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London (1996), which ran concurrently with the exhibition Inside the Visible at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, to monographic exhibitions at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (1998), The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2004), The Freud Museum, London (2005), Tate Liverpool and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (2007), and South London Gallery (2009). Tate’s own enduring commitment to the artist can be seen through the works we are privileged to have as part of our Collection including Murmur (2003-4), DeLuxe (2004-5) and Bird in Hand (2006), and those acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland – Paper Cup (1996) and Untitled (1998) – which form part of ARTIST ROOMS.

Tate’s curatorial team has been complemented by administrators Zuzana Flaskova, Priyesh Mistry and Katie-Marie Ford, and Exhibition Interns Grazyna Dobrzanska-Redrup and Joseph Funnell who have ably supported the project. We are indebted to Exhibition Registrar Wendy Lothian and Tate’s conservators who have contributed their expertise to the installation and care of vulnerable loans, in particular Louise Lawson, Conservation Manager, Tina Weidner, Time-based Media Conservator, and Art Installation Manager Phil Monk and his team. Helen Sainsbury, Head of Exhibitions Programme Management, and Rachel Kent, Exhibition Touring Manager, have provided invaluable senior support. The wider Tate team – including Tate Learning, Tate Media and Tate Development – has given dedicated support to the project. We would like to thank Marko Daniel, Sandra Sykorova, Nora Razian, Simon Bolitho, Jane Burton, Duncan Holden, Sarah Briggs, Jon-Ross Le Haye and Clare Gill.

This exhibition and publication would not have been possible without the close collaboration of Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne, who we thank unreservedly. Juliet Bingham, Curator International Art at Tate, has curated the exhibition in dialogue with the artists, supported by Assistant Curator Loren Hansi Momodu, both of whom have brought great creativity and commitment to the project. We sincerely thank Irma Boom for her astute understanding of the concept and for creating such an intuitive and elegant book design, in close collaboration with the artist. For their considerable help in the research and organisation of this exhibition, we would like to thank Neil Wenman, Nicole Heller and Maria Brassel at Hauser & Wirth, and Mark Francis, Tessa Goodhew and Sarah Hoover at Gagosian Gallery. We are especially grateful to Hauser & Wirth for their support in the realisation of the catalogue.

We have been fortunate to be able to draw upon loans from both private and public collections for this exhibition. We have been touched by the enthusiasm of so many individuals to lend their treasured works for such an extended period and offer them our deepest gratitude. We are indebted to public collections for making available iconic works from their holdings.

For the catalogue, we are most grateful to Carol Armstrong, Robin D.G. Kelley, Richard Shiff and Ulrich Wilmes for their illuminating and insightful essays. We would especially like to thank Tate Publishing’s team for steering the catalogue expertly through the complex editorial and production process, in particular Alice Chasey, Project Editor, Bill Jones, Production Manager, Miriam Perez, Picture Researcher, and external Project Manager and Copy-Editor Kate Bell.

Finally, we would like to offer our immense gratitude to Ellen Gallagher for her tireless dedication to all aspects of the project, from the selection of work to the catalogue concept, and for sharing her unique practice, which we are delighted to be able to bring to Tate’s audiences.

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CONFOUNDING MYTHS ROBIN D.G. KELLEY Confound (verb) 1. cause surprise or confusion in (someone), especially by not according with their expectations.

2. prove (a theory or expectation) wrong.

3. mix up (something) with something else.

OXFORD BRITISH AND WORLD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

YOUR TRUTHS ARE SELF-EVIDENT. OURS ARE A MYSTERY. SUN RA1

One of Ellen Gallagher’s most intriguing works consists of a grid of twenty female wig models of various skin shades set against a vast white background. The wigs are meticulously cut into elaborate shapes and float on paper as if embossed. Squiggles of pink plasticine cover their eyes. Each model is captioned with her wig’s brand name: E-Bangs, Fifi, Innocence, Afro-Swirly, and so on. Curiously titled Negroes Ask for German Colonies (2002; figs.1, 2 no. ##), the piece has confounded critics since it was first shown a decade ago. What do wigs have to do with German colonies? Are these black women demanding white (‘Aryan’?) hairstyles, blinded by pink dreams of racial transmutation? Do the wigs symbolise Frantz Fanon’s colonial subjects longing to imitate their oppressors?2 To confound is not simply to confuse, but to surprise or perplex by challenging received wisdom. It also means to mix up or fail to discern differences between things.

Gallagher employs and remixes historically burdened signs, ephemera, narratives, materials, to confound and challenge us to plumb the depths – whether it be the ocean, memory, skin or the layers that comprise her paintings. She makes us work. She makes us laugh. She makes us uncomfortable. Negroes Ask for German Colonies demands this sort of plumbing. Gallagher appropriated the title from an article written in 1919 by the illustrious Harlem radical Hubert Harrison, who questioned black nationalists for calling on world leaders at the Paris Peace Conference held that year to allow Germany’s African colonies self-rule. The London-based African Progress Union and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association wanted an independent state that could serve as a homeland for Africa’s descendants who wished to emigrate. While Harrison fiercely supported the principle of self-determination, he dismissed the plan, reminding readers that black people ‘have no battleships, no guns, no force, military or financial. They are not a power.’3 By detaching the title from Harrison’s essay and its context, Gallagher confounds us, mixing up two different eras linked by the quest for ‘power’. Her models are conscripts from the 1950s and 1960s, the conflicted world of middle-class Negro assimilation and Black Power, straightened wigs and Afros. By reattaching the title to its 1919 origins, we learn that the so-called ‘war to end all wars’ was really a struggle over colonies, a new phase in the formation of the modern world. The square grid of twenty wigged women floating in white space can be read as a mediation on race and modernity – a world in upheaval, demanding democracy and self-determination, challenging social norms and laws, fighting for the repossession of indigenous lands and rights, finding new modes of artistic expression, and coming to terms with what it means to be human in a modern, rapidly industrialising consumer society. Vital to this process is the birth of the ‘New Negro’, a political, social and cultural negation of white fictions of blackness, poised at the crossroads between minstrelsy and militancy, slavery and freedom, nostalgia and history, myth and memory.

Gallagher’s project is nothing short of a deep examination, meditation, dissembling, disassembling and remixing of modernity. She confounds critics who regard her as one

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of several black artists exploring racial identity and stereotype, as well as those who assert, with a sense of relief or surprise, that she ‘transcends’ a politics of race and identity. Both claims are mistaken because they treat race as a sideshow, as the unique province of artists of colour beyond the centre stage where self-important white guys, presumably unburdened by race, fight over Universal issues of Humanity, Philosophy, Aesthetics and Form. This strangely Manichaean way of thinking denies the centrality of race in the formation of the modern world. Modernity was forged in the violence of slavery and colonialism; it required the invention of the Negro, the Savage, the Oriental – the necessary first step in the West’s invention of itself as a coherent, superior, universal culture. It also denies the broad reach and scope of her work. Gallagher explores the interstices of architecture and archaeology, ontology and oceanography, humour and history, taking fragments of memory and material culture formed in an era over-determined by colonialism, race, sexuality, technology and psychoanalysis.

In fact, the first piece one sees upon entering the exhibition signals her intention of taking on modernity as a whole. Odalisque (2005; pl.##) is a humorous revision of Man Ray’s humorous revision of the classical paintings by François Boucher and Jean Auguste Ingres of the reclining nude associated with Ottoman harems. Man Ray’s 1928 photo captures Henri Matisse sketching a model, fully-clothed in Orientalist garb and surrounded

by Orientalist tapestries. Gallagher has placed her own head on the model’s body and substituted Sigmund Freud’s head for that of Matisse. There is much to read here. We might draw parallels between Matisse’s ‘retro’ study of Odalisque in the age of cubism and Gallagher’s fascination with old magazines. And then there is Freud, who, perhaps unconsciously, linked female sexuality and colonialism in Africa when he wrote in a 1926 essay, ‘the sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychoanalysis’. The essay was reprinted a year later in La Revolution Surrealiste, which attracted the attention of surrealists such as Man Ray.4 Of course, Odalisque was always a racialised ‘Other’ to the European voyeurs who viewed her through the Orientalist frame. Hence Gallagher’s lightbrown face (high yellow in her lexicon) and what the viewer presumes to be her body gives the ‘dark continent’ metaphor renewed meaning. She also reverses the gaze back on to the coloniser. Freud, eyes fixed on his pad, occupies the couch, as it were, and Gallagher is the empathetic analyst compelling Sigmund and all of us transfixed by her work to come to terms with the racial unconscious, colonialism and its discontents, civilisation and its malcontents, the return of the oppressed, desire.

I am not suggesting that Gallagher is primarily concerned with Freudianism. Rather that she makes art inspired by the same big questions with which Freud wrestled: what does it mean to be modern subjects; how did this modern world we now inhabit come to be; and at what price? In this sense, Edward Said’s apt description of Freud as ‘an explorer of the mind . . . also, in the philosophical sense, an overturner and re-mapper of accepted or settled geographies and genealogies’ equally applies to Gallagher.5 She mirrors the process of memory recovery by taking fragments, before reshuffling and laying them on the canvas in ways that are not readily recognisable. These signs are never static but always in motion, unmoored from their original contexts, accumulating and gathering like swarms of locusts, darkening the skies and obscuring visibility like a giant veil. ‘I’m interested in signs not as static but as moving,’ she once explained, ‘as things that start with something that has already been discarded. And I try to make my images through that – the unruly cracks in the edifice, underneath which there is something to be protected.’6 The exhibition’s playful, confounding title, AxME, speaks to Gallagher’s larger philosophical and artistic objective to interrogate, mess with and recast modernity itself.

Besides playing with black vernacular language and its minstrel heritage (‘Negroes Ax for German Colonies’), she takes the metaphorical axe to her archival materials, penmanship paper, plasticine, rubber and enamel, the minstrel figure and iconic black bodies, and to history itself. AxME is also a demand placed on us, the viewer, to cut through the surface

of what we see, to recognise that there is more here than exhumations of modernity’s dark, violent history, ironic humour, deep-sea dystopias. She explores the capacity for rebirth and regeneration – the spiritual power of a people to sustain humanity in the face of a system that reduces life and land to commodities. So consider this: in Yoruba religions of the African Diaspora and parts of West Africa, ‘Axé’ (pronounced ‘Ashe’ or ‘Ache’) refers to the life force that permeates all things – human beings, animal and plant life, inanimate objects.

AxME also references the modern nexus where mass culture, abstraction and conceptual art meet: the cartoon. Don’t Axe Me (1958) is a Looney Tunes classic involving Elmer Fudd’s futile efforts to turn Daffy Duck into dinner. And as Gallagher reminded me, AxME is but a consonant away from ACME Corporation, the improbable mail-order company that furnishes the devices and materials Wile E. Coyote uses in his failed efforts to turn the Road Runner into dinner. The Coyote is a modern subject trying to negotiate a primitive desert terrain. Lacking natural qualities of speed and instinct, he must rely on corporate merchandise in order to capture his prey. As in Gallagher’s work, the line between slapstick and horrific violence is blurred, and no matter how many times he is blown up or free-falls into the ravine below, Wile E. always returns. (Regeneration!) And the Coyote’s ‘work’ is similarly concerned with materials and signs – dynamite, anvils, steel traps, cannon, giant rubber bands, nitro-glycerine, glue, grease.7 Every trap, like every one of Gallagher’s pieces, requires an enormous investment of labour, craftsmanship and ingenuity. But whereas the Super Genius Coyote always fails and Gallagher succeeds, both are working with materials that are unstable. Gallagher deliberately uses penmanship rather than fine archival paper knowing that ‘it will darken with time, and that is interesting to me. It is also humiliating because it means that I don’t really have control.’8 In a word, AxME presents one of the most consequential American artists of the early twenty-first century taking an Axe to the Modern Era, splitting its repressed histories wide open for all to see, wielding it with the precision of an X-Acto knife or a surgeon’s scalpel, masterfully slicing, scoring, slashing, severing, scratching, cutting, trimming, reassembling to create new myths, new worlds, or in Gallagher’s words, ‘an expansive, fluid realm that is both the concrete historical fragments it is made up of and the new form it describes’.9

often get linked to some kind of pristine minimalism, but I think that one needs to reach back further, to early American abstractions. The earliest, I think, is the minstrel show, which is the disembodiment of the black body.’11 Gallagher regards these disembodied signs as fugitive and explores how their legibility changes when rescued from their original context. She chose penmanship paper for its ephemeral, unstable quality and because of its capacity to create a horizon line or a hemisphere, a watery surface or a map, or in the case of Delirious Hem (1995; pl.##) to transform endless rows of fat lips and bug eyes into strips of gorgeous African cloth and elegant Ndebele women’s neck rings.

As the decade proceeded, her penmanship paper became ever more fugitive. She made a series of ‘black paintings’ that might be better described as being ‘built’ of thick, opaque materials such as rubber and enamel with bulging layers of paper and canvas.

Behind the black paintings lay a question: ‘Why is it that people are more comfortable with locating blackness in the figure, however distorted that figure may be?’12 She set out to make huge ‘suprematist’ paintings inspired by Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square of 1915.

The Black Square was a provocation to unseat cubism. It announced a new modernist concept of the ‘zero of form’ that rejected pictorial and representational conventions of narrative, theme and composition, and embraced the non-objective as the only pure form of painting capable of embodying the whole universe.13 Today, nearly a century later, its surface is riddled with cracks, revealing other layers of colour, light and abstract form beneath – undercutting Malevich’s claim of having created a work of purity.14 It is this humiliation that interests Gallagher, effectively inverting Malevich’s intentions. Beginning with her signature penmanship paper, she builds upon it layers of tiny pieces of rubber shaped into bows, knots, boats, eyeballs, lips, tongues, wings and shamrocks. These accumulations take larger form – fantastical landscapes, an African headdress, a stool.

By evoking blackness as both colour and subjectivity, she disrupts our impulse to locate blackness within a knowable sign – that is, the human body. Mobb Deep (1998; pl.##), a grotesque, cartoonish depiction of four dancing blackface minstrel figures, forces us to question why the ‘Invented Negro’ continues to be a ‘knowable sign’ of blackness when, in fact, it is an abstraction.

THE INTERPRETATION OF WEAVES

SLAVING IN THE COLOUR FIELDS

The Afro was a serious setback for the perpetrators of Anglo-Saxonism. . . .

Nursing caps didn’t fit, airline caps didn’t fit, military headgear didn’t fit. . . .

Caricature . . . brings about degradation by emphasizing in the general impression given by the exalted object a single trait which is comic in itself but was bound to be overlooked so long as it was only perceivable in the general picture. By isolating this, a comic effect can be attained which extends our memory over the whole object.

15 WILLIE MORROW, 400 YEARS WITHOUT A COMB

10 SIGMUND FREUD, JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

Ellen Gallagher took the New York art world by storm in the early 1990s with a series of beautifully balanced, deceptively minimalist paintings such as Oh! Susanna (1993; fig.3), Afro-Mountain, Pinocchio Theory and Oogaboogah (all 1994; pls.##, ##, ##). Her use of penmanship paper, with its blue-line grid and abstract blocks of colour, links her to the abstract artist Agnes Martin. But upon closer inspection, we discover a deluge of tiny hand-painted or drawn lips, wigs and eyeballs – what she calls ‘the disembodied ephemera of minstrelsy’. These paintings involve hundreds of tiny gestures, printing, embossing, cutting, layering and contorting the grid in ways that mock minimalism’s clean, industrial lines. Playing down Martin’s influence, Gallagher situates her work in response to the very origins of American abstraction: ‘I think that these signs, these disembodied swollen eyes, and these lips have already been bruised into metaphor, into caricature. I

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Gallagher’s interest in the ephemeral nature of magazines, their archival content, and the role of print media as a modern mode of communication and consumption, led to a series of works using advertisements for wigs and other commodities as well as feature articles from black-oriented magazines (Ebony, Our World, Black Stars, etc.). Beginning with Preserve (2001; pl.##), these works are ‘built’ much like her black paintings. Her accumulations of eyes, lips and spores constructed with plasticine and paint and boxed in alongside the ads explore the idea of wigs as a kind of skin or vice versa, wigs as ‘natural’, skin as mutable, and wigs and skin as ‘transformations’. The ads also became the basis for a series of five monumental works comprising 396 portraits laid out on a grid: Falls and Flips (2001), Double Natural (2002; no.##), Pomp-Bang (2003; no.##), eXelento (2004; see figs.17, 25, 26) and Afrylic (2004; see fig. 27, no.##). Referred to by Gallagher as the ‘yellow paintings’, these intricate works consist of altered advertisements featuring wig models and various figures, eyes whited out, sporting these magical, whimsical hairpieces sculpted from yellow plasticine. The grid allows for non-linear, random reading, inviting the viewer to ponder layers of meaning and imagine intersecting narratives.

While Gallagher’s wigs are surely transformations, they also symbolise the unconscious – expressions of dreams, fears and desires.16 Plasticine, after all, is the stuff of animation, play and destruction. Invented in 1897 as modelling clay for children because it retains its elasticity without hardening, it was the perfect material for claymation. Plasticine compounds are also used in explosives (a fact Wile E. Coyote surely knew). It not only provides texture and dimension, but in Gallagher’s hands it is also animate, much as the inky lips and eyes stripped from performing bodies function like living organisms. Although some critics have called them ‘helmets’, miniature sculptures is a more apt description. She painstakingly moulds elaborate and richly textured hairpieces into loops, curls, twists, squiggles, braids, flowers, stars and constellations, bananas, eyes, planets, African masks, marine life, pea pods, shoes, weaves (as in basket- or textileweaving), and every geometric shape imaginable. These forms often pun on the image/ text before us or on material that had been excised from the piece. In one plate from Pomp-Bang, she plays with Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, placing a huge bouffantstyle Afro on a model’s head, framing her face to create either a heart or buttocks. An ominous wave rises up from the middle of her doo, threatening to overtake everything.

Beneath the drama reads, ‘Dream Girl – Your hair-do comes alive with radiant charm thanks to our exclusive upsweep . . . .’

Gallagher explains that some of the images ‘chart an emerging Afro-urban aesthetic where the Afro becomes this important way of taking up space in the city’.17 The Afro or ‘natural’ style was an important political and aesthetic expression for the Civil Rights/ Black Power generation. The invention and disembodiment of the Negro turned the black body into a site of assault and brutalisation, as well as a source of envy, fascination and desire – and thus central to the very formation of American popular culture from minstrelsy to professional sports to various manifestations of song and dance. Degradation of black bodies has understandably produced a kind of schizophrenia – mimicry of the dominant culture and its outright rejection. The Afro represents an act of self-determination at the very moment when middle-class blacks were moving on up and out, leaving the black poor trapped in heavily policed ghettoes poised for insurrection. The dialectic of police repression and ghetto rebellion was a microcosm of the world: America emerged in this same period as the global cop and imperial power, as it tried to suppress insurrections in South East Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and parts of Africa. Gallagher captures these anxieties in funny, ironic, biting references. One ad from Pomp-Bang reads: ‘American Made Beauty $44.44. Sold Elsewhere at $79.00.’ The wig frames the model’s face as a rough outline of the continental United States, while the wig’s exterior doubles as a globe, apparently pockmarked with bullet holes.

Recurring narrative themes link all five grids of wigged conscripts to other paintings.

The so-called ‘Tuskegee Experiment’, a cruel forty-year ‘study’ of the effects of syphilis on the human body that involved withholding treatment from some 400 syphilitic black men in rural Alabama, has been a major motif in her work.18 Gallagher first referenced the Tuskegee Experiment in her 1997 painting Drexciya (see fig.8), which incorporates wigs with nurse’s caps as an allusion to Eunice Rivers, the Tuskegee nurse who was the liaison between the ‘patients’ and the US Public Health Service. She includes nurses in several of her works as ominous signs, signifying constriction, conscription and death.

She repeats these signs in the yellow paintings through her use of recruitment ads for the nursing profession. Like Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth, the Tuskegee tragedy continues to haunt Gallagher’s canvases, most recently in An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity (2008; pl.##), a huge, nightmarish sea creature (or the protozoan parasite in syphilis?) awash in waves made of magazine pages soaked in blue ink and cut into thin strips to look like penmanship paper, its tentacles gripping skeletal and ghost-like figures and men in African masks. In the culture of modernity, suffering and death is the price of ‘progress’.

Another recurring figure in Gallagher’s world is Clayton ‘Peg Leg’ Bates (1907–1998)

Figs.1, 2[C_017/ PLATE ID_011] Negroes Ask for German Colonies 2002 Oil, graphite, plasticine and cut paper on paper 56.5 x 76.3 Private collection Fig.3 Oh! Susanna (detail) 1993 Oil, graphite and paper on canvas 152.4 x 91.4 Collection of Joan & Michael Salke.

Courtesy of Diego Cortez Arte Ltd, New York Fig.4 Clayton ‘Peg Leg’ Bates 1927

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Fig.5 The Man Who Kept Harlem Cool (detail from DeLuxe) 2004–5 Etching and plasticine on paper 38.9 x 32.5 x 4.6 Tate, London Fig.6 Abu Simbel 2005 Photogravure, watercolour, colour graphite, varnish, pomade, plasticine, blue fur, gold leaf and crystals 62 x 90 Courtesy the artist and Two Palms Press, New York Fig.7 Sun Ra, Space Is the Place 1974 Directed by John Coney

Fig.6 Fig.4

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(fig.4), a one-legged tap dancer whose acrobatic abilities thrilled audiences all around the world. The celebrated entertainer made enough money to open a country club and resort in the Catskill Mountains, which frequently ran advertisements in black magazines and newspapers. Gallagher, a close reader of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, appointed Peg Leg as her own ‘Captain Ahab’. When she transforms his wooden leg into whalebone with white plasticine (Double Natural, 2002; pl.##), the association is self-evident. But it is in the mysteries of Peg Leg’s life and the deeper meaning of Melville’s masterpiece that we begin to see the depths to which she links minstrelsy, modernity, mass culture and fugitivity to the racial economy.

First, Bates spans the twentieth century. A product of the post-minstrel black vaudeville circuit, his professional career took off in 1922 – the year the iconic Caribbeanborn blackface performer Bert Williams died. He even integrated a little doggerel in his performances, a throwback to the minstrel stump speeches:

rendering that might even be more physically present than a captured moment in a photographic image’.24 Once again, she turns Malevich’s ‘zero painting’ idea on its head by making the objective of erasure a means to illuminate what is present, widening its narrative possibilities. One page from DeLuxe unpacks this idea (fig.5). Taking an article about Lloyd Sealy, the second African-American precinct commander in the NYPD’s history, and his role in maintaining calm during the 1964 Harlem riots, Gallagher excised the image of a burned-out building leaving only the headline, ‘The Man Who Kept Harlem Cool’, and an aquatint portrait of Sealy to tell the story. Stripped of any police insignia, she endows him with a huge, grey plasticine Afro embedded with an overhead view of seven fire hydrants and hoses – what she calls an ‘Afro-aerial view’ of the city.25 In lieu of riot torn streets and baton-wielding cops, Gallagher gives us a man of the people. Sealy, who held a BA in Sociology and a degree in Law, pioneered the concept of community policing. During the Harlem riots he told his officers on the beat, ‘this is a community of decent people with the same values and same standards as any other community’.26 The fire hydrants evoke children cooling off in the streets during the long, hot summer of 1964, while also reminding us of Birmingham, Alabama, where a year earlier a police commander named Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor had turned fire hoses on children marching for Civil Rights.

Connor’s attempt to keep Birmingham ‘cool’ was broadcast all over the country and the world, generating massive moral outrage. Finally, the text, even more than the image, disrupts ‘self-evident truths’, since the title ‘the man who kept Harlem cool’ was given to Mayor John V. Lindsay in 1968, when he decided to walk the ghetto streets in an effort to calm tempers in the wake of Dr Martin Luther King Jnr’s murder. Lindsay’s highly publicised act sparked talk of a presidential run.27 Incidentally, none of the pieces praising Mayor Lindsay’s courageous Harlem strolls mention that Lloyd Sealy was right by his side.28

Don’t look at me in sympathy I’m glad that I’m this way I feel good I’m knockin’ on wood As long as I could say I mix life’s fantastic Up with hot gymnastics I’m Peg Leg Bates The one-legged dancing man

Fig.2

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Whereas Peg Leg retained vestiges of minstrelsy’s last generation, Melville employed the stagecraft of minstrelsy’s first generation by importing the language and the form of blackface theatre – notably Fleece’s sermon to the sharks in Moby-Dick – to wage a subtle critique of nineteenth-century racism.19 Like the driven Captain Ahab, Peg Leg circumnavigated both major oceans, performing for the King and Queen of England, conquering Australia’s Tivoli circuit and appearing at least twenty-one times on the nationally televised Ed Sullivan Show. Captain Ahab lost his leg to a Great White – a powerful whale whose very life was both fugitive and metaphor for the horrific working conditions at sea. Bates lost his leg to an industrial cotton gin – a commodity long associated with slavery, subjugation and whiteness. Born dirt-poor in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, twelve-year-old Clayton had just begun working at the cotton gin when he accidently stepped into an auger conveyor that crushed his leg so badly it had to be amputated. The doctor performed the operation on the family’s kitchen table since there were no black hospitals nearby.20 Finally, and perhaps most improbably, Peg Leg and Captain Ahab were both men of colour who exhibited a mix of racial pride and ambivalence. While Bates’s comedic performance style led younger generations to label him an old Uncle Tom, he quietly fought for justice, turning his estate in the Catskills into a retreat for young Civil Rights workers.21 Ahab, whom Melville described as ‘solid bronze’ possessing a ‘tawny’ face and ‘Egyptian chest’, is mulatto. There are many other signs of Ahab’s non-whiteness and his hatred of white supremacy, notably his utter defiance of the slaveholder’s version of Christianity.22 And yet, the whales fleeing north in the Pacific, terrorised, bloodied and scarred, serve as a metaphor for runaway slaves trying to escape the South and being chased down by patrollers and deputies. The intrepid white whale is graced with white skin, all the more reason for Ahab’s loathing.

Following up her yellow paintings, Gallagher created DeLuxe (2004–5; pl.##) – a pared down grid of sixty pages, each possessing its own narrative told through a fragment.23 As she dug deeper into the journalistic content, she discovered that ‘by turning found photographic images inwards and with alterations it is possible to come up with a

THAT OCEANIC FEELING ‘Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!’

SONG SUNG BY STUBB, FROM MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK

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In 1986, under the auspices of the Sea Education Association (SEA) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, twenty-year-old Ellen Gallagher spent a semester aboard an oceanographic research vessel examining the migratory patterns of pteropods – microscopic wing-footed snails. She spent her nights catching the tiny creatures and part of her days drawing them.29 Exactly a century and a decade earlier, twenty-year-old Sigmund Freud arrived in the Italian port of Trieste to begin work as a researcher at an experimental station for marine biology. Like Gallagher, he was fascinated with marine life and an accomplished draughtsman. He spent several years in Trieste, first dissecting eels in a futile search for testes, and then studying the nervous systems of fish.30 He eventually grew weary of dead fish but left behind an impressive collection of drawings that inspired several works in Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic series (pls.##–##). In these delicate, dreamlike drawings made of cut paper on paper, watercolour, ink and oil, the grid writhes and bends organically or disappears altogether. We encounter the unfamiliar: exotic fish, eels, jellyfish, ancient sea creatures and strange vegetation, removed from the darkness of their habitat to laboratory or light-box whiteness; creatures entangled in love or struggle or both. We encounter the familiar: disembodied eyes, wigs and lips attached like barnacles, the masked and unmasked faces of African people.

The Africans represent the people of ‘Drexciya’, the main inhabitants of Watery Ecstatic and Coral Cities (pl.##), as well as some of Gallagher’s later works. Drexciya is a mythic black Atlantis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean founded by pregnant African

women who leapt or were thrown from slave ships during the Middle Passage and gave birth to offspring capable of breathing underwater. The legend’s creator was the late James Stinson, founder of the now defunct Detroit-based techno band of the same name.

Stinson and artist Frankie C. Fulitz imagined Drexciyans as water-breathing militants waging a perpetual war ‘against planetary control systems incarnated in the Audiovisual Programmers’.31 Gallagher’s Drexciyans are a far cry from the macho characters of Stinson’s imagination. She populates her canvases with women protected by Afro wigs made of vibrant sea creatures and marine flora; women with flowing coral hair; and jellyfishlike figures with African faces. Her Drexciya is less about war or revenge than about regeneration – hence the emphasis on the botanical, biological and cellular nature of marine life. Jellyfish, for example, appear frequently in the work because some species can reproduce asexually by splitting in half. ‘The overboard, drowned slaves,’ Gallagher explains, ‘are carriers of ideas of regeneration and ideas of transhistorical nation’ – ideas she discovered in the novels of Maryse Condé and the poetry of Aimé Césaire.

In Césaire’s ‘Lost Body’ (‘Corps Perdu’), a poem in which he imagines an underwater Utopia, ‘the flaming torches of aurelian jellyfish’ are life-giving. Indeed, it is possible to see Gallagher’s Drexciya as a visual evocation of Césaire’s ‘Ode à la Guinée’ (1948), a poem about a mythic place, ‘the heaven of black peoples’, that culminates in the possibility of regeneration or rebirth. However, for Césaire rebirth means activating the ‘Guinea’ within, the ancestral land violently silenced, to plumb ‘the astral depth of medusas’ – which is to say, the depth of the racial unconscious.32 The idea of regeneration is sublimely rendered in Gallagher’s Jungle Gym (pl.##) from Preserve. When I wrote about the work a decade ago, I thought of it as a transformation of death into life, a literal reconstruction of ‘the bones of our ancestors; bones rescued from the real Drexciya at the bottom of the ocean floor’ rebuilt as ‘a space of freedom and democratic play’.33 What I missed then is the way in which its peculiar structure and texture mirrors the regenerative qualities of coral, or the interdependent life forms of the sea – molluscs, crustaceans, exotic seaweed and the tentacles of jellyfish. And yet, despite the peaceful elegance of these life forms, regeneration does not occur outside of history. These are the bones of disembodied Africans, conscripts for the fields and factories, black bodies cannibalised by a racial capitalism and its scientific jaws. Even in the realm of myth, modernity never leaves her sights. Drexciya is not Utopia. It blooms under siege, which is precisely why regeneration is so essential.

And so is escape. Two keywords in Gallagher’s visual lexicon are conscript and fugitive – words fused together by their opposition. Fugitive, in this sense, is not about loss or disappearance but escape, freedom, mobility as resistance to captivity. Consider La Chinoise (2008; no.#), two collages that mix black print culture, Drexciya’s mythic inhabitants, with evocations of traditional Chinese painting techniques to create a meditation on the meaning of mobility in the modern world. Incorporating long, vertical strips of red and white newsprint allows her to create the illusion of hanging scrolls made of silk, paper, folding screens and highly lacquered wood. In one piece, a massive sea monster obscures text ‘scrolls’ from Ebony magazine describing Sonny Liston’s boxing style and praising Surinam as a ‘multiracial paradise’, while the faces of Drexciyans descend – scroll-like – in the foreground. In Surinam, we learn, ‘American Negro immigrants are welcome’ to this beautiful Dutch colony in South America populated by Indians, Africans, Indonesians and Chinese.34 Despite racial and ethnic tensions, Surinam might be the Promised Land for the coloured world, the Drexciyan’s dream. (Negroes ask for Dutch Colonies?) In the other collage a large, hairy sea monster is nearly completely obscured by newsprint that is quite literally ‘black and white and red all over’. Gallagher juxtaposes an excerpt from a serialised version of John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, his memoir about darkening his skin and living temporarily as a black man; a story

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of ‘black Frenchmen’ (Félix Eboué and Fulbert Youlou) who served the colonial order, fought heroically against the Nazis in the Second World War, and led their countries to independence; an article about successful black banker Nivelle Beaubien; and an exposé on the terrible state of public education for poor black kids in New York City. Each column is separated by dyed red strips of ads promoting shoes, cars and opportunities for success. Within the same picture plane, narratives of black status anxiety, class mobility, racial crossing and inequality are enfolded in Chinese aesthetics. All of the articles date from the 1950s and early 1960s, when China was ‘Red’ and communism was associated with austerity and classlessness. The red-tinted ads echo contemporary China’s status anxiety and consumer culture, as the sea monster of neo-liberalism prevails.

Gallagher’s whimsical Abu Simbel (2005; fig.6, no.#) and IGBT (2008; pl.##) are also ruminations on fugitivity – specifically, the biblical story of Exodus. Like Odalisque, Abu Simbel was part of her installation at the Freud Museum, London, in 2005. She turned a photogravure of the Great Temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel that hung in Freud’s library into, ‘a tricked-out, multi-directional flow from Freud to Ancient Egypt to Sun Ra to George Clinton’.35 She adorned the statues with bits of gold ‘bling’, big bug eyes and ‘Negroid’ facial features, and covered the temple’s entrance with the grille of a Cadillac, complete with insignia. Sun Ra’s spaceship from the 1974 film Space Is the Place appears in the upper left-hand corner, two inlaid black figures piloting the craft, its ray guns blazing.

Nearly two-dozen severed heads of black men are scattered about, the object of their rescue mission. The smiling, flirtatious nurses below (projections of the notorious Nurse Rivers) ‘are sirens trying to lure the ship onto the rocks’.36 Off to the far right are three official-looking men, conscripts from a Jet magazine article about real-estate speculation in Harlem.

Gallagher knows her Egyptian history. Ramesses II had erected the monument to himself and his wife, Nefertari, to commemorate his victory over the Hittite king at Kadesh in 1274 bc, and to intimidate the Nubians to the south. You will notice in the background inky blue waves, giving the impression that the entire battle is taking place under water.

Technically, it is: during the Afro-coifed era from whence her conscripts came (1964–8), archaeologists and engineers were busy cutting up and removing the Abu Simbel temple from the Nile’s floodwaters created by the Aswan Dam – President Gamel Abdel Nasser’s greatest symbol of Egyptian modernity. The entire monument was reassembled on dry ground, some 200 metres from the banks of the river.

Gallagher also knows her Bible. Upon first glance, one might assume that Sun Ra is Moses, the liberator. But the Alabama-born pianist, composer and bandleader revered Ancient Egypt and identified with the Pharaoh, not the Hebrews whom black folk-culture transformed into a reflection of their enslaved condition. Ra had immersed himself in mysticism, astrology and history, and concurred with the great Senegalese intellectual, Cheikh Anta Diop, that ‘the Egyptians were Blacks of the type of all the native people of tropical Africa. That is particularly true when it concerns Ramses II.’37 So what is Sun Ra’s relationship to Old Moses?

Gallagher gives us a hint by linking Freud to the film Space Is the Place, a modern revision of the Exodus story. Sun Ra returns to Earth in his spaceship and offers to transport black people to Saturn to escape the misery, poverty and racism of America’s urban ghetto. His nemesis, ‘the Overseer’, is a pimp clad in a white suit who drives a Cadillac, of course. Ra is an intergalactic Marcus Garvey – the unnamed failed hero of Gallagher’s Negroes Ask for German Colonies. And like Garvey, Sun Ra was a kind of ‘Black Moses’ looking to lead the people to the Promised Land – a Moses who considered himself a son of Egypt. Unlike Garvey, however, Sun Ra fashioned himself an outsider, an alien, a strong leader for the people but not of the people. But, alas, the black masses proved too brainwashed to follow (fig.7).

Ironically, Freud, a secular Jew, shared Sun Ra’s passion for Ancient Egypt. He was,

among other things, an obsessive collector of Egyptian antiquities.38 Freud’s last book, Moses and Monotheism, made the controversial argument that Moses was actually an Egyptian who not only introduced Akhenaton’s conception of a single deity to the Jews but also was responsible for the creation of the Jews as a people. This claim followed from his view that religion was handed down to people by great, charismatic men since ordinary folks were like helpless children in need of a father figure. Moses was that father figure.39 And yet, as Edward Said observed, the value of Moses and Monotheism is Freud’s construction of Jewish identity as complex, contradictory, fluid and open to outside influences. Exodus was never simply about escape but about the New Land, new beginnings, new identities formed in the context of emancipation.

In fugitivity, Gallagher refashions modernity into something more fluid. The watery, inky, ancient, high-tech realm she has spent the last two decades building is fundamentally a world in perpetual motion, in which the boundaries of space, time and temporality are constantly breached. There is hardly a more poignant illustration of this than IGBT, Gallagher’s take on the iconic gold-leaf mosaics of the Byzantine era. Inlaid in the centre of the painting are the two black men from Sun Ra’s spaceship, now posed in silhouette in the style of nineteenth-century daguerreotype portraits of freed people, literally ‘plugged in’ to the circuit board for an Insulated-Gate Bipolar Transistor audio amplifier, rendered in shimmering gold relief.40 On one level, presented in bold relief is Hip Hop. Bling. The boom box dissected like Freud’s fish. On a deeper level, however, the circuit board is less about sound than navigation. Its metaphors are oceanic – waves, circuits, currents – and its ‘grid’ is circulatory, if not global. The men could be dandies, funkateers or dressed-up ex-field Negroes, but in my mind they are sailors, Jack Tars – Ishmael and Ahab preparing to face the whale.41 As sailors, they symbolise how differences of time and space are linked: through circulation, the movement of signs, icons, bodies and memories. In the ‘fluid realm’ of Gallagher’s imagination, the world is a vast ocean with its own patterns of circulation, currents and tricks. To fully grasp her world, we need to channel the sailor within. To truly plumb its depths and move through its ‘jesty, joky, hoky-poky’ seascape requires both navigation and a willingness to relinquish control.

NOTES

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1 From Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, documentary film, dir. Robert Mugge, Winstar DVD 1999 (orig.

1980).

2 Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Charles Lan Markmann, New York 1967, argues that the inferiority complex engendered by racism compels the racialised/colonised subject to imitate the cultural codes and practices of the dominant race/ coloniser (speech, dress, skin colour, hair texture, etc.). The petit bourgeois or upwardly mobile are more likely to exhibit this behaviour.

3 Quoted in Jeffrey B. Perry (ed.), A Hubert Harrison Reader, Middletown, CT 2001, p.211. See also Marcus Garvey, ‘Peace Aims to the Paris Peace Conference’ (March 1919), in Robert Hill (ed.), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Volume XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920, Los Angeles and Berkeley 2011, p.154.

4 Freud’s essay, ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, first appeared as a small booklet in 1926, and was reprinted in other journals, including La Revolution Surrealiste, nos.

9/10, 1 October 1927. See also Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Colonialism and Psychoanalysis, Durham, NC 2003, p.ix passim; David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent, London 2004, p.172.

5 Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European, London and New York 2003, p.27.

6 Suzanne P. Hudson, ‘1000 words: Ellen Gallagher Talks about PompBang, 2003,’ Artforum, vol.42, no.8, April 2004, p.131.

7 It is worth noting that AXME is also the commercial name for a type of axle grease manufactured

by Shell Oil (Shell Spirax S6 AXME 75W-90). Something to think about when one contemplates Gallagher’s work Greasy or considers her obsession with hair.

8 Ellen Gallagher interview with the author.

9 Ellen Gallagher quoted in, Lyra Kilston and Quinn Latimer, ‘Ellen Gallagher: Creating the World she Longs for’, Modern Painters, vol.21, no.2, March 2009, p.12.

10 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), New York 1963, p.201.

11 Ellen Gallagher interview with the author 12 Ibid.

13 This brief description does not do justice to Malevich’s ideas and their ties to Russian futurism, war, modernity and revolution.

See Simmons W. Sherwin, Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ and the Genesis of Suprematism 1907–1915, New York and London 1981; Aaron J. Cohen, Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture

in Russia, 1914–1917, Lincoln, NE 2008; and especially Malevich’s own manifesto, ‘From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting’, in K.S. Malevich, Essays on Art, Vol.1: 1915–1928, Copenhagen 1971, pp.19–41.

14 See Briony Fer, On Abstract Art, New Haven and London 2000, chapter 1. Ironically, the wartime shortage of materials left Malevich with no choice but to recycle old canvases.

15 Willie Morrow, 400 Years Without a Comb, San Diego 1973, p.87.

16 I develop the notion of Gallagher’s wigs as transformations in Robin D.G. Kelley, ‘Fugitives from a Chain Store’, in Jeff Fleming (ed.), Ellen Gallagher: Preserve, exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center 2001, pp.11–20.

17 Suzanne P. Hudson, ‘1000 words: Ellen Gallagher Talks about Pomp-Bang, 2003,’ Artforum, vol.42, no.8, April 2004, p.131.

18 Gallagher came across an article about the federally funded study (1932–72) administered through Tuskegee Institute while rummaging through her archive of black magazines, and immediately incorporated it into her work. The article by Jack Slater made clear that the Tuskegee Experiment was a product of modernity rather than a throwback to barbarism was not lost on the writer, who observed that the study began ‘during the same year Adolf Hitler, who would soon initiate his own “experiments” in the name of medical science, rose to power’. For more on the Tuskegee Experiment and Nurse Eunice Rivers, see Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy, Chapel Hill, CA 2009; Evelynn M. Hammonds, ‘Your Silence will not Protect you: Nurse Rivers and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study’, in Susan M. Reverby (ed.), Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Chapel Hill, CA 2000, pp.340–7; Susan L. Smith, ‘Neither Victim nor Villain: Eunice Rivers and Public Health Work’, in ibid., pp.348–64; James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, New York 1993.

19 Melville’s use of minstrelsy has been the subject of a burgeoning scholarship, though most of these critiques focus on Benito Cereno and The Confidence-Man. For just a couple of examples, see Robert Nowatzki, Representing African Americans in Trans-Atlantic Abolitionism and Minstrelsy, Baton Rouge 2010, pp.140–7; Jennifer Gordon Baker, ‘Staging Revolution in Melville’s “Benito Cereno”: Babo, Figaro, and the “Play of the Barber”’, Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 26, 2001, pp.91–107; W.T. Lhamon Jnr, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, Cambridge, MA 1998; Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class,

New York and Oxford 1993; Michael Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville, New York 1983; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, Cambridge, MA 1993.

20 On the life of Peg Leg Bates, see Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History, Oxford 2010, pp.164–207 passim; Dancing Man: Peg Leg Bates, documentary film, dir. Dave Davidson, Hudson West Productions and South Carolina Television, 1992.

21 Faith S. Holsaert et al. (eds.), Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, Urbana 2012, pp.433, 522, 544.

22 Fred V. Bernard, ‘The Question of Race in Moby-Dick’, Massachusetts Review, vol.43, no.3, 2002, pp.384–404.

23 For an incredibly insightful reading of DeLuxe, see Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, ‘The History Lesson: Flesh is a Texture as Much as a Color’, Parkett, no.73, 2005, pp.39–53.

24 Ellen Gallagher interview with the author.

25 Ibid.; Sarah Suzuki, in Christophe Cherix (ed.), Print/Out: 20 Years in Print, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2012, p.119.

26 Gerald Markowitz, ‘Lloyd George Sealy: An Appreciation’, http://www. lib.jjay.cuny.edu/sealy/indexx.html 27 Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life, New York 2002, p.324; Richard Reeves, ‘Feud – Rockefeller and Lindsay: An Old Rival Turns Personal and Savage’, Life Magazine, 25 June 1971, p.56; John K. Jessup, ‘The Threat and Promise of Black Power’, Life Magazine, 9 August 1968, p.28; Bruce Biossat, ‘Pointers Seen in Lindsay’, Rock Hill Herald, 21 October 1968.

28 Markowitz, ‘Lloyd George Sealy’.

29 Ellen Gallagher, Ichthyosaurus: 29–30 November 2005: http://www. freud.org.uk/exhibitions/10539/ ichthyosaurus/ 30 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time, New York 2006, pp.29–34.

31 Kodwo Eshun, ‘Drexcyia: Fear of a Wet Planet’, The Wire 167, January 1998.

32 Aimé Césaire, ‘Lost Body’, in Lost Body (Corps Perdu): Poems

by Aimé Césaire, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, Paris 1986, p.59; Aimé Césaire, Solar Throat Slashed, trans. A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman, Middletown, CT 2011, pp.142–5; Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post, Palo Alto 1998, p.136.

33 Kelley 2001, p.20.

34 The article is by Era Bell Thompson, ‘Surinam: Multiracial Paradise at the Crossroads’, Ebony, February 1967, pp.114–16, 118, 120.

35 Eliza Williams, ‘Profile: Ellen Gallagher’, Contemporary, no.76, Summer 2006: www.contemporarymagazines.com/profile76.htm 36 Ellen Gallagher email to the author, 8 January 2011.

37 Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality?, trans. Mercer Cook, Westport 1974, p.217. On Sun Ra’s ideas about Ancient Egypt, see John F. Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, New York 1997, pp.62–72, 105–6.

38 Janine Burke, The Sphinx on the Table: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection and the Development of Psychoanalysis, New York 2006, p.222.

39 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939), New York 1955; Edward Said, Freud and the NonEuropean, London and New York 2003, p.35. The claim that Moses was not a Jew was not entirely novel. Max Weber, among others, had made it years before, and several respected biblical scholars concluded that Moses was probably more of a mythical figure. See Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, New York 2006, pp.626–9. As one might expect, critics took Moses and Monotheism to task. Besides being an unpopular thesis in the shadows of Adolf Hitler’s ascent, it often read as Freud’s projection of himself as ‘the alienated priest who brought the Enlightenment-religion of psychoanalysis to the band of his followers, only to be rejected and forbidden entry into the Promised Land’. Joel Kovel, ‘Review: Freud and the Non-Europeans’, Socialism and Democracy 37, vol.19, no.1, 2005: http://sdonline.org/37/freudand-the-non-europeans/ Incidentally, Sun Ra never got around to reading Freud’s account, but he learned of it during his first visit to Egypt in 1971. John Szwed writes: ‘As he had feared, many of the modern Egyptians did not appear to be his people, not a Hamitic people. When he told some locals about his racial theories of Ancient Egypt, they suggested he read Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. And when he couldn’t find it bookstores he concluded that the Egyptian government had banned it.’ Szwed 1997, p.292.

40 The idea of using inlaid technique to ‘plug’ these men into their craft derives from Gallagher’s reading of Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Middletown, CT 2004, in which the protagonist Rat Korga, having been surgically transformed into a passive slave, is plugged into his vehicle.

41 Although my take on IGBT differs radically from Amna Malik’s, her reading of the piece is fascinating nonetheless. See Amna Malik, ‘An Accumulation of Signs: Ellen Gallagher’s Recent Work’, in Greasy: Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York 2011, p.43.

ELLEN GALLAGHER: MYTHOPOETICS AND MATERIALS CAROL ARMSTRONG

‘BIRD IN HAND’: THE ARISING OF FIGURE OUT OF GROUND Ellen Gallagher’s early painting practice is best known for its post-minimalist look and for its use of units of blank penmanship paper glued onto canvas support.1 Yet it is also truly remarkable for its fertile hybridisation of medium. In among its many permutations a gradual shift can be traced from the all-over structure reminiscent of a grid to the operations of figure against ground, developing figuration out of abstraction. It is as if the very ground of painting gives birth to figure, materialising into figuration. For example, in Drexciya of 1997 (fig.8) – made of oil, ink and gesso directly on canvas, this time with no glued paper intervening between mark and canvas surface – the canvas begins to sprout free-floating areas of line and dot forming themselves into angular creatures, gyrating all elbows and knees amid speckled swarms of red, black and yellow gnats. Upon closer looking, they turn out to be agglomerations of penmanship-paper-like blue lines that have broken ranks from the sheets they normally inhabit. Flights of tiny little black heads with blonde wigs, red lips and protruding tongues continue around the corner and edge of the canvas as if they had lost their way in their refusal to be corralled. Such initial departures from the all-over pattern of earlier works also announce the fact that, though the potentiality for characters and stories to emerge organically out of a material ground and the fecundity of medium and technical experimentation that accompanies it is a defining feature of Gallagher’s practice, at the same time that ground is always inseminated with pre-existing cultural matter.

For ‘Drexciya’ is one such piece of pre-existent cultural matter, referring at once to a 1990s Detroit techno band2 and the myth of a black Atlantis, an underwater mutant population descended from the unborn children of slave women thrown overboard for insurrection during the transatlantic, Middle Passage slave trade. Particularly important for Gallagher’s work of the following decade, it constitutes an already fleshed-out piece of iconography, intersecting with those from other sources: hair ads in Ebony magazine, minstrelsy and Dada, Sun Ra and Ancient Egypt, evolutionary theory and the prehistoric fossil record, Moby-Dick and seventeenth-century female Maroons such as the military leader Aqualtune.3 Gallagher has made all this her own mythopoetics, adapted for and by her own distinctive post-minimalist painting.

The full accomplishment of this process of the arising of figure out of ground and with it the emergence of a fully developed mythopoetics is to be seen in a work such as Bird in Hand of 2006 (fig.9, no.#). Bird in Hand is intimately tied to the maritime life of the Atlantic Passage story of Drexciya. At the same time, it resonates with the thematics and materiality of the equally pivotal DeLuxe (2004–5; no.##), in its focus on the subject of hair combined with its use of cut-and-glued paper and polymer medium.4 Starting, as before, with penmanship paper, stuck on every which way to form its foundations, Bird in Hand mines Gallagher’s beginnings to demonstrate the sheer fecundity of that substrate in its capacities to make mythic figure arise out of material ground; indeed, it abandons itself rather wildly to that process. Punctuated with areas of blue wash that suggest water, the zigzagging of the penmanship paper unmoors the foundation that it creates from the structure of the minimalist grid and makes it wave-like, while suggesting the potentiality for anarchy that is incipient within structuration itself. Meanwhile the actions of cutting and collaging, of digging into and building up, of subtraction and addition, accretion and layering found elsewhere in Gallagher’s paintings and drawings, here manifest their ability not only to spell out the medium-hybridity that is fundamental to her work – its simultaneous recourse to the strategies of drawing, writing, painting, collaging, construction and the sculptural processes of carving and moulding, relief and intaglio

printing, as well as xeroxing and other photo-based, planographic means – but also to produce form and figure. One has only to take the repeated straight lines of the penmanship paper and allow them to waver, by dint of further cutting and gluing and colouring, into undulating strips, cells and other units that suggest streaming hair, seaweed, lace, root, coral, swimming protozoa and submarine animalcules, and, hey presto, one has conjured up an underwater pirate with a fantastical afro, a kind of mutant tree of life, that spreads and grows into a whole botany and zoology. What happens here in this painting, which seems to make such a radical jump from the stripped-down minimalism of the earliest examples to an almost baroque excess of figural potentiality, is the best visual instantiation of what happens everywhere else in this body of work as well.

A growing set of external references fecundates an already fertile ground that has its own figural possibilities burgeoning latent within it.

If I were so inclined I could emphasise the semiosis of this: after all, the use of penmanship paper had from the beginning elided the ground of painting and drawing with that of writing. And in works such as Moon-Glo (2010; no.##), the simultaneity of the sprouting of little faces and the blooming of letters for the vowel sounds ‘e’ and ‘o’ out of the paper ground of the image strongly suggests that language and imagery emerge from a common source, and are more or less the same thing, namely, a sign system. But what I want to do instead is to focus on the materiality of the process of the sprouting and blooming of signs, the inversion of the movement away from imagery that characterised an earlier, Euro- and phallo-centric history of abstract painting, and the organic, even biomorphic generativity, rather than reductivism, of a hybridised conception of medium in the hands of an other-than-white, other-than-male contemporary artist. And at the same time, I want to suggest that there is an anti-illustrational politics at play, which inverts as well the ‘normal’ priority of text over image and distinguishes Gallagher’s labour in the fields of political art from other work of its kind and thematics.

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EXCURSUS: NATURAL HISTORY AND THE DISORDERING OF BINARIES Gathered together first in Ichthyosaurus (2005) and Coral Cities (2007–8; no.##) are a series of watercolours that together constitute a kind of natural history of the spotted, striped, undulating, multi-form, rainbow-coloured marine life of the coral seas. Corals themselves, seaweeds, spiny sea urchins, octopus, sea anemones, angelfish, tigerfish, frogfish, lionfish, wolf-fish, rabbitfish, hawkfish, butterfly-fish, clownfish, jellyfish, barracuda, moray eels and the chambered nautilus creature are among those variegated species (whose names describe a wild panoply of zoological hybridity) either represented more or less as themselves or figuring in some kind of mutant variation in that natural history. These began life in 2001, in the larger, ongoing series Watery Ecstatic (figs.10, 11, nos.##), which in turn grew out of Blubber (2000–1), whose theme had partly to do with the whaling trade summoned up so famously by Herman Melville.5 Some of the works are white-on-white, as if to conjure up Melville’s stunning verbal riff on ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’ in Moby-Dick.6 Others, however, represent the vivid polychromy and variegated patterning of this underwater world in a combination of watercolour wash and cut-andslice texturing of the paper surface. But these watercolours also recall the fact that as a student, Gallagher spent a semester aboard a research sailing vessel collecting, studying and drawing marine specimens under a microscope. As Gallagher herself recounts: ‘My project was studying pteropods – wing-footed snails. I chose this subject [because] it appeared to me that they looked just like butterflies – I thought I would be catching beautiful butterflies in the water. It never occurred to me that they were microscopic…’7

The natural-history project that unfolds through Watery Ecstatic, Ichthyosaurus and Coral Cities serves a twofold purpose with regard to the binary logics of race and gender.

As it relates to Drexciya’s underground-techno storytelling and myth-creation, it

Fig.8 Drexciya 1997 Oil, ink and gesso on canvas 304.8 x 243.6

destabilises racial black-and-whiteness by means of the colour- and form-spectrum of a species-proliferating world. But we might also add into the mix an earlier, feminist use of the ‘data of biology’ to subvert and ambiguate the binary of gender. When, in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir began The Second Sex with a chapter of this title, she surveyed the sex lives of plants, protozoa, batrachians (frogs and toads), crustaceans, insects, spiders, fish, birds and mammals (such as guinea pigs, kangaroos, horses and monkeys), in order to argue against the arguments from biology that had marked Western philosophy since Plato (which is to say, white, European, patriarchal philosophy) in its thinking about gender. In writing about the ‘innovating aspect’ of reproduction in nature, de Beauvoir paid particular attention to the sex life of ‘various fishes’, ‘water as an element in which the eggs and sperms can float about … fecundation in the aquatic environment’ being external and the sex roles of mother and father either reversed or indistinguishable. Not unlike Freud himself, that is, who also expressed a particular interest in marine biology and in the sex lives of the animal kingdom, de Beauvoir acted as a kind of biologist, though hers was a feminist biology that emphasised the potential subversiveness of diversity.8

Later, in this alternative story of ‘Genesis’ according to the encyclopaedia of natural history rather than the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition, de Beauvoir concluded ‘In nature nothing is ever perfectly clear. The two types, male and female, are not always sharply distinguished; while they sometimes exhibit a dimorphism – in coat colour or in arrange­ ment of spotting or mottling – that seems distinctive, yet it may happen, on the contrary, that they are indistinguishable, and that even their functions are hardly differentiated, as in many fishes.’9 In short, de Beauvoir used her natural history to ‘imagine a parthenogenetic or hermaphroditic society’, to suggest that we should try to understand a range of sexualities and reproductive systems by studying their ‘concrete manifestations’ in nature rather than ‘universalizing specific life processes’ according to some ‘a priori’ principle, and finally to argue that the ‘allegory [of biology] should not be pushed too far’.10

What is fascinating about de Beauvoir’s ‘data of biology’ – and, I would argue, eminently applicable to Gallagher’s emphasis upon diversity, both at the level of facture and technique and at that of marine biology – is that it finds in nature, rather than culture, a liberatory potentiality. Furthermore, it identifies a principle of ‘creative’ generativity, and in the empirical study of the former, rather than the ideological dictates of the latter, an inductive logic of the open series, as opposed to the deductive (and reductive) reasoning from hidden a prioris that have put such destructive pressure on human ideas about sexual and racial difference, in which such difference is reduced to the black-and-white binaries of good and bad, higher and lower, same and other. This feminist interpretation of species variation offers a contrary model to that kind of thinking. Striking as well in this account are the ways of marine animals – ‘various fishes’ – and the role of water as a (pro)creative medium.11 DRAWINGS: THE TWO-SIDEDNESS OF PAPER What is the difference between a drawing and a painting? Numerous answers, all of them conventional and institutional – categorical and departmental – suggest themselves. For example: a drawing is made by line, which divides a surface into figure and ground, while a painting is made by the application of substance to a surface, which must create a ground before and while it creates figures; a drawing is preparatory, small, private and ‘minor’, while a painting is final, large, public and ‘major’; a drawing acknowledges its surface while a painting does not (or vice versa); a drawing is conceptual (as in ‘dessin’, ‘disegno’ or ‘design’, all of which are terms for drawing which suggest conceiving, planning, organising and intending – doing something by deliberate design), while a painting is pictorial and perceptual and/or sensually embodied; a drawing can be hybrid, as in a papier collé, while a painting is unitary; and finally a drawing is a ‘work on paper’,

Fig.9 Bird in Hand 2006 Oil, ink, paper, polymer, salt and gold leaf on canvas 238.3 x 307.2 x 4.5 Tate. Presented anonymously 2007 Fig.10 Watery Ecstatic 2001 Ink, oil, graphite and cut paper on Paper 56.5 x 76.2 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift Fig.11 Watery Ecstatic 2004 Watercolour, ink, oil, plasticine, graphite and cut paper on paper 77.5 x 101.6

Fig.14

Figs.12, 13 Morphia (recto/verso) 2008–12 Ink, watercolour, polymer medium, charcoal, pencil and varnish on cut paper.

Frame structure: steel and glass 51.6 x 42.4 Private collection

Fig.12

Fig.13

Figs.14, 15 Morphia (recto/verso) 2008–12 Ink, pencil, watercolour, varnish, oil, gesso, gouache, egg tempera, polymer medium and cut paper on paper. Ten parts each presented in a steel frame Fig.16 An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity 2008 Ink, graphite, oil, varnish and cut paper on canvas 201.9 x 188 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Promised gift of Larry Gagosian

Fig.11

Fig.16

Fig.9

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Fig.8

Fig.10

and assigned to museum departments that are prepared to conserve such works, while a painting is typically a work on canvas, and usually assigned to a museum’s primary department, which is prepared to conserve and curate such primary works.12

I will take the last of these binary oppositions, which is the most arbitrary and merely conventional of all, as my rationale for dividing up Gallagher’s work. That last example – works on paper as opposed to works on canvas – is useful to me because it is the one that most emphasises the material substrate of mark-making and figure-ground relations.

I am even tempted to say that it suggests the possibility of a mythopoetic conversion of conventionally reductive, formalist notions of medium – paper versus canvas, drawing versus painting – into biologically generative notions of medium, or ‘menstruum’, as it used sometimes to be called – water versus dry land, liquid versus solid, a ‘mechanics of fluids’ versus the phallogocentrism of hard-and-fast borders, boundaries, nations, gestalts, hierarchies, the ownership and domination of one by another.13

Let me start with the whiteness of paper, and what Melville called his ‘incantation’ on the ‘whiteness of the whale’, his ‘white-lead chapter about whiteness’. ‘It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me’, he wrote, developing a whole bestiary associated with the double meaning – the simultaneous purity and ghastliness – of the colour white, which in addition to the white man and the ‘Albino whale’, included the white bear, the white shark, the white albatross and the ‘White Steed’. He concluded his white chapter with ruminations on the colourlessness of the colour white: Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues – every stately or lovely emblazoning – the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge– pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and … so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.

And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.14

Fig.15

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Writing as one who frankly adores the varied spectrum of the ‘palsied universe’ that ‘Nature … paints like the harlot,’ it is with a certain counter-horror that I read Melville’s chromophobic paean to whiteness. At the same time, it is useful to read because of its exposing of a bias deep within the Western philosophical and cultural tradition – against colour, and thus against both colour’s femininity and people ‘of colour’.15 But most important of all, for my purposes, is the double-sidedness of white: at once all colours and colourless, the utmost of both the absent and the concrete, nothing and the potentiality of everything, white is, in short, something like uninscribed handwriting paper, ‘a dumb blankness, full of meaning’.

And it is in precisely this way that Gallagher uses the white of paper, as a blankness always already inscribed with meanings aplenty, perhaps most particularly that of the ‘Albino whale’; and as a layered, double-sided material ground that can be handled in an astonishingly multifarious fashion, though it is never simply drawn upon with a pencil.

Stained and sullied into not-whiteness, frayed, abraded and sliced, often with a surgeon’s

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scalpel, the already-textured white of the watercolour paper that Gallagher prefers is made to matter, both as a fully material ground, and as ‘the visible absence … and at the same time the concrete of all colors’. But more than that, when it is cut into, sometimes sliced through to the other side, sometimes cut less deeply, one sees that it has more than one side to it, indeed that it is made of several pulpy layers, strata that can be uncovered, as if archaeologically, by the blade. The ramifications of this are manifold, as Gallagher herself must have discovered, in both drawing and texturing with the knife.

In the drawings that constitute Watery Ecstatic, for example, the sculpting of the paper surface – producing the scales of a fish, the strands of hair that undulate and coil outwards from the tiny heads that float everywhere, as well as the waves of the watery world that these beings inhabit – transforms the optical figures that these biomorphic forms make into tactile surfaces that can actually be felt, and which stand in for the real biological surfaces that they render, while equating watery with paper medium, fictional biosphere with the generativity of material facture. In addition, the manifest two-sidedness of the paper is shown to possess the same potentiality for the doubling and splitting of meaning that are yielded up by Melville’s white words: blank and replete, clean and dirty, good and bad, Utopia and dystopia, creation and destruction, assimilation and expulsion (as in the white monster-fish, as toothy as the white paper of which he is made, who simultaneously devours and defecates the little black heads that have accreted to the paper surface). In very fundamental ways these moves alter the definition of a medium such as drawing, moving away from the radical reductionism of modernism’s history towards a celebration of proliferation, away from an opposition between the literal, the illusionistic and the representational, towards their joining and eliding, and away from a rigid conception of the singleness of a medium towards a multiplicity inhering in materials and their potentialities.

From Watery Ecstatic to Morphia (figs.12–15, nos.##), Gallagher has moved towards an even fuller embracing of the two-sidedness of paper as a material/medium. All of the operations that produce her drawings are also to be found in her later paintings, as in the dark An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity (2008; fig.16, no.#) and the white Greasy (2011; no.##). Even more than the techno-galactic Neptune of Greasy, the deep-sea creature of An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity is made by a dizzying array of material actions: paper that is first stained with ink, then cut into strips, either straight-ruled after the fashion of the handwriting paper with which Gallagher began her practice, or undulating and coiling into the central figure of the piece, that are glued down in intricate patterns of inlay, then sliced again in various depths to reveal the layers of colour, largely blue-black and pink-to-red, beneath them, and then covered in oil and varnish.16 The result of all this labour-intensive work is an image that has to be seen ‘in the flesh’ to be made out at all, and that begs to be touched to be believed, in which figure and ground cannot be separated from one another – one is in the other – as if one were peering through the medium of the dark water of the deepest depths of the ocean, in search of the barest outlines of the bio-luminescent creature that one senses lurking there. Again, while ground constantly mutates into figure and vice versa, facture creates its own biosphere, in an incessant mimicry of the bio-logics of the underwater world that it represents: in which diversity and plurality, generativity and variation, rather than unchanging conformity and reduction to a single standard, rule the day.

But if painting creates its own bio-medium in works such as An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity, the Morphia drawings do even more than that. From one side to the other, recto to verso, each figure quite literally morphs into another, by dint of first building up layers of paper, and then, not only cutting through those layers as before, but also allowing ink and other materials to seep and stain though to the verso side, and jazz-like, suggest a further riff on whatever shape was created on the recto side. It is a process that continues to the point that there is then no first or second side, but simply the constantly

NOTES

flipping and reversing double-sidedness of both the paper and the figures that are created in it. Much like the Mobius-strip twisting and turning of green-watercolour seaweed in some of the Watery Ecstatic drawings, so looping strands of hair on one side turn and twist into inky waves of water on the other side, or lacy cutwork patterns, or the organic involutions of brain or entrails; or alternatively a head of hair involutes into a jellyfish trailing its stingers behind it, or braids of Celtic knots; or an invertebrate insectoid spirals into some kind of helmet or skeletal system; or a ram-like beast evolves into an upright fish-like form; and through it all, over and over, black turns into white and back again, male into female, head into body, human into animal, figure into ground or environment or medium, and the scissor cut into the polymer projection, a subtraction into an addition and vice versa. Thus one is led by the hand to the realisation that this is material thought that represents the ruination of all prejudicial binaries by their infinitely varied conversion into a language of open-ended propagation. In short, Gallagher uses the two-sidedness of paper to transform whiteness into the birthing of a whole counter-cultural world, and with it a mythopoetics of endless mutation.

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1 For discussions of Gallagher’s early work, see Claire Doherty, ‘Infection in the Sentence’, in Claire Doherty (ed.), Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 1998; Greg Tate, ‘Rewind’, and Robert Storr, ‘A funny thing happened…’, in Jessica Morgan (ed.), Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 2001; the essay by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve in Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London 2001; and Jeff Fleming (ed.), Ellen Gallagher: Preserve, exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center 2001. As for myself, I first wrote, very briefly, about some pieces of Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic (which I first saw in an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, New York, in autumn 2004): Carol Armstrong, ‘Women on Paper’, in Cornelia Butler, Alexandra Schwartz and Griselda Pollock (eds.), Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York 2010, pp.104–23.

2 Drexciya was the name of the Detroit underground techno band, consisting mainly of the duo James Stinson and Gerald Donald, which was active primarily between 1992 and 2002, with a resurgence of compilations in 2011. Its discography is as follows: Deep Sea Dweller (1992), Shockwave Records; Drexciya 2: Bubble Metropolis (1993), Underground Resistance; Aquatic Invasion (1994); Drexciya 3: Molecular Enhancement (1994), Rephlex Submerge; Drexciya 4: The Unknown Aquazone (1994), Submerge; The Journey Home (1995), Warp Records; The Return Of Drexciya (1996), Underground Resistance; and compilations The Quest (1997), Submerge and Journey of the Deep See Dweller I-III (2011–12), Clone. See www. discogs.com/artist/Drexciya.

Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic series predicts the iconography of the ‘Drexciya’ cult: in particular two fan videos from 2011, each deploying footage from the BBC ‘Blue Planet’ television series of 2001, when Watery Ecstatic itself began, accompanying Drexciya’s ‘Hydro Theory’ and ‘Return to Bubble’.

3 On the subject of female ‘marronage’ (from Aimé Césaire’s neologism, ‘marronner’, meaning, in the Caribbean/Creole context, ‘an inventive, subversive, and liberating’ literary rebellion), see Kathleen M. Balutansky, ‘Of Female Maroons and Literary Rebellions: Plotting the End of Caribbean MasterNarratives’, Journal of West Indian Literature, vol.7, no.2, April 1998, pp.12–24; as well as Kathleen M. Balutanksy and Marie-Agnès Sourieau, Carribean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity, Gainesville, FL 1998; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London 1993; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the

Making of the Atlantic World, 1400– 1800, Cambridge 1992; and John Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800, London 1999.

4 In fact, these themes and material practices go back to Preserve, and what Gallagher calls her ‘yellow paintings’ (2001–4), all of which feature plasticine, which first appeared in an Untitled painting of 1998.

5 See Lisa Kim (ed.), Ellen Gallagher: Blubber, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York 2001; and Ellen Gallagher: Coral Cities, exh. cat., Tate Liverpool 2007, which, after the Ichthyosaurus exhibition at the Freud Museum in London in 2005, represented the most comprehensive installation of the Watery Ecstatic drawings to date.

6 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale (1851), New York 1961, chapter 42, ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, pp.189–97.

7 See Ellen Gallagher, ‘Interview’ (by Jessica Morgan), in Morgan 2001, p.17.

8 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), trans. H.M. Parshley, New York 1989, pp.19–20 (in part I, chapter I, ‘The Data of Biology’).

9 Ibid., p.24 (my italics).

10 Ibid., pp.7, 9, 12. See the Freud Museum’s account of Freud’s interest in marine biology: www. freud.org.uk/exhibitions/10539/ ichthyosaurus/.

11 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘medium’ is ‘Any intervening substance through which a force acts on objects at a distance or through which impressions are conveyed to the senses: applied [to] any substance considered with regard to its properties as a vehicle of light or sound … Pervading or enveloping substance; the substance or ‘element’ in which an organism lives … An intermediate agency, means or channel …

Painting. Any liquid vehicle with which pigments (as oil, water, albumen, etc.) are mixed … Also, any of the varieties of painting as determined by the nature of the vehicle employed, as oil-painting, watercolour, tempera, fresco, etc. …

Medium, the menstruum, or liquid vehicle, with which the dry pigments are ground and made ready for the artist’s use…’ These are definitions, new and old, that suggest a broader notion of medium than that assumed in the old modernist conceptions of medium-specificity, pace Clement Greenberg in ‘Towards a Newer Laocöon’, Partisan Review, vol.7, July–August 1940, pp.296–310.

12 For a much opened-up definition of the ‘medium’ of drawing, see Cornelia H. Butler and Catherine de Zegher, On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2010.

13 Many of my ideas about the ‘feminine’ splitting and doubling of form and materiality ultimately derive from Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, Paris 1977, published in

English as This Sex which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca, NY 1985.

14 Melville 1961, pp.196–7.

15 More than a matter of mere aesthetics, this bias lies deep in the Western philosophical tradition, which argues that colour is inessential and therefore secondary and inferior – at once decorative and artificial, superficial and supplemental, and feminine. On the question of this ‘chromophobic’ tradition, see David Batchelor, Chromophobia, London 2000.

16 The title of this painting refers to the infamous syphilis experiment that the US Public Health Service conducted on black men in rural Alabama between 1932 and 1972.

SIGNS PRESERVE US RICHARD SHIFF

complaint about complaint’.9 By wordplay parallel to the phonetics of out and to – ‘the way owt is the way two’ – Sun Ra argued that complaining or wailing amounted to whaling, that is, whalin’ or whale-in. A person whale-in (wailing) is a person in-whale, inside the whale, like the biblical Jonah. Sun Ra’s passage from whale-in to in-whale is metathetic; but here the transposition only worsens the situation, offering no exit. Instead of whale-in, why not whale-out? One verbal action displaces the other. Like a countercultural dropout, Sun Ra was suggesting that you have to depart before you can arrive. He demonstrated that words for the speaker or writer are like materials for the studio artist: profiting from an inherent autonomy, they generate otherwise unseen, unheard possibilities. With his combination of old-time religion and futuristic science, Sun Ra concluded: ‘You could make God so proud if you whale-out.’10 In 1979, he called to his audience: ‘You’ve outlived the Bible. [You’re living] in a science fiction film now.’11 Several years earlier, he had released his own feature-length sci-fi film with the title Space Is the Place.12 Its narrative drops Sun Ra into Oakland, California where he entreats the black community to leave its social malaise behind. The destination would not be nineteenth-century Africa, marking a return, but twenty-first-century Outer Space, a way to.

MEANING IS GENERATED BY THE ELASTICITY BETWEEN ASSOCIATIONS. ELLEN GALLAGHER, 20091 THE WAY TO TRUE LIVING LIFE IS THE PHONETIC OF TWO WHICH IS TO BECAUSE THE WAY TO IS THE WAY OT AND THE WAY OWT IS THE WAY TWO, THE WAY TUO IS THE WAY TU AND TO. SUN RA, 1950S2

A dialect diverges from its standard, while remaining true to the living language. Meaning stretches between. Painter Ellen Gallagher and jazz composer Sun Ra (1914–1993), two artists attuned to signs, treat meaning as elastic.3 When Sun Ra transposed consonants in his phonetic play on to/ot and owt/two, he was writing poetry rather than speaking black dialect. His favoured linguistic trope nevertheless characterises African-American vernacular. Consider the verb ask: its vernacular form is aks, that is, ax (or the archaic axe). To ask, to ax: two signifiers of the same action. Is ax, as the non-standard form, the one that deviates? It appears to convert the sk of ask to ks. Yet, of the two variants of this verb, ax is the older.4 Black vernacular happens to use the original form, or at least the one that counts the longer history. Its consonants remain in place; it transposes nothing. As if containing white English yellowed in amber, black vernacular preserves ciphers of sound that the evolving language long ago abandoned.

METATHETIC Black, yellow, white: these colours of racial transposition assume no particular sequence or priority.5 Standard English deviates from African-American dialect, not the reverse. The normative form is responsible for transposing the consonants, converting the ks of ax to sk. Regardless of the direction of movement, the rhetorical term for exchange of this type is metathesis: etymologically, a change of position, whether of physical location or conceptual stance. The English diction to be associated with the Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossing endured by Africans taken into slavery, may have developed into our contemporary standard. The ax of the Middle Passage – whether lost at sea or saved in the speech of black Americans – lies concealed today within the shell of ask.6 It holds its genetic distinction within orthography as well as by the sound, which echoes specific places, times and histories. Our signs, like our saints, preserve us.

Wedded to the look and sound of a word is its meaning, the sense, the direction, the directive. ‘A font is both what it is made of and what it says’, Gallagher states, referring to the parallel tracks of visual and verbal communication.7 The sensory feel of the font or the word conveys more than mere sensation. If every word is a proposition, the projection of a thesis, then metathetic operations ought to change some aspect of the idea or argument.

In the play of graphic transposition, the sense changes with the form. In ax and ask we confront alternative markers within a single cultural history. They sound different and look different, so how can they mean the same? Gallagher and Sun Ra share the belief that signs within cultural exchange benefit from deciphering, because the deeper meanings lie hidden. Sun Ra put it this way: ‘Proper evaluation of words and letters in their phonetic and associated sense can bring the peoples of earth into the clear light of pure Cosmic Wisdom.’8

In one of his broadsheet calls to spiritual awakening, Sun Ra used metathesis to warn fellow African Americans of the counterproductive nature of their complaining, however justified. Rather than lament over an enslaved or impoverished condition, it would be better simply to leave the oppressive society. Gallagher refers to this message as ‘a

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WHALING Gallagher’s studio practice is intensely physical, even when focused on relatively fragile sheets of penmanship paper or newsprint. With an exacting scalpel, she cuts and shapes paper, plasticine, pomade and a diversity of other materials, rigid or malleable. She works on the flat, against the hard surface of panel, table or floor, because her process so often involves composing fragments in the way that a refined woodworker constructs marquetry inlay, dropping one element into the precise contours of another, fitting interlocking shapes into place. In 2001, she remarked on working above a large expanse of painting surface, set horizontally on the floor. Her comment seems to channel a builder’s sensitivity to gravity and other factors of physical resistance, as opposed to a painter’s concern for establishing order in virtual space: ‘What I drop down on the floor presses back up at me.’13 Gallagher was indicating her attentiveness to the capacity of various substances (as well as the images they generate) to push back, expressing both will and limitation, as if the material were saying, ‘I can do this but not that’. Gallagher’s various materials induce her hand to follow a certain course, even as they yield to the hand’s direction. Meaning emerges as an elastic collaboration between the physicality of the materials and the figuration of the signs.

Gallagher speaks of wanting to maintain the ‘vulnerability’ of her materials and their forms, their potential to yield to environmental pressures, including those imposed by her tools, which leave characteristic imprints.14 Some of these tools are implements designed to carve and shape wax or clay; dense but malleable, plasticine itself is clay-like. As Gallagher adds yellow and white plasticine forms to the black-grey base of advertising imagery in a work such as Pomp-Bang (2003; no.##), she never seals or otherwise protects the top surfaces of these coarsely cut inlays. Sealant appears only at the exterior edges, leaving a white halo around the shape. Remaining in the raw, the plasticine forms look more tentative and unstable than they actually are. This is their charm. Each alters the appearance of a human figure while itself appearing subject to physical change. Often resembling helmets or masks, the plasticine reliefs out-wig the wigs that they supplant.

Within their gridded array, Gallagher notes, ‘the plasticine pageant of the yellow paintings is already elastic, making puns’.15 Meanings stretch into puns when stray fragments of text interact with visual figures. One of the units of eXelento (2004) has a text including the phrase don’t yet know; it borders a plasticine wig featuring a question mark. A nearby unit displays the word glow above a wig fitted with the image of a light bulb (fig.17). Perhaps the light bulb of the one represents the idea that would answer the question of the other.

But the question – ‘What is the no. 1 rule of hair beauty?’ – is already answered by each style of advertised wig.

Gallagher’s aesthetic fantasies, such as the light-bulb wig complete with its spread of linear rays, take inspiration from styles pictured in outdated issues of magazines like Ebony and Jet, designed to target a black readership within the middle class. Her whimsical hairpieces supersede the commercialised beauty associated with the advertised products.

‘I’m interested in signs not as static but as moving, as things that start with something that has already been discarded.’16 Centuries ago, standard English discarded ax in favour of ask. Works such as Pomp-Bang and eXelento resuscitate discarded black-oriented journalism, the culture of the (new) Negro from the period 1939 to 1970 – its outmoded wigs, hair straighteners and skin lighteners. ‘The word Negro’, Gallagher states, ‘brings to mind something that is impossible with the words African American or black.’17 A number of her works, such as Asthma (2006; no.##), use plasticine to isolate evocative words from the magazines, especially those referring to conditions and ailments that products marketed to the ‘Negro’ community were intended to remedy.

When I asked Gallagher about her admiration for Sun Ra’s music, poetry and science fiction (germinated in the era of the magazines), she referred me to several of his writings quoted above, including those with language in transposition, the ones that play phonetically on two, owt and whale-out. Gallagher shares with Sun Ra an interest not only in the poetic metathesis of verbal sounds but also in the romance of the Leviathan, the whale. Her sense of the latter derives less from Jonah’s lament and the Old Testament, more from Herman Melville and modern migration studies – accounts of the wanderings of whales and other creatures of the sea and of cases of human diaspora. Human life and marine life converge under the sea in the mythical realm of Drexciya, which Gallagher explored throughout the decade of the 2000s in a series of works titled Watery Ecstatic.

The population of Drexciya, a black Atlantis, comprises ‘water-breathing descendants of embryos whose mothers had been thrown or had thrown themselves overboard during the Middle Passage’.18 Despite originating in the horror of mass death at sea, the Drexciya myth promises survival in a new form of life, an evolution that requires the transposition of air and water, with water becoming the nurturing medium for humans. Analogously, Sun Ra had regarded life in Oakland as a living death, whereas transport to an extraterrestrial place promised a regenerative future. ‘It’s the passage itself,’ Gallagher states: ‘The concept of mutability [is] the origin myth that I’m referring to.’19 Here, by comparison – in poetic compression – is Sun Ra’s thought on origins, ends and their transposition: ‘The nothing and the air and the water and the fire are really the same.’20 A metathetic process, the mutability of elements and the exchange of their signs, holds more meaning for the likes of Gallagher and Sun Ra than do inelastic principles, whether rational or moral. The reality of life is evolving.

A late addition to Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic series (fig.18) consists of eight inkand-watercolour heads set near the base of a sheet of paper. The mouths are prominent, perhaps rendered large to suggest a capacity to breathe water. The hair of two central heads becomes a unified relief of collaged and incised fragments of paper; it evokes not only a compound wave of hair but also a single, flowing watery wave. The motif of heads associates this work with a more tenuously structured object from the previous year, Dirty O’s (figs.19–21, no.##).21 By its composition from bits of laminated paper and plasticine, its figural elements have been elevated from the surface – raised from both papery and watery obscurity. The tightly distributed O’s suggest a concentration of underwater air bubbles or even the effect of ‘marine snow’, a floating mass of innumerable tiny sea creatures. Such an image appears in Gallagher’s film animation Murmur: Blizzard of White (2003), in which the blizzard, a phenomenon of the atmosphere, is transposed into a watery realm.

The O’s of Dirty O’s collectively constitute a volume that might be marked out by

Fig.17 eXelento (detail) 2004 Plasticine, ink and paper on canvas xxxxx dimension??

The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica Fig.18 Watery Ecstatic (detail) 2007 Ink, watercolour, crushed mica and cut paper on paper 140 x 190 Private collection Figs.19–21 Dirty O’s 2006 Pencil, ink, watercolour, plasticine and cut paper on paper 60.6 x 80.6 x 5.2 Hauser & Wirth Collection, Switzerland Fig.22 Greasy 2011 Ink, oil, graphite and printed paper on canvas 202 x 188 Collection Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman NY Courtesy The FLAG Art Foundation

Fig.22

Fig.23 Fragment from O EO 2010 Ink, watercolour, graphite and cut paper on paper 205.5 x 163 Fig.24 Untitled 1998 Oil and graphite on paper 30.5 x 47 Joe and Marie Donnelly

Fig.24 Fig.18

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fish or any other marine organisms in suspension at different depths and distances from the position of the viewer. This effect results from the variation in the forward projection of the heads within their encompassing O’s. Dirty O’s maps a three-dimensional grid for Drexciya. During the time of the Watery Ecstatic series but in another context, Gallagher stated: ‘Distances between things tend to be more holographic than linear. Like something might be right on top of [something else], and be really far away or happened at another time.’22 These words evoke the complex character of each of the units of Dirty O’s. One unit consists of a frontal face in watercolour, as well as a profile view in photographic halftone, angling off to its side at a somewhat smaller scale; in addition, a plasticine eye lies below, at a larger scale (fig.20). A projecting ring of paper focuses the central face as if it were under a lens, drawing the face forward (Gallagher associates this paper construction with a bonnet).23 Each lost soul of Drexciya, each of the O’s, occupies multiple spaces, times and attitudes. Gallagher uses her manipulation of materials to imagine not merely escape from death in the sea but the possibility of a new form of being.24

Gallagher and whales: the artist has genetic links to the whaling communities of Cape Verde, island birthplace of her African grandfather, and New England, home of her IrishAmerican mother and African-American father. Although not her profession, oceanography has long been her avocation. She keeps abreast of research into the life cycle of whales, which she connects to her speculations on Drexciya, for the death of air-breathing whales brings about regeneration in water-breathing forms of life. With the collaboration of Edgar Cleijne, Gallagher developed Osedax (2011; no.##). The title identifies a species of sea worm, a ‘bone devourer’; it survives by scavenging whale fall (the carcass and skeletal remains of the mammal, fallen to the seabed). Gallagher and Cleijne’s three-dimensional installation presents a set of images relating to whales as a past source of fuel (blubber for humans) and a present source of nourishment (sustenance for worms and other marine creatures). To this whale cycle, Osedax associates undersea exploration for deposits of oil – a source of energy, which, like the osedax worm, will be located at a site of fallen organic matter. Geological mapping identifies deposits of oil, whereas living whales carry oceanographic maps in their memory, perhaps figured by the indecipherable scarring on the surface of the creature’s body, each whale becoming a living pictorial record of its encounters with rocks, icebergs and other whales.25 The man-made chart seems complete; the whale is merely a work in progress. Yet geological mapping is no more than a theory, a guess at where to find oil, subject to error. The whale’s map, as happenstance as it may be, is reality, an index of actual occurrences.

FLIP Elements of material reality disturb the expected order of the everyday, our prescription for living, a fiction written in advance of events, like a scar in advance of the cut. When the culture of the moment prescribes the order of life or of art, illusions become the reality.

Interruption, disturbance, happenstance, mere occurrence – these conditions are the more real reality. Some art promotes a culture; some art interrupts it. Gallagher’s art disturbs forgotten memories and lost moments, sometimes by the simplest of material means.

Gallagher features the characters e and o as graphic elements within her compositions.

She follows the occurrence of the two letters in fragments of printed text being used to form a paper-based construction. The letters, as a kind of material, are available in the present, but their original message seems bound to a past. Gallagher transmutes these linguistic fragments into an array of signs that have no fixed relation to the past or even the present. They remain close to the chance reality of life. Such signs of reality imitate reality in this respect: they have innumerable meanings, just as any moment in life does.

Moon-Glo (2010; no.##) and O EO (2010; no.##) contain e’s and o’s that articulate the textual surrounds of watercolour faces. Greasy (fig.22) displays a more extensive use

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of these ciphers as floating signifiers. Lost in a sea without orientation (a factor of the artist’s position looking down towards the floor), the debris of textual flotsam is analogous to bits of whale fall – or perhaps whale rise – ready to generate alternative forms of being. Gallagher uses white ink, heated to a glaze-like finish, to mask out unwanted letters and images. She keeps the ink moving as she passes across a printed surface, so the fluid edges, as they isolate a letter or other fragment, retain a tentative appearance – ‘vulnerable’ to subsequent forces and, in this regard, like the shaped plasticine wigs in Pomp-Bang, eXelento or DeLuxe (2004–5; no.##). The original text from the likes of Ebony or Jet – whether news report, editorial comment or advertising copy – constitutes a culturally specific fiction within a lost reality. Such an illusion becomes the material base of Gallagher’s sensory play. To her selection of e’s and o’s, she adds preserved bits of illustration and suggestive phrasing; O EO includes a slice of a 1960 Chevrolet and an onomatopoetic CRRRSPTTT. For an exhibition catalogue that presents both Greasy and O EO, Gallagher published actual-scale details on paper with a glossiness mimicking the reflectivity of the ink (fig.23).26 The details do not belong to the completed works. Gallagher cut them out of her process rather than laying them in. These full-scale out-takes, as illustrations, are more real (less illusory) than the matt reductions of the ‘real’ works of art. Whale-in, whale-out: in a metathetic flip, the catalogue allows whale fall, the pictorial detritus, to display more reproductive realism than the living whale, the construction that is Greasy or O EO. Why e’s and o’s? Graphically they vaguely resemble the minstrel mouths and eyes that Gallagher featured in many early works, such as Oh! Susanna (1993; no.##). She offers instead a linguistic association: the two vowels are those of Negro. Vowels ‘travel’, she says. They connect consonants and transfer meaning just as readily as the consonants themselves, not only across a given word but also across time, as they reappear in variant configurations. ‘They can be released from their previous context while still remembering the past form [the spacing] they held.’27 This is the sense in which not only vowels travel but the meaning of one’s words: ‘I often say something and then say something next to it and that is what it means – both of those things.’28 Gallagher’s ‘next to’ refers to both temporal and spatial proximity, both succession in time and a synchronicity, yet displacement, in space.29 These relationships are elastic, like certain plastics: one’s words, the very letters, are like matter with a memory – they change, they deform, yet they retain the moment.

Having read an article about Bill Pickett and other black rodeo cowboys, Gallagher realised that rodeo, like Negro, uses the same two vowels – a change that is a case of ‘next to’. Negro evokes rodeo; rodeo evokes Negro. The vowels say it. Hence, Gallagher’s title O EO, with a space before the initial letter to mark the missing R and a space after for the missing D. ‘I thought leaving only the vowels set the rodeo in space’, Gallagher comments. This is true: the vowels seem unanchored, lost in space, like the embryos of Drexciya – mouths and eyes, e’s and o’s – lost in the vast space of the sea. The black rodeo is lost in historical space, and the word itself is lost when its vowels are released from their function as vocalising ligatures. The spacing of O EO and its rodeo leads Gallagher to cultural eccentrics who might fit the colloquialism ‘space cowboy’: perhaps Sun Ra and his cult film Space Is the Place, perhaps the vocalist of ‘Lost in Space’, Kool Keith – ‘he is certainly a space cowboy in his plastic yellow Elvis wig’.30 The entire culture – black, yellow, white – is plastic-elastic. The signs preserve our cultural memory while changing it.31 Gallagher, too, is elastic. She stretches her art from plasticine wigs to whales to worms to rodeo to the space cowboy. Wigs – self-fashioning, self-improving – are designed to stretch over the head: ‘Stretches to fit anyone’ is the inscription on one of Gallagher’s photo-transferred images.32 She sees the humour in this one-cultural-form-fitsall, as much as the pathos. As for space cowboys, they stretch their minds while stretching ours.

NOTES

Whale-in, whale-out. Melville’s white whale, living ‘in this world without being of it’.33 Whale fall. Air into water and water into air. Black wigs, yellow wigs. As cultural signs pass from one application to a ‘next to’ application, the ironies deepen. Gallagher encourages ironic transposition by combining incompatibles. ‘Often when I use this flipped-wig form it’s referred to as Caucasian’, she remarked in 2002, recalling an untitled drawing of 1998 in which she introduced a light-toned figure with minstrel features and a blonde flip (fig.24, no.##). ‘It’s this one-to-one reading of the signs, I always think it is so funny, as if they couldn’t mutate or shift. As soon as you put that flip on something, it’s all of a sudden about “Whiteness” … It’s too late in history for blonde hair to … be only about whiteness.’34 Black, yellow, white: signs do preserve us – and travel with us, as Gallagher notes of her e’s and o’s, her colours and flips. They travel, they arrive, without definitively leaving.

PENETRATION Mindful of such preservation-in-change, Gallagher provides an offhand definition of her practice in its entirety: ‘penetrating one realm into another.’35 ‘Penetration’ is apt. Her acceptance of cultural interchange lends meaning to her frequent resort to techniques of inlaying, as she sets one form into an excised section of another. She could take a much easier route, merely layering one material atop the other. The plasticine falls and flips of Pomp-Bang and eXelento, although rising above the surface of print, are penetrating inserts, like the bird among the sea worms in Untitled (2012), a case of air-life into water, water-life into air. What happens with language – Gallagher’s e’s and o’s, Sun Ra’s owt and two – can happen with materials: transposition, mutual penetration, exchange.

A culture rests within its signs but remains restless. Gallagher is a cultural agent.

Her sensory, conceptual play energises the material signs, extending their meaning, which is their life. The group of images in the series Morphia (2008–12; nos.##) – a title that connotes dreamlike transformation – can be seen from either side of these paper constructions; the images do not merely reverse but change in character. ‘Meaning is generated by the elasticity.’36 The elastic visual forms that Gallagher manipulates point towards ‘pure Cosmic Wisdom’, as do Sun Ra’s plays on phonetics.37 Like a verbal language, the material signs in Gallagher’s hands are flexible enough to preserve a living past while preserving every viewer in his or her present. We become the multivalent signs, at once visual and verbal – little e’s, little o’s – cultural ciphers about to penetrate an uncertain future.

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1 Kyra Kilston and Quinn Latimer, ‘Ellen Gallagher: Creating the World she Longs for’, Modern Painters, vol.21, no.2, March 2009, p.12. Through conversations in person and by email during autumn 2012, Ellen Gallagher generously shared many aspects of her thought and technical practice.

This essay is deeply indebted to her contributions, as well as to information from Edgar Cleijne.

For aid in research, I am grateful to Hauser & Wirth (London), Gagosian Gallery (New York) and Jason A. Goldstein (Austin).

2 Sun Ra, ‘The Wisdom of Ra’, in John Corbett, The Wisdom of Sun-Ra: Sun Ra’s Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets, Chicago 2006, p.123 (italics added). Corbett dates this and other broadsheet typescripts to the early to mid-1950s. Sun Ra’s neologism tuo evokes its potential doubling, the double-u or w that would convert tuo to two. Adding u to tuo produces two; subtracting u from tuo produces to. I thank Ellen Gallagher for discussing the work of Sun Ra as well as that of a number of other poets and musicians who have stimulated her thinking.

3 Sun Ra invoked ‘the elasticity of words’ in his poem ‘Words and the Impossible’, quoted in John F. Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, New York 1998, p.302.

4 The Old English ‘acsian, axian, survived in ax, down to nearly 1600 the regular literary form, and still used everywhere in middle and southern dialects, though supplanted in standard English by ask, originally the northern form’; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ask.

5 Gallagher has referred to the history of a ‘strange mulatto fantasy … To get white people to identify with the African body, it had to be yellow or something. It had to be like them’: Ellen Gallagher, interview with Peter Halley (1997), Index Magazine, at www.indexmagazine.com/ interviews/ellen_gallagher (accessed 12 October 2012). Gallagher also alludes to the inversion of blackness in whiteness or blondeness; see Jeff Fleming, ‘Ellen Gallagher: Preserve’, in Jeff Fleming (ed.), Ellen Gallagher: Preserve, exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center 2001, p.7.

6 Gallagher is sensitive to this type of wordplay. She comments on the poem Oregon by Bob Kaufman, which contains the phrasing, ‘I am Negro. I am Oregon’: ‘While there may or may not be any Negroes in Oregon, the word Negro does sit very well inside the word Oregon.

Both spoken and written’; Gallagher, email to the author, 31 October 2012. See also below, concerning Negro and rodeo.

7 Kilston and Latimer 2009, p.12.

8 Sun Ra, ‘To the Peoples of Earth’, in LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (eds.), Black Fire: An Anthology of AfroAmerican Writing, New York 1968,

p.217. Sun Ra wrote this sentence in verse as a quatrain. It is included in the unpublished manuscript, Sun Ra, The Magic Lie: Outer Universe Equations (1966), reproduced in John Corbett, Anthony Elms and Terri Kapsalis, Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun-Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-68, Chicago 2006, p.115.

9 Gallagher, email to the author, 28 November 2012.

10 Sun Ra, ‘Let There Be Light!’, in Corbett 2006, p.84. On the dating of this text, see note 2.

11 Sun Ra, ‘Your Only Hope Now Is a Lie’, Hambone, vol.2, Autumn 1982, p.106; quoted in Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton, Durham, NC, 1999, p.41.

12 Sun Ra, Space Is the Place, produced by Jim Newman, directed

by John Coney, filmed 1972, released 1974; videocassette, Rhapsody Films, 1993. Lock (1999, p.69) suggests that the title Space Is the Place might refer to Martin Delany’s nineteenth-century account of seeking a black homeland in Africa, Search for a Place (1860). In this transposition of places, Delany is to Africa as Sun Ra is to Outer Space. Gallagher’s Abu Simbel (2005) acknowledges Sun Ra’s belief in the Egyptian origin of the black race as well as his film’s image of a sci-fi spacecraft.

13 Ellen Gallagher, ‘Interview’ (by Jessica Morgan), in Jessica Morgan (ed.), Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 2001, p.22.

14 Gallagher, email to the author, 27 November 2012.

15 Gallagher, email to the author, 28 November 2012.

16 Suzanne P. Hudson, ‘1000 Words: Ellen Gallagher Talks about Pomp-Bang, 2003’, Artforum, vol.43, April 2004, p.131.

17 Ellen Gallagher, ‘In Conversation: Ellen Gallagher’, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2005, at www.brooklynrail. org/2005/03/art/ellen-gallagher (accessed 12 October 2012).

18 Greg Tate, ‘Are You Free or Are You a Mystery?’, in Ellen Gallagher: Coral Cities, exh. cat., Tate Liverpool 2007, pp.18-19.

On Drexciya, see also Philippe Vergne, ‘The Memory of Water’, in Heart of Darkness: Kai Althoff, Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne, Thomas Hirschhorn, exh. cat., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 2006, pp.82–98.

19 Ellen Gallagher, Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 3 (2005), PBS, at www.pbs.org/art21 (accessed 12 October 2012).

20 Sun Ra, ‘Nothing Is’, in Jones and Neal 1968, p.216. For the manuscript source, see note 8.

21 Concerning the title, the quality of the rendering is ‘dirty, as in grimy, gritty’; Gallagher, email to the author, 1 December 2012.

22 Ellen Gallagher, ‘Women and

Girls Are Wanted to Train at Home for Practical Nurse Career’ (in conversation with Octavia Butler, 2002), ‘The Preserver’, Preserve, Drawing Papers 27, Drawing Center, New York 2002, broadsheet, verso.

23 Gallagher, email to the author, 13 November 2012.

24 The possibility of a new being: here I paraphrase Gallagher, email to the author, 27 November 2012.

25 Gallagher and Cleijne’s Osedax alludes to Melville’s description of types of whale marking; see Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale (1851), New York 2001, pp.333–4.

26 See Amna Malik, Greasy: Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York 2011.

27 Gallagher, email to the author, 31 October 2012.

28 Ellen Gallagher, quoted in Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, ‘This Theatre Where You Are Not There: A Conversation with Ellen Gallagher’, in Claire Doherty (ed.), Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 1998, p.18. Gallagher associates her aesthetic practice with this kind of repetition, as well as the writings of Gertrude Stein and the blackface minstrelsy of Bert Williams; see her account in Goodeve 1998, p.22.

29 Gallagher refers to the temporal factor as ‘sequential’ and the spatial factor as ‘parallel’: email to the author, 10 December 2012.

30 Gallagher, email to the author, 29 October 2012. Kool Keith’s plastic Elvis wig is actually black, not yellow. Gallagher appears to have transposed black and yellow in memory, or perhaps displaced the colour of the wig with the colour of the performer’s clothing. This may be a case in which memory converts an observation to a more meaningful variant.

31 For some of Gallagher’s thinking along these lines, see Robin D.G. Kelley, ‘Fugitives from a Chain Store’, in Jeff Fleming (ed.), Ellen Gallagher: Preserve, exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center 2001, pp.11–20.

32 Illustration embedded in Gallagher, ‘Women and Girls Are Wanted to Train at Home for Practical Nurse Career’ (in conversation with Octavia Butler, 2002), recto.

33 Melville 2001, p.334.

34 Gallagher, ‘Women and Girls Are Wanted to Train at Home for Practical Nurse Career’ (in conversation with Octavia Butler, 2002), verso. Along with graphic markers for mouths, eyes, e’s and o’s, Gallagher commonly uses a shorthand version of a wig flip as a compositional element.

35 Gallagher, email to the author, 27 November 2012.

36 See the first epigraph.

37 See note 8.

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

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Fig.31 Fig.32

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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

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‘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.

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LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION (ALLOW AT LEAST 4 PAGES)

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION (ALLOW AT LEAST 4 PAGES)

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LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION (ALLOW AT LEAST 4 PAGES)

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION (ALLOW AT LEAST 4 PAGES)

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EXHIBITION HISTORY ELLEN GALLAGHER EXHIBITIONS ACCOMPANIED BY A CATALOGUE ARE MARKED WITH AN * Born in Providence, RI 1965 Lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and New York, NY 1993 Skowhegan School of Art, Maine, ME 1992 School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA 1989 Studio 70, Fort Thomas, KY 1986–7 Sea Education Association (SEA),

Woods Hole, MA 1982–4 Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2013 Ellen Gallagher: AxME, Tate Modern, London* 2011 Ellen Gallagher, Gagosian Gallery, New York Ellen Gallagher: Greasy, Gagosian Gallery, New York* 2009 An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity: Everybody’s Got a Little Light Under the Door, South London Gallery, London 2007 Ellen Gallagher: Coral Cities, Tate Liverpool; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane* 2006 Salt Eaters, Hauser & Wirth, London DeLuxe, Hauser & Wirth, Zurich 2005 Ellen Gallagher: Ichthyosaurus, The Freud Museum, London Ellen Gallagher: Murmur and DeLuxe, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami Ellen Gallagher: DeLuxe, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2004 Ellen Gallagher Orbus, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh* Ellen Gallagher: eXelento, Gagosian Gallery, New York* Ellen Gallagher, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck Ellen Gallagher: Preserve/Murmur, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle 2003 Murmur: Drawings from the Series ‘Watery Ecstatic’, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin Currents 88: Ellen Gallagher: Pomp-Bang, St Louis Art Museum* 2001 Preserve, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,

San Francisco; Des Moines Art Center; The Drawing Centre, New York* Watery Ecstatic, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney* Ellen Gallagher: Blubber, Gagosian Gallery, New York* 2000 Ellen Gallagher, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London* 1999 Ellen Gallagher, Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston* Ellen Gallagher, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin* 1998 Ellen Gallagher, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham* Ellen Gallagher: New Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, New York* 1996 New Paintings, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London* Ellen Gallagher, Mary Boone Gallery, New York 1994 Ellen Gallagher, Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston* GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2013 Archetypes and Historicity: Painting and Other Radical Forms 1995–2007, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia* 2012 Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Seattle Art Museum The Master Printer and the Collaborative Process: Conversations from the Print Studio IPCNY International Print Center, New York Manifesto Collage, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin* La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris* Print / Out, The Museum of Modern Art, New York* Printin’, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Six Yards: Guaranteed Dutch Design, Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem* Medals of Dishonour, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg* 2011 WUNDER, Deichtorhallen Hamburg* After Hours: Murals on the Bowery, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation with 21 Contemporary Artists, Bronx Museum, New York* 2010 On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century, The Museum of Modern Art, New York* Ab / Fig, William Shearburn Gallery, St Louis Take Me To Your Leader! The Great Escape Into Space, National Museum of Art,

Architecture and Design, Oslo* Brune / Blonde: Une exposition Arts et Cinéma, La Cinémathèque française, Paris* Huckleberry Finn, CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts, San Francisco* Contemporary Art from the Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Underwater, Towner, Eastbourne; Spacex, Exeter; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; The Bluecoat, Liverpool; Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle* Les Mutantes / I Mutanti, Villa Medici, Rome* Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York* Disquieted: Contemporary Voices from out of the Shadows, Portland Art Museum* Afro Modern: Journey through the Black Atlantic, Tate Liverpool; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela* Collecting Biennials, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Foundation, New York 2007 Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Collection Highlights, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Contemporary Art from the Harvard University Art Museums, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA Paper Trail: A Decade of Acquisitions, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Very Abstract and Hyper Figurative, Thomas Dane Gallery, London Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making, The Museum of Modern Art, New York* 2006 Alien Nation, Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Manchester City Art Gallery; Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich* Naturalia, Unosunove Arte Contemporanea, Rome* Heart of Darkness, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis* The Secret Theory of Drawing, The Drawing Room, London; Model Arts and Nailand Gallery, Sligo* Limits, Andrew Mummery Gallery, London Black Alphabet – ConTEXTS of Contemporary African-American Art, Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, Warsaw* Infinite Painting: Contemporary Painting and Global Realism, Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art, Codroipo* Contemporary Masterworks: St. Louis Collects, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis Black Panther Rank and File, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Having New Eyes, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado See into Liquid, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver Skin is a Language, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Selections from the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies – Columbia University, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

2009 Topographies, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York A Few Frames: Photography and the Contact Sheet, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Connect the Dots…The Warhol Legacy: Tom Friedman, Ellen Gallagher, Vik Muniz, Rob Pruitt, University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Moby-Dick, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco* Exposed! – Revealing Sources in Contemporary Art, Delaware Art Museum Constellations: Paintings from the MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Medals of Dishonour, British Museum, London* The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women, Cheim & Read, New York Elles@centrepompidou: artistes femmes dans les collections du Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris* Vija Celmins, Damien Hirst, Ellen Gallagher, Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, Francesca Woodman, Artist Rooms, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh Paper: Pressed, Stained, Slashed, Folded, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Der Schmerz sitzt tief/The pain runs deep, Stiftung Opelvillen, Rüsselsheim 2008 For what you are about to receive, Gagosian Gallery / Red October Chocolate Factory, Moscow* Carte Blanche III: Gedichte der Fakten, Arbeiten aus der Sammlung Arend und Brigitte Oetker, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig* Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age, Moderna Museet, Stockholm* Paper Trail II: Passing Through Clouds, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham Attention to Detail, The FLAG Art

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2005 The Fluidity of Time: Selections from the MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Looking at Words, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists, Vancouver Art Gallery Figures of Thinking: Convergences in Contemporary Cultures, Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle; McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown State University; Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond* Ovitz Family Collection and Broad Art Foundation Loans, Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston* Works on Paper, Galerie Max Hetzler,

Berlin* Works on Paper, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles 2004 Keys to the Koop: Humor and Satire in Contemporary Printmaking, Boise Art Museum, Idaho; Art Gym, Marylhurst University; Mills College Art Museum; Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University; Schneider Museum of Art, Southern Oregon University; Western Gallery, Western Washington University* Artist’s Choice: Mona Hatoum, Here is Elsewhere, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Non Toccare la Donna Bianca, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque, SITE Santa Fe’s Fifth International Biennial* Animals, Haunch of Venison, London Fabulism, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha* The Game Show, James Cohan Gallery, New York 2003 Black Belt, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York* Copy it, Steal it, Share it, Borusan Center for Culture and Arts, Istanbul Stranger in the Village, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Delays and Revolutions, Italian Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice* …an der Wand, Barbara Gross Galerie, Munich

Drawings, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham* 1999 The Nature of Order, James Cohan Gallery, New York Negotiating Small Truths, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin* (Corps) Social, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris* Collectors Collect Contemporary: 1990–1999, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston* 1998 Postcards from Black America, De Beyerd Center for Contemporary Art, Breda; MuHKA, Antwerp; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem Cinco continentes y uno ciudad, Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico City* More Pieces for the Puzzle: Recent Additions to the Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1997 T-Race, Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago Project Painting, Basilico Fine Arts and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York Projects, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin* The Body of Painting, Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston

2002 Painting in Boston: 1950–2000, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA* Cartoon Noir: Four Contemporary Investigations, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin* Accrochage II: Paintings, Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York

1996 Art at the End of the 20th Century: Selections from the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery, Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Castello di Rivoli, Turin* Inside the Visible, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth*

2001 The Americans: New Art, Barbican Centre, London* The Mystery of Painting, Sammlung Goetz, Munich* From Rembrandt to Rauschenberg: Building the Collection, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin*

1995 Degrees of Abstraction: From Morris Louis to Mapplethorpe, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Altered States: American Art in the 90s, Forum for Contemporary Art, St Louis* Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York*

2000 American Artists, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA New Acquisitions, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York American Academy Invitational Exhibition of Painting & Sculpture, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York KIN, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin Making Sense: Ellen Gallagher, Christian Marclay, Liliana Porter, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore* Greater New York: New Art in New York Now, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New York* Visual Memoirs: Selected Paintings and

1994 In Context, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston* Airborne / Earthbound, Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston 1993 Traveling Scholars’ Exhibit, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Artists Select, Artists Space, New York African American Perspectives, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham*

AWARDS AND GRANTS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

2001 Medal of Honor, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2000 American Academy Award in Art 1997 Joan Mitchell Fellowship 1996 MacDowell Colony 1995 Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship 1993 Traveling Scholars Award, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Ann Gund Scholarship, Skowhegan School of Art, Maine

SOLO EXHIBITION CATALOGUES Amna Malik, Greasy: Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York 2011.

Amna Malik, On the Transient and the Ephemeral, exh. brochure, South London Gallery 2009.

Karen Alexander and Greg Tate, Ellen Gallagher: Coral Cities, exh. cat., Tate Liverpool 2007.

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Murmur: Orbus, exh. cat., The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 2005.

Ellen Gallagher, eXelento, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York 2004.

Robin Clark, Currents 88: Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., St Louis Art Museum 2003.

Catherine de Zegher, Jeff Fleming, Robin D.G. Kelley and Susan Lubowsky Talbott, Ellen Gallagher: Preserve, ed. Jeff Fleming, exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center 2001.

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London 2001.

Lisa Kim (ed.), Ellen Gallagher: Blubber, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York 2001.

Jessica Morgan (ed.), Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 2001.

Ellen Gallagher: Pickling, exh. cat., Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin 1999.

Claire Doherty and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Ellen Gallagher, ed. Claire Doherty, exh. cat., Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 1998.

Greg Tate and Ellen Gallagher, Ellen Gallagher: New Paintings, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York 1998.

Ellen Gallagher, The Astonishing Nose, exh. cat., Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London 1996.

Mario Diacono, Ellen Gallagher, exh. cat., Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston 1994.

GROUP EXHIBITION CATALOGUES AND BOOKS Isolde Brielmaier, Franklin Sirmans, Xaviera Simmons and Emma Amos, Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation with 21 Contemporary Artists, exh. cat., Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York 2012.

Christophe Cherix, Kim Conaty, Sarah Suzuki, Print/Out: 20 Years in Print, ed.

Christophe Cherix, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2012.

Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (eds.), Women Artists at the Millennium, Cambridge, MA 2006.

Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society, London 2012.

Francesco Bonami and Sarah Cosulich Canarutto (eds.), Infinite Painting: Contemporary Painting and Global Realism, exh. cat., Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art, Codroipo 2006.

Daniel Tyradellis, Beate Hentschel and Dirk Luckow, Wunder, exh. cat., Deichtorhallen Hamburg 2011.

Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter (eds.), Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, exh. cat., Tate Liverpool 2010.

Francesco Bonami and Gary CarrionMurayari (eds.), Whitney Biennial 2010, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2010.

Cornelia H. Butler and Catherine de Zegher, On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2010.

Kirsty Bell, Works on Paper, exh. cat., Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin 2005.

Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible: Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of and from the Feminine, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 1996.

Barry Schwabsky, Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, London 2005.

Mark Welzel (ed.), 200 Artworks 25 Years Artists’ Editions for Parkett, Zurich 2009.

Klaus Kertess, Fabulism: Carroll Dunham, Ellen Gallagher, Chris Ofili, Neo Rauch, Matthew Ritchie, exh. cat., Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha 2004.

Magnus af Petersens, (ed.), Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age, exh. cat., Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2008.

Robert Storr, Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque, exh. cat., Fifth International SITE Santa Fe Biennial, 2004.

Brigitte Oetker (ed.), Gedichte der Fakten: aus der Sammlung von Arend und Brigitte Oetker, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig 2008.

Francesco Bonami and Maria Luisa Frisa (eds.), Venice Biennale Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, exh. cat., La Biennale di Venezia, Venice 2003.

Charles Darwent, Kate MacFarlane and Katharine Stout, The Drawing Book: A Survey of Drawing – The Primary Means of Expression, ed. Tania Kovats, London 2007.

Roxana Marcoci, Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2007.

Jessica Morgan (ed.), Collectors Collect Contemporary: 1990–1999, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 1999.

Valerie C. Oliver (ed.), Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970, exh. cat., Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston 2005.

Jens Hoffmann and Alexander Nemerov, Moby-Dick, exh. cat., CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco 2009.

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, The Secret Theory of Drawing: David Austen, Trisha Donnelly, Olafur Eliasson, Ceal Floyer, Ellen Gallagher et al., exh. cat., The Drawing Room, Tannery Arts, London 2007.

Philippe Vergne (ed.), Heart of Darkness: Kai Althoff, Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne, Thomas Hirschhorn, exh. cat., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 2006.

Uta Grosenick and Burkhard Riemschneider, Art Now: 81 Artists at the Rise of the New Millennium, Cologne 2005.

Philip Attwood and Felicity Powell, Medals of Dishonour, exh. cat., British Museum, London 2009.

Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott, After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art, Munich 2007.

Carl Belz, Visual Memoirs: Selected Paintings and Drawings, exh. cat., The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham 1999.

Emma Dexter, Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing, London 2005.

Anne Marquez and Alain Bergala, Brune/ Blonde: La chevelure féminine dans l’art et le cinéma, exh. cat., La Cinémathèque française, Paris 2010.

Christine Y. Kim, Vijay Prashad, Latasha Natasha and Nevada Diggs, Black Belt, exh. cat., The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York 2003.

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Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (eds.), To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, New York 2000.

John Gill, Jens Hoffmann and Gilane Tawadros (eds.), Alien Nation, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 2006.

Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, New York 2005.

Cornelia H. Butler, Griselda Pollock and Alexandra Schwartz (eds.), Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York 2010.

Jessie Otto Hite, Rembrandt to Rauschenberg: Building the Collection, exh. cat., Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin 2001.

Robin D.G. Kelley (ed.), Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Boston 2002.

Ingvild Goetz and Rainald Schumacher (eds.), The Mystery of Painting: Ellen Gallagher, Toba Khedoori, Karen Kilimnik, Udomsak Krisanamis, Sarah Morris, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Lari Pittman, Neo Rauch, Matthew Ritchie, exh. cat., Sammlung Goetz, Munich 2001.

Tsuya Chinn et al., African American Perspectives: The Lois Foster Exhibition of Boston Area Artists, exh. cat., The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham 1993.

Nicky Bird, ‘Ellen Gallagher: Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh’, Art Monthly, no.283, Feb. 2005, pp.24–5.

Michelle Cliff, ‘Oblique Brilliance’, Parkett, no.73, 2005, pp.18–23.

Holland Cotter, ‘Art in Review: Ellen Gallagher’, The New York Times, 1 April 2005.

Charlotte Edwards, ‘Hidden Depths’, Art Review, Dec. 2005, p.23.

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, ‘The History Lesson: Flesh is a Texture as Much as a Color’, Parkett, no.73, 2005, pp.39–53.

Edward Lewine, ‘60 Ways of Looking at a Black Woman’, The New York Times, 23 Jan. 2005.

Colin Martin, ‘Ichthyosaurus: An Installation

by Ellen Gallagher’, Nature, no.436, Aug. 2005.

Ben Okri, ‘The Racial Colorist’, Parkett, no.73, 2005, pp.32–3.

Jerry Saltz, ‘Ellen Gallagher at Gagosian Gallery’, The Village Voice, Jan. 2005.

ARTICLES Faye Hirsch, ‘MoMA’s Excellent Print Show Celebrates Circulation’, Art in America, 5 March 2012.

Ken Johnson, ‘Gauging the Power of the Print’, The New York Times, 16 Feb. 2012.

Suzanne P. Hudson, ‘Ellen Gallagher at Gagosian Gallery’, Artforum, vol.49, April 2011.

Murtaza Vali, ‘Ellen Gallagher: Greasy’, Art Review, no.49, April 2011, p.117.

Kate Forde, ‘Ellen Gallagher’, Frieze, no.124, June 2009, p.189.

Lyra Kilston and Quinn Latimer ‘Ellen Gallagher: Creating the World she Longs for’, Modern Painters, vol.21, no.2, March 2009, p.12.

Roberta Smith, ‘Visions That Flaunt Cartoon Pedigrees’, The New York Times, 2 March 2007.

Ines Gebetsroither, ‘Moves, Cracks, Hair: David Hammons, Ellen Gallagher, Kori Newkirk’, Spike, Summer 2006, no.8, pp.61–8.

Amna Malik, ‘Patterning Memory’, Wasafiri, vol.21, no.3, Nov. 2006, pp.29–39.

Cherry Smyth, ‘Ellen Gallagher: Salt Eaters’, Circa, no.112, Autumn 2006, pp.90–1.

Eliza Williams, ‘Ellen Gallagher’, Contemporary, no.76, Summer 2006, pp.

26–9.

Mark Stevens, ‘In Black and White’, New York Magazine, 21 Feb. 2005.

Suzanne P. Hudson, ‘1000 Words: Ellen Gallagher Talks about Pomp-Bang, 2003’, Artforum, vol.42, April 2004, pp.128–31.

Jeffrey Hughes, ‘Reviews: Midwest’, Art Papers, vol.27, no.4, July 2003, p.45.

James Rondeau, ‘50th Venice Biennale’, Frieze, no.77, Sept. 2003, pp.96–7.

Thomas Wulffen, ‘Delays and Revolutions’, Kunstforum International, no.166, Aug.– Oct. 2003, pp.62–89.

Jan Avgikos, ‘Ellen Gallagher at Drawing Center’, Artforum, Summer 2002, p.173.

Reinhard Ermen, ‘The Mystery of Painting’, Kunstforum International, no.158, Jan. 2002.

Alex Farquharson, ‘The Americans: New Art’, Artforum, vol.40, no.7, March 2002, p.136.

Ellen Gallagher and Hubert H. Harrison, ‘The Preserver’, Preserve, Drawing Papers 27, Drawing Center, New York 2002.

Ken Johnson, ‘Art in Review: Ellen Gallagher: Preserve’, The New York Times, 29 March 2002.

Holland Cotter, ‘Art in Review: Ellen Gallagher: Blubber’, The New York Times, 13 April 2001.

Frances Richard, ‘Ellen Gallagher at

Gagosian Gallery’, Artforum, Summer 2001, pp.182–3.

Calvin Reid, ‘How We Got To Now’, The International Review of African American Art, vol.16, no.4, 2000, pp.16–31.

Stuart Shave, ‘Ellen Gallagher’, i-D Magazine, no.197, May 2000, p.166.

Dominic Eichler, ‘Ellen Gallagher / Galerie Max Hetzler’, Frieze, no.47, June–Aug. 1999, pp.96–7.

Harald Fricke, ‘Jeder Mund ist eine kleine Bohne’, Die Tageszeitung, 19 March 1999.

Germaine Gomez Haro, ‘Five Continents and a City’, Art Nexus, no.33, Aug.–Oct. 1999, pp.123–6.

Matthew Debord, ‘Back Against The Wall’, Nka Magazine: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no.3, Autumn/Winter 1995, pp.64–70.

Okwui Enwezor, in Nka Magazine: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no.3, Autumn/Winter 1995.

Ann Wilson Lloyd, ‘Ellen Gallagher at Mario Diacono’, Art in America, vol.83, April 1995, p.114.

Roberta Smith, ‘Artists Select: Part I’, The New York Times, Jan. 1994, p.23.

Nancy Stapen, ‘Milena Dopitova at the ICA’, Flash Art, no.177, Summer 1994, p.37.

ONLINE ARTICLES Peter Herbstreuth, ‘Die Erinnerung anrufen, um ihr die Macht zu nehmen’, Tagespiegel, 13 March 1999.

Jerry Saltz, ‘Finders and Keepers’, The Village Voice, 25 May 1999, p.131.

Ron Hunt, ‘Ellen Gallagher’, Modern Painters, vol.11, no.4, Dec. 1998, p.98.

Sarah Schmerler, ‘Ellen Gallagher’, Artnews, vol.97, no.7, Summer 1998, p.159.

Franklin Sirmans, ‘Spotlight: Ellen Gallagher’, Flash Art, vol.31, no.201, Summer 1998, p.136.

Roberta Smith, ‘Ellen Gallagher’, The New York Times, 20 March 1998.

Graham Coulter-Smith, ‘Ellen Gallagher: DeLuxe’, June 2007. http://artinteligence. wordpress.com/2007/06/06/ellengallagher-deluxe/ Hollie Kearns, ‘Ellen Gallagher: Coral Cities, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane’, Circa, 2007. http://www.recirca.com/cgi-bin/ mysql/show_item.cgi?post_id=1810 ‘Ellen Gallagher Interview: eXelento and DeLuxe’, Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 3, 2005. http://www.pbs.org/art21/ artists/gallagher/clip1.html ‘In Conversation: Ellen Gallagher’, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2005. www. brooklynrail.org/2005/03/art/ellen-gallagher

Martin Coomer, ‘Ellen Gallagher’, Flash Art, Milan, no.192, Jan./Feb. 1997, p.100.

Eric de Chassey, ‘Painting is Alive: 10 Artists under 40 Years of Age’, L’Oeil, no.489, Oct. 1997, pp.52–61.

David Bourdon, ‘Ellen Gallagher at Mary Boone’, Art in America, no.84, April 1996, p.111.

Andrew Decker, ‘Conjuring Consensus’, Artnews (special issue), 1996, pp.58–9.

Okwui Enwezor, ‘Ellen Gallagher’, Frieze, no.28, May 1996.

Michael Kimmelman, ‘Art in Review’, The New York Times, Jan. 1996.

Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Color Line’, The Village Voice, Jan. 1996, p.81.

Mark Van de Walle, ‘Openings: Ellen Gallagher’, Artforum, no.34, Feb. 1996, p.76.

Judith Wilson, ‘Sniffing Elephant Bones: The Poetics of Race in the Art of Ellen Gallagher’, Callaloo: A Journal of AfroAmerican and African Arts and Letters, vol.19, no.2, 1996, pp.337–9.

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SUPPORTING TATE

art of outstanding importance. In this case the amount of tax is reduced, and it can be Tate relies on a large number of supporters made a condition of the offer that the work – individuals, foundations, companies and of art is allocated to Tate. Please contact public sector sources – to enable it to us for details. deliver its programme of activities, both on Tate Members and off its gallery sites. This support is Tate Members enjoy unlimited free essential in order for Tate to acquire works admission throughout the year to all of art for the Collection, run education, exhibitions at Tate, as well as a number of outreach and exhibition programmes, care other benefits such as exclusive use of our for the Collection in storage and enable art Members’ Rooms and a free annual to be displayed, both digitally and subscription to Tate Etc. Whilst enjoying the physically, inside and outside Tate. Your exclusive privileges of membership, you are donation will make a real difference and also helping secure Tate’s position at the enable others to enjoy Tate and its very heart of British and modern art. Your Collection both now and in the future. support actively contributes to new There are a variety of ways in which you purchases of important art, ensuring that can help support Tate and also benefit as a the Tate’s Collection continues to be UK or US taxpayer. Please contact us at: relevant and comprehensive, as well as funding projects in London, Liverpool and Development Office St Ives that increase access and

understanding for everyone.

Tate Tate Patrons

Tate Patrons share a strong enthusiasm for Millbank art and are committed to giving significant financial support to Tate on an annual London SWIP 4RG basis. The Patrons support the acquisition of works across Tate’s broad collecting remit, as well as other areas of Tate activity Tel: 020 7887 4900 such as conservation, education and research. The scheme provides a forum for Fax: 020 7887 8098 Patrons to share their interest in art and to exchange knowledge and information in an enjoyable environment. United States American Patrons of Tate taxpayers who wish to receive full tax 520 West 27 Street Unit 404 exempt status from the IRS under Section New York, NY 10001 501(c)(3) are able to support the Patrons USA through the American Patrons of Tate. For more information on the scheme please Tel: 001 212 643 2818 contact the Patrons office.

Fax: 001 212 643 1001 Corporate Membership Donations, of whatever size, are gratefully Corporate Membership at Tate Modern, received, either to support particular areas Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool offers of interest, or to contribute to general companies opportunities for corporate activity costs. entertaining and the chance for a wide Gifts of Shares variety of employee benefits. These include We can accept gifts of quoted share and special private views, special access to securities. All gifts of shares to Tate are paying exhibitions, out-of-hours visits and exempt from capital gains tax, and higher tours, invitations to VIP events and talks at rate taxpayers enjoy additional tax members’ offices. efficiencies. For further information please Corporate Investment contact the Development Office.

Tate has developed a range of imaginative Gift Aid partnerships with the corporate sector, Through Gift Aid you can increase the value ranging from international interpretation of your donation to Tate as we are able to and exhibition programmes to local reclaim the tax on your gift. Gift Aid applies outreach and staff development to gifts of any size, whether regular or a programmes. We are particularly known for one-off gift. Higher rate taxpayers are also high-profile business to business marketing able to claim additional personal tax relief. initiatives and employee benefit packages.

Contact us for further information and to Please contact the Corporate Fundraising make a Gift Aid Declaration. team for further details.

Legacies Charity Details A legacy to Tate may take the form of a The Tate Gallery is an exempt charity; the residual share of an estate, a specific cash Museums & Galleries Act 1992 added the sum or item of property such as a work of Tate Gallery to the list of exempt charities art. Legacies to Tate are free of inheritance defined in the 1960 Charities Act. Tate tax, and help to secure a strong future for Members is a registered charity (number the Collection and galleries. For further 313021). Tate Foundation is a registered information please contact the charity (number 1085314).

Development Office.

American Patrons of Tate American Patrons of Tate is an independent Offers in lieu of tax charity based in New York that supports Inheritance Tax can be satisfied by the work of Tate in the United Kingdom. It transferring to the Government a work of receives full tax exempt status from the IRS

under section 501(c)(3) allowing United States taxpayers to receive tax deductions on gifts towards annual membership programmes, exhibitions, scholarship and capital projects. For more information contact the American Patrons of Tate office.

Robert McCracken Carol Propper Miranda Sawyer Neil Scott Jon Snow (Chair) Simon Wilson American Patrons of Tate Trustees Frances Bowes Estrellita Brodsky James Chanos Henry Christensen III Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian (Ex-officio) Jeanne Donovan Fisher (Chair) Noam Gottesman Sandra Niles Robert Rennie (Ex-officio) John Studzinski, CBE Juan Carlos Verme

Tate Trustees Tomma Abts Lionel Barber Tom Bloxham The Lord Browne of Madingley, FRS, FREng (Chair) Prof David Ekserdjian Mala Gaonkar Maja Hoffmann Patricia Lankester Elisabeth Murdoch Franck Petitgas Monisha Shah Bob and Roberta Smith Gareth Thomas Wolfgang Tillmans Tate Foundation Executive Trustees John C Botts, CBE Noam Gottesman Scott Mead Simon Palley Franck Petitgas (Chair) Emmanuel Roman Anthony Salz Sir Nicholas Serota Lord Stevenson of Coddenham, CBE Tate Foundation Non-Executive Trustees Victoria Barnsley, OBE Mrs James Brice The Lord Browne of Madingley, FRS, FREng Susan Burns Melanie Clore Sir Howard Davies Dame Vivien Duffield George Economou Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild Mandy Moross Paul Myners, CBE Sir John Ritblat Lady Ritblat Dame Theresa Sackler Peter Simon Jon Snow John J Studzinski, CBE Anita Zabludowicz Tate Foundation Honorary Members Ms Christina Chandris Mr Oliver Haarmann Mr Ronald and the Hon Mrs Rita McAulay Ms Elisabeth Murdoch The Rt Hon Sir Timothy Sainsbury Mr Ian Taylor Tate Members Council Brian Chadwick Shami Chakrabarti Chris Chinaloy Hannah Collins Mo Fisher Ryan Gander Johnstone Godfrey Dominic Harris Rachel Lloyd

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Tate Modern Donors to the Founding Capital Campaign 29th May 1961 Charitable Trust AMP The Annenberg Foundation The Arts Council England The Asprey Family Charitable Foundation Lord and Lady Attenborough The Baring Foundation Ron Beller and Jennifer Moses Alex and Angela Bernstein David and Janice Blackburn Mr and Mrs Anthony Bloom BNP Paribas Mr and Mrs Pontus Bonnier Lauren and Mark Booth Mr and Mrs John Botts Frances and John Bowes Ivor Braka Mr and Mrs James Brice The British Land Company plc Donald L Bryant Jr Family Melva Bucksbaum Cazenove & Co The Clore Duffield Foundation CGU plc Clifford Chance Edwin C Cohen The John S. Cohen Foundation Ronald and Sharon Cohen Sadie Coles Carole and Neville Conrad Giles and Sonia Coode-Adams Douglas Cramer Alan Cristea Gallery Thomas Dane Michel and Hélène David-Weill Julia W Dayton Gilbert de Botton Pauline Denyer-Smith and Paul Smith Sir Harry and Lady Djanogly The Drapers’ Company Energis Communications English Heritage English Partnerships The Eranda Foundation Esmée Fairbairn Charitable Trust Donald and Doris Fisher Richard B. and Jeanne Donovan Fisher The Fishmongers’ Company Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer Friends of the Tate Gallery Bob and Kate Gavron

Giancarlo Giammetti Alan Gibbs Mr and Mrs Edward Gilhuly GKR GLG Partners Helyn and Ralph Goldenberg Goldman Sachs The Horace W Goldsmith Foundation The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Noam and Geraldine Gottesman Pehr and Christina Gyllenhammar Mimi and Peter Haas The Worshipful Company of Haberdashers Hanover Acceptances Limited The Headley Trust Mr and Mrs André Hoffmann Anthony and Evelyn Jacobs Jay Jopling Mr and Mrs Karpidas Howard and Lynda Karshan Peter and Maria Kellner Madeleine Kleinwort Brian and Lesley Knox Pamela and C Richard Kramlich Mr and Mrs Henry R Kravis Irene and Hyman Kreitman The Kresge Foundation Catherine and Pierre Lagrange The Lauder Foundation – Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund Lazard Brothers & Co., Limited Leathersellers’ Company Charitable Fund Edward and Agnès Lee Lex Service Plc Lehman Brothers Ruth and Stuart Lipton Anders and Ulla Ljungh The Frank Lloyd Family Trusts London & Cambridge Properties Limited London Electricity plc, EDF Group Mr and Mrs George Loudon Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw Viviane and James Mayor Ronald and Rita McAulay The Mercers’ Company The Meyer Foundation The Millennium Commission Anthony and Deirdre Montagu The Monument Trust Mori Building, Ltd Mr and Mrs M D Moross Guy and Marion Naggar Peter and Eileen Norton, The Peter Norton Family Foundation Maja Oeri and Hans Bodenmann Sir Peter and Lady Osborne William A Palmer Mr Frederik Paulsen Pearson plc The Pet Shop Boys The Nyda and Oliver Prenn Foundation Prudential plc Railtrack plc The Rayne Foundation Reuters Sir John and Lady Ritblat Rolls-Royce plc Barrie and Emmanuel Roman Lord and Lady Rothschild The Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation J. Sainsbury plc Ruth and Stephan Schmidheiny

Schroders Mr and Mrs Charles Schwab David and Sophie Shalit Belle Shenkman Estate William Sieghart Peter Simon Mr and Mrs Sven Skarendahl London Borough of Southwark The Foundation for Sports and the Arts Mr and Mrs Nicholas Stanley The Starr Foundation The Jack Steinberg Charitable Trust Charlotte Stevenson Hugh and Catherine Stevenson John Studzinski David and Linda Supino The Government of Switzerland Carter and Mary Thacher Insinger Townsley UBS UBS Warburg David and Emma Verey Dinah Verey The Vintners’ Company Clodagh and Leslie Waddington Robert and Felicity Waley-Cohen Wasserstein, Perella & Co., Inc. Gordon D Watson The Weston Family Mr and Mrs Stephen Wilberding Michael S Wilson Poju and Anita Zabludowicz and those donors who wish to remain anonymous Donors to The Tate Modern Project The Blavatnik Family Foundation Lauren and Mark Booth The Deborah Loeb Brice Foundation The Lord Browne of Madingley, FRS, FREng John and Christina Chandris James Chanos Paul Cooke Ago Demirdjian and Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian George Economou Mala Gaonkar Thomas Gibson in memory of Anthea Gibson Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Noam Gottesman Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation Maxine Isaacs Peter and Maria Kellner Madeleine Kleinwort Catherine Lagrange Pierre Lagrange Allison and Howard W. Lutnick Donald B. Marron Anthony and Deirdre Montagu Elisabeth Murdoch Alison and Paul Myners Maureen Paley Daniel and Elizabeth Peltz Catherine and Franck Petitgas Barrie and Emmanuel Roman The Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation Mr John Studzinski, CBE Tate Members Nina and Graham Williams and those donors who wish to remain anonymous

Tate Modern Benefactors and Major Donors We would like to acknowledge and thank the following benefactors who have supported Tate Modern prior to 31 December 2012.

29th May 1961 Charitable Trust Carolyn Alexander Basil Alkazzi American Patrons of Tate The Ampersand Foundation Annenberg Foundation Klaus Anschel The Fagus Anstruther Memorial Trust Mehves and Dalinc Ariburnu The Kenneth Armitage Foundation The Art Fund Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne Arts Council England The Arts & Humanities Research Council Charles Asprey Marwan Assaf Averda Miroslaw Balka Fay Ballard Lionel Barber Pedro Barbosa The Estate of Peter and Caroline Barker-Mill Trevor Bell Anne Best Big Lottery Fund Billstone Foundation Sutapa Biswas Dorothy Bohm Mr and Mrs Oliver Bolitho The Charlotte Bonham-Carter Charitable Trust Pontus Bonnier Charles Booth-Clibborn John Botts Louise Bourgeois Frances Bowes Dr Luther Brady Pierre Brahm The Estate of Dr Marcella Louis Brenner British Council The Broad Art Foundation Mr and Mrs Ben Brown Armando Cabral Pedro Cabrita Reis Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Lucy Carter James Chanos Henry Christensen III Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Toby Clarke The Clore Duffield Foundation The Clothworkers’ Foundation Contemporary Art Society Isabelle and John Corbani Paul Coulon Douglas S Cramer Jane Crawford Martin Creed Bilge Ogut-Cumbusyan and Haro Cumbusyan Manuel Fernando da Silva Santos Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Thomas Dane Dimitris Daskalopoulos Julia W Dayton Richard Deacon Dedalus Foundation, Inc.

The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian and Ago Demirdjian Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Department for Culture, Media and Sport Department for Education Anthony d’Offay Jytte Dresing, The Merla Art Foundation, Dresing Collection The Duerckheim Collection EDP - Energias de Portugal, S.A. Maryam and Edward Eisler The John Ellerman Foundation Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein European Cultural Foundation European Union Esmée Fairbairn Foundation Fares and Tania Fares The Fisher Family Jeanne Donovan Fisher Wendy Fisher David Fitzsimons Representation of the Government of Flanders in the UK Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild The Estate of Ann Forsdyke Eric and Louise Franck The Getty Foundation Antonia Gibbs Milly and Arne Glimcher Goethe-Institut Nicholas and Judith Goodison Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town Marian Goodman Gallery, New York David and Maggi Gordon Lady Gosling The Estate of Alan Green Konstantin Grigorishin Chloë and Paul Gunn Rokni Haerizadeh Paul Hamlyn Foundation Viscount and Viscountess Hampden and Family Mr Toshio Hara Hauser & Wirth Stuart Heath Charitable Settlement Heritage Lottery Fund The Hintze Family Charitable Foundation Damien Hirst Robert Hiscox David Hockney The Estate of Mrs Mimi Hodgkin Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation Marguerite Hoffman Jenny Holzer The Estate of Sir Robert Horton Idlewild Trust Cristina Iglesias Institut Ramon Llull Marc Jacobs The Japan Foundation The JP Marland Charitable Trust J. Patrick Kennedy and Patricia A. Kennedy Bharti Kher Kirby Laing Foundation Jack Kirkland Leon Kossoff Jannis Kounellis The Kreitman Foundation H. Kress Foundation, administered by the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation

Catherine Lagrange Pierre Lagrange The Estate of Margaret Lapsley The Leche Trust Agnes and Edward Lee Legacy Trust UK The Leverhulme Trust José Lima The Estate of Barbara Lloyd Doris J. Lockhart LOCOG Mark and Liza Loveday The Henry Luce Foundation John Lyon’s Charity Peter & Susan MacGill Christopher Eykyn and Nicholas Maclean The Estate of Sir Edwin Manton The Maplescombe Trust Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Lord McAlpine of West Green The Andrew W Mellon Foundation Mikati Foundation Boris and Vita Mikhailov Sir Geoffroy Millais Jean-Yves Mock The Henry Moore Foundation Peter Moores Foundation Mr Minoru Mori, Hon KBE and Mrs Yoshiko Mori NADFAS National Heritage Memorial Fund Nederlandse Organisatie Voor Research Royal Norwegian Embassy Averill Ogden and Winston Ginsberg The Olivier Family Tony Oursler and Artangel Outset Contemporary Art Fund Maureen Paley The Estate of Mr Allan Herbert Palmer Konstantinos Papageorgiou and Gregory Papadimitriou The Estate of Mr Brian and Mrs Nancy Pattenden Stephen and Yana Peel Slavica Perkovic Catherine Petitgas The PHG Cadbury Charitable Trust Stanley Picker Trust The Pilgrim Trust PINTA Museum Acquisition Programme Heather and Tony Podesta Collection Powell Charitable Trust Gilberto Pozzi The Reed Foundation Manuel Rios Barrie and Emmanuel Roman Rootstein Hopkins Foundation Helen and Ken Rowe Edward Ruscha The Michael Harry Sacher Charitable Trust The Estate of Simon Sainsbury The Sandra Charitable Trust Fondation Saradar The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation James Scott Robert Scott Thomas J Sikorski Charitable Trust and American Patrons of Tate Candida and Rebecca Smith Tishman Speyer Ricardo Steinbruch Charlotte Stevenson Mercedes and Ian Stoutzker The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu

Parviz Tanavoli Tate Africa Acquisitions Committee Tate Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee Tate International Council Tate Latin American Acquisitions Committee Tate Members Tate Middle East and North Africa Acquisitions Committee Tate North American Acquisitions Committee Tate Patrons Tate Photography Acquisitions Committee Terra Foundation for American Art The Estate of Mr Nicholas Themans Robert Therrien Tornabuoni Art, Paris The Tretyakov Family Collection Tyler Graphics Ltd in honour of Pat Gilmour Andy Warhol Foundation Wellcome Trust Welton Foundation Michael Werner , Inc The Estate of Fred Williams Jane and Michael Wilson Samuel and Nina Wisnia Poju and Anita Zabludowicz and those donors who wish to remain anonymous

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Platinum Patrons Mr Alireza Abrishamchi Ghazwa Mayassi Abu-Suud Mr Shane Akeroyd Basil Alkazzi Ryan Allen and Caleb Kramer Mr and Mrs Edward Atkin CBE Beecroft Charitable Trust Mrs Abeer ben Halim Mr Harry Blain Broeksmit Family Foundation Rory and Elizabeth Brooks (Chairman) The Lord Browne of Madingley, FRS, FREng Mr Stephane Custot Miel de Botton Fares and Tania Fares Mrs Jodi Feist King Mr David Fitzsimons The Flow Foundation Mr Michael Foster Edwin Fox Foundation Hugh Gibson The Goss-Michael Foundation Mandy Gray and Randall Work Mrs Nathalie and Mr Luc Guiot-Saucier Mr and Mrs Yan Huo Mr Phillip Hylander Anne-Marie and Geoffrey Isaac Mrs Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Maria and Peter Kellner Mrs Ella Krasner Mr and Mrs Eskandar Maleki Scott and Suling Mead Gabriela Mendoza and Rodrigo Marquez Pierre Tollis and Alexandra Mollof Mr Donald Moore Mary Moore Mr and Mrs Paul Phillips Maya and Ramzy Rasamny Frances Reynolds Simon and Virginia Robertson Mr and Mrs Richard Rose Claudia Ruimy Vipin Sareen and Rebecca Mitchell

Hakon Runer and Ulrike Schwarz-Runer Mr and Mrs J Shafran Mrs Andrée Shore Maria and Malek Sukkar Mr Vladimir Tsarenkov and Ms Irina Kargina Mr and Mrs Petri Vainio Rebecca Wang Michael and Jane Wilson Poju and Anita Zabludowicz and those who wish to remain anonymous Gold Patrons Eric Abraham Jacqueline Appel and Alexander Malmaeus Tim Attias Katrina Barter Jenny and Robert Borgerhoff Mulder Elena Bowes Ben and Louisa Brown Nicolò Cardi Melanie Clore Beth and Michele Colocci Bilge Ogut-Cumbusyan & Haro Cumbusyan Mr Dónall Curtin Mrs Robin D’Alessandro Harry David Mr Frank Destribats Mrs Maryam Eisler Mala Gaonkar Mrs Helene Guerin-Llamas Mr and Mrs Charles M Hale Mrs Petra Horvat Ms Natascha Jakobs Fiona Mactaggart Paul and Alison Myners Reem Nassar Mr Francis Outred Simon and Midge Palley Mariela Pissioti Mathew Prichard Valerie Rademacher Mr Charles Roxburgh Carol Sellars Mrs Dana Sheves Britt Tidelius Mr and Mrs Stanley S. Tollman Emily Tsingou and Henry Bond Mrs Celia Forner Venturi Manuela and Iwan Wirth Barbara Yerolemou and those who wish to remain anonymous Silver Patrons Agnew’s Mrs Malgosia Alterman Toby and Kate Anstruther Mr and Mrs Zeev Aram Mrs Charlotte Artus Miss Silvia Badiali Mrs Jane Barker Mr Edward Barlow Victoria Barnsley, OBE Christopher Bartlett Jim Bartos Mrs Nada Bayoud Mr Harold Berg Lady Angela Bernstein Ms Anne Berthoud Madeleine Bessborough Ms Karen Bizon Janice Blackburn Shoshana Bloch David Blood and Beth Bisso Mrs Sofia Bogolyubov

Nathalie and Daniel Boulakia Mr Brian Boylan Mrs Lena Boyle Ivor Braka Viscountess Bridgeman The Broere Charitable Foundation Mr Dan Brooke Michael Burrell Mrs Marlene Burston Mrs Aisha Caan Timothy and Elizabeth Capon Mr Francis Carnwath and Ms Caroline Wiseman Lord and Lady Charles Cecil Frank Cohen Dr Judith Collins Mrs Jane Collins Terrence Collis Mr and Mrs Oliver Colman Carole and Neville Conrad Giles and Sonia Coode-Adams Alastair Cookson Cynthia Corbett Mark and Cathy Corbett Mrs Ursula Cornely Tommaso Corvi-Mora Mr and Mrs Bertrand Coste Kathleen Crook and James Penturn James Curtis Sir Howard Davies Mr and Mrs Roger de Haan Giles de la Mare Maria de Madariaga Anne Chantal Defay Sheridan Marco di Cesaria Simon C Dickinson Ltd Ms Sophie Diedrichs-Cox Mrs Fiona Dilger James Diner Liz and Simon Dingemans Ms Charlotte Ransom and Mr Tim Dye Joan Edlis Lord and Lady Egremont Jeffrey and Jennifer Eldredge John Erle-Drax Dr Nigel Evans Stuart and Margaret Evans Gerard Faggionato Ms Rose Fajardo Mrs Heather Farrar David Fawkes Mrs Margy Fenwick Mr Bryan Ferry, CBE The Sylvie Fleming Collection Lt Commander Paul Fletcher Mrs Jean Fletcher Steve Fletcher Elizabeth Freeman Stephen Friedman Carol Galley Daniela and Victor Gareh Mrs Lisa Garrison Mrs Joanna Gemes Ljubica Georgievska Mr Mark Glatman Ms Emily Goldner and Mr Michael Humphries Ms Josefa Gonzalez-Blanco Mr Jonathan Goodman Mr and Mrs Paul Goswell Penelope Govett Martyn Gregory Sir Ronald Grierson Mrs Kate Grimond

Richard and Odile Grogan Louise Hallett Richard Hazlewood Michael and Morven Heller Richard and Sophia Herman Miss Judith Hess Mrs Patsy Hickman Robert Holden James Holland-Hibbert Lady Hollick, OBE Vicky Hughes John Huntingford Mr Alex Ionides Maxine Isaacs Helen Janecek Sarah Jennings Mr Haydn John Mr Michael Johnson Jay Jopling Mrs Marcelle Joseph and Mr Paolo Cicchiné Mrs Brenda Josephs Tracey Josephs Mr Joseph Kaempfer Andrew Kalman Jag-Preet Kaur Dr Martin Kenig Simon and Jeannette Kenny Mr David Ker Nicola Kerr Mr and Mrs Simon Keswick Richard and Helen Keys Mrs Mae Khouri David Killick Mr and Mrs James Kirkman Brian and Lesley Knox Mr and Mrs Herbert Kretzmer Ms Jacqueline Lane Mrs Julie Lee Simon Lee Mr Gerald Levin Leonard Lewis Mrs Cynthia Lewis Beck Mark and Sophia Lewisohn Mr Gilbert Lloyd George Loudon Mrs Elizabeth Louis Mark and Liza Loveday Catherine Lovell Daniella Luxembourg Art Anthony Mackintosh Eykyn Maclean LLC The Mactaggart Third Fund Mrs Jane Maitland Hudson Mr M J Margulies Lord and Lady Marks Marsh Christian Trust Mrs Anne-Sophie McGrath Mr Martin Mellish Mrs R W P Mellish Ms Fiona Mellish Professor Rob Melville Mr Michael Meynell Mr Alfred Mignano Victoria Miro Ms Milica Mitrovich Jan Mol Lulette Monbiot Mrs Bona Montagu Mrs Valerie Gladwin Montgomery Mr Ricardo Mora Mrs William Morrison Richard Nagy Julian Opie

Pilar Ordovás Sir Richard Osborn Joseph and Chloe O’Sullivan Desmond Page Maureen Paley Dominic Palfreyman Michael Palin Mrs Adelaida Palm Stephen and Clare Pardy Mrs Véronique Parke Mr Sanjay Parthasarathy Frans Pettinga Miss Nathalie Philippe Ms Michina Ponzone-Pope Mr Oliver Prenn Susan Prevezer QC Mr Adam Prideaux Mr and Mrs Ryan Prince James Pyner Ivetta Rabinovich Mrs Phyllis Rapp Ms Victoria Reanney Dr Laurence Reed Mr and Mrs Philip Renaud The Reuben Foundation Sir Tim Rice Lady Ritblat Ms Chao Roberts David Rocklin Frankie Rossi Mr David V Rouch Mr James Roundell Naomi Russell Mr Alex Sainsbury and Ms Elinor Jansz Mr Richard Saltoun Mrs Amanda Sater Mrs Cecilia Scarpa Cherrill and Ian Scheer Sylvia Scheuer Mrs Cara Schulze Andrew and Belinda Scott The Hon Richard Sharp Mr Stuart Shave Neville Shulman, CBE The Schneer Foundation Ms Julia Simmonds Jennifer Smith Mr George Soros Louise Spence Mr and Mrs Nicholas Stanley Mr Nicos Steratzias Stacie Styles Mrs Patricia Swannell Mr James Swartz The Lady Juliet Tadgell Tot Taylor Christopher and Sally Tennant Lady Tennant Mr Henry Tinsley Karen Townshend Melissa Ulfane Mr Marc Vandecandelaere Mrs Cecilia Versteegh Mr Jorge Villon Gisela von Sanden Audrey Wallrock Stephen and Linda Waterhouse Offer Waterman Terry Watkins Miss Cheyenne Westphal Walter H. White, Jnr. Sue Whiteley Mr David Wood Mr Douglas Woolf

Anthony Zboralski and those who wish to remain anonymous Young Patrons Vinita Agarwal Aziz Ahsan Stephanie Alameida HH Princess Nauf AlBendar Al-Saud Ms Maria Allen Miss Noor Al-Rahim HRH Princess Alia Al-Senussi (Chair, Young Patrons Ambassador Group) Miss Sharifa Alsudairi Sigurdur Arngrimsson Miss Katharine Arnold Miss Joy Asfar Ms Mila Askarova Miss Olivia Aubry Flavie Audi Josh Bell and Jsen Wintle Miss Marisa Bellani Ms Shruti Belliappa Mr Erik Belz Mr Edouard Benveniste-Schuler Miss Margherita Berloni Raimund Berthold Dr Brenda Blott Mrs Sofia Bocca Ms Lara Bohinc Miss Camilla Bullus Miss Verena Butt Miss May Calil Miss Sarah Calodney Matt Carey-Williams and Donnie Roark Georgina Casals Alexandra and Kabir Chhatwani Miss Katya Chitova Dr Peter Chocian Mrs Mona Collins Mrs Laura Comfort Thamara Corm Miss Amanda C Cronin Mr Theo Danjuma Mr Joshua Davis Ms Lora de Felice Countess Charlotte de la Rochefoucauld Emilie De Pauw Mr Stanislas de Quenetain Agnes de Royere Federico Debernardi Mira Dimitrova Ms Michelle D’Souza Miss Roxanna Farboud Jane and Richard Found Mr Andreas Gegner Mrs Benedetta Ghione-Webb Miss Dori Gilinski Jessica Grosman Olga Grotova and Oleksiy Osnach Mr Nick Hackworth Alex Haidas Sara Harrison Kira Allegra Heller Christoph Hett Mrs Samantha Heyworth Andrew Honan Katherine Ireland Miss Eloise Isaac Kamel Jaber Mr Jermaine Johnson Mr Christopher Jones Ms Melek Huma Kabakci Miss Meruyert Kaliyeva Efe and Aysun Kapanci

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Nicole Karlisch Ms Tanya Kazeminy Mackay Miss Tamila Kerimova Mr Benjamin Khalili Ms Chloe Kinsman Ms Marijana Kolak Alkistis Koukouilou Miss Constanze Kubern Miss Marina Kurikhina Mr Jimmy Lahoud Ms Aliki Lampropoulos Ms Anna Lapshina Isabella Lauder-Frost Mrs Julie Lawson Lin Lei Miss MC Llamas Mr Justin Lobo Alex Logsdail Charlotte Lucas Mr John Madden Ms Sonia Mak Mr Jean-David Malat Kamiar Maleki Ms Clémence Mauchamp Mr John McLaughlin Miss Nina Moaddel Mr Fernando Moncho Lobo Ms Michelle Morphew Erin Morris Ali Munir Mrs Annette Nygren Katharina Ottmann Ilona Pacia Ms Camilla Paul Alexander V. Petalas Mrs Stephanie Petit The Piper Gallery Lauren Prakke Mr Eugenio Re Rebaudengo Mr Bruce Ritchie and Mrs Shadi Ritchie Kimberley and Michael Robson-Ortiz Mr Daniel Ross Mr Simon Sakhai Miss Tatiana Sapegina Olga Savchenko Taya Sawiris Mr Simon Scheuer Franz Schwarz Alex Seddon Count Indoo Sella Di Monteluce Preeya Seth Henrietta Shields Ms Heather Shimizu Mr Paul Shin Ms Marie-Anya Shriro Mr Max Silver Laura Simkins Tammy Smulders Miss Jelena Spasojevic Alexandra Sterling Mr Dominic Stolerman Mr Edward Tang Miss Georgiana Teodorescu Miss Inge Theron Soren S K Tholstrup Hannah Tjaden Mr Giancarlo Trinca Mrs Padideh Trojanow Mr Philippos Tsangrides Dr George Tzircotis Miss Brenda Van Camp Mr Rupert Van Millingen Mr Neil Wenman Ms Hailey Widrig Ritcheson

Miss Julia Wright Ms Seda Yalcinkaya Michelle Yue Mr Fabrizio Zappaterra Daniel Zarchan Alma Zevi Miss Valeria Zingarevich and those who wish to remain anonymous North American Acquisitions Committee Carol and David Appel Jackie Appel Paul Britton Beth Rudin De Woody Carla Emil and Richard Silverstein Glenn Fuhrman Victoria Gelfand-Magalhaes Andrea and Marc Glimcher Pamela Joyner Monica Kalpakian Elisabeth Farrell and Panos Karpidas Christian K Keese Celine and Jacques Lamarre Michael and Marjorie Levine Massimo Marcucci Lillian and Billy Mauer Liza Mauer and Andrew Sheiner Nancy McCain Stuart and Della McLaughlin Stavros Merjos Gregory R. Miller Shabin and Nadir Mohamed Elisa Nuyten & David Dime Amy and John Phelan Melinda B and Paul Pressler Liz Gerring Radke and Kirk Radke Laura Rapp and Jay Smith Robert Rennie (Chair) and Carey Fouks Kimberly Richter Donald R Sobey Robert Sobey Dr. Diane Vachon Christen and Derek Wilson and those who wish to remain anonymous Latin American Acquisitions Committee Monica and Robert Aguirre Karen and Leon Amitai Patricia Moraes and Pedro Barbosa Luis Benshimol Billy Bickford, Jr. and Oscar Cuellar Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky Trudy and Paul Cejas Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gerard Cohen David Cohen Sitton HSH the Prince Pierre d’Arenberg Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian (Chair) Patricia Druck Lily Gabriella Elia Angelica Fuentes de Vergara Mauro Herlitzka Yaz Hernandez Rocio and Boris Hirmas Said Anne Marie and Geoffrey Isaac Nicole Junkermann Jack Kirkland Fatima and Eskander Maleki Fernanda Feitosa and Heitor Martins Becky and Jimmy Mayer Solita and Steven Mishaan Catherine and Michel Pastor Catherine Petitgas Ferdinand Porák

Isabella Prata and Idel Arcuschin Frances Reynolds Erica Roberts Judko Rosenstock and Oscar Hernandez Guillermo Rozenblum Alin Ryan von Buch Lilly Scarpetta and Roberto Pumarejo Catherine Shriro Norma Smith Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch Juan Carlos Verme Tania and Arnoldo Wald Juan Yarur Torres and those who wish to remain anonymous Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee Bonnie and R Derek Bandeen Andrew Cameron Mr and Mrs John Carrafiell Mrs Christina Chandris Richard Chang Pierre TM Chen, Yageo Foundation, Taiwan Katie de Tilly Mr. Hyung-Teh Do Ms Mareva Grabowski Elizabeth Griffith Kyoko Hattori Cees Hendrikse Mr Yongsoo Huh Lady Tessa Keswick Mr Chang-Il Kim Ms Yung Hee Kim Alan Lau Woong Yeul Lee Mr William Lim Ms Kai-Yin Lo Anne Louis-Dreyfus Mrs Geraldine Elaine Marden The Red Mansion Foundation Mr Jackson See Mr Paul Serfaty Dr Gene Sherman AM Mr Robert Shum Sir David Tang (Chair) Mr Budi Tek, The Yuz Foundation Rudy Tseng (Taiwan) and those who wish to remain anonymous Middle East and North Africa Acquisitions Committee HRH Princess Alia Al-Senussi Abdullah Al Turki Mehves Ariburnu Sule Arinc Marwan Assaf Perihan Bassatne Foundation Boghossian Ms Isabelle de la Bruyère Füsun Eczacibaşi Shirley Elghanian Delfina Entrecanales Miss Noor Fares Maryam Homayoun Eisler (Co-Chair) Maha and Kasim Kutay Lina Lazaar Nina Mahdavi Mrs Fatima Maleki Fayeeza Naqvi Dina Nasser-Khadivi Ebru Özdemir Mrs Edwina Özyegin Ramzy and Maya Rasamny (Co-Chair) Dania Debs-Sakka Mrs Sherine Sawiris

Maria and Malek Sukkar Ana Luiza and Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas Berna Tuglular and those who wish to remain anonymous Photography Acquisitions Committee Ryan Allen Mr Nicholas Barker Marisa Bellani Pierre Brahm (Chair) William and Alla Broeksmit Elizabeth and Rory Brooks Marcel and Gabrielle Cassard Nicolas & Celia Cattelain Beth and Michele Colocci Fares and Tania Fares David Fitzsimons George and Margot Greig Alexandra Hess Michael Hoppen Bernard Huppert Tim Jefferies, Hamiltons Gallery Dede Johnston Jack Kirkland Mark McCain Mr Scott Mead Mr Donald Moore Mr Axel Nordin Ellen and Dan Shapiro Saadi Soudavar Maria and Malek Sukkar Mrs Caroline Trausch Michael and Jane Wilson and those who wish to remain anonymous Africa Acquisitions Committee Tutu Agyare (Co-Chair) Bolanle Austen Peters Mrs Kavita Chellaram Salim Currimjee Robert Devereux (Co-Chair) Hamish Dewar Isis Dove-Edwin and Paul Ellis Mrs Wendy Fisher Kari Gahiga Deborah Goldman Helene Huth Andrea Kerzner Samallie Kiyingi Matthias and Gervanne Leridon Caro Macdonald Dr Kenneth Montague Miles Morland Alain F. Nkontchou Professor Oba Nsugbe QC Pascale Revert Wheeler Kathryn Jane Robins Maria Spink Emile Stipp Mr Varnavas A. Varnava Mercedes Vilardell Piet Viljoen Tony Wainaina Alexa Waley-Cohen Edwin Wulfsohn and those who wish to remain anonymous South Asia Acquisitions Committee Dr Amin Jaffer Prof. Nirmalya Kumar Amna & Ali Naqvi Fayeeza Naqvi Mrs.Chandrika Pathak

Lekha Poddar (Chair) and those who wish to remain anonymous Russia Eastern Europe Acquisitions Committee Mr Pavel Erochkine Dr Kira Flanzraich (Chair) Mrs Grażyna Kulczyk Neil K. Rector Zsolt Somlói and those who wish to remain anonymous International Council Members Doris Ammann Mr Plácido Arango Gabrielle Bacon Anne H Bass Cristina Bechtler Nicolas Berggruen Olivier & Desiree Berggruen Baron Berghmans Mr Pontus Bonnier Mrs Frances Bowes Ivor Braka The Deborah Loeb Brice Foundation The Broad Art Foundation Bettina and Donald L Bryant Jr Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain Mrs Christina Chandris Richard Chang Pierre TM Chen, Yageo Foundation, Taiwan Lord Cholmondeley Mr Kemal Has Cingillioglu Mr and Mrs Attilio Codognato David and Michelle Coe Sir Ronald Cohen and Lady Sharon HarelCohen Mr Alfonso Cortina de Alcocer Mr Douglas S Cramer and Mr Hubert S Bush III Mr Dimitris Daskalopoulos Mr and Mrs Michel David-Weill Julia W Dayton Ms Miel de Botton Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian and Ago Demirdjian Joseph and Marie Donnelly Mrs Olga Dreesmann Mrs Jytte Dresing Barney A Ebsworth Füsun & Faruk Eczacibaşi Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson Mr and Mrs Edward Eisler Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein Alan Faena Harald Falckenberg Fares and Tania Fares HRH Princess Firyal of Jordan Mrs Doris Fisher Mrs Wendy Fisher Dr Corinne M Flick Amanda and Glenn Fuhrman Candida and Zak Gertler Alan Gibbs Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Kenny Goss Mr Laurence Graff Ms Esther Grether Konstantin Grigorishin Mr Xavier Guerrand-Hermès Mimi and Peter Haas Fund Margrit and Paul Hahnloser Andy and Christine Hall

Mr Toshio Hara Mrs Susan Hayden Ms Ydessa Hendeles Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin André and Rosalie Hoffmann Ms Maja Hoffmann (Chair) Vicky Hughes ITYS, Athens Dakis and Lietta Joannou Sir Elton John and Mr David Furnish Pamela Joyner Mr Chang-Il Kim Jack Kirkland C Richard and Pamela Kramlich Catherine Lagrange Mr Pierre Lagrange and Mr Roubi L’Roubi Baroness Lambert Bernard Lambilliotte Agnès and Edward Lee Mme RaHee Hong Lee Jacqueline and Marc Leland Mr and Mrs Sylvain Levy Mr Eugenio Lopez Mrs Fatima Maleki Panos and Sandra Marinopoulos Nancy and Howard Marks Mr and Mrs Donald B Marron Andreas and Marina Martinos Mr Ronald and The Hon Mrs McAulay Angela Westwater and David Meitus Mr Leonid Mikhelson Simon and Catriona Mordant Mr and Mrs Minoru Mori Mr Guy and The Hon Mrs Naggar Mr and Mrs Takeo Obayashi Mrs Kathrine Palmer Irene Panagopoulos Young-Ju Park Yana and Stephen Peel Daniel and Elizabeth Peltz Andrea and José Olympio Pereira Catherine and Franck Petitgas Sydney Picasso Mr and Mrs Jürgen Pierburg Jean Pigozzi Ms Miuccia Prada and Mr Patrizio Bertelli Laura Rapp and Jay Smith Maya and Ramzy Rasamny Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Agostino Re Rebaudengo Robert Rennie and Carey Fouks Mr John Richardson Michael Ringier Lady Ritblat Barrie and Emmanuel Roman Ms Güler Sabanci Dame Theresa Sackler Mrs Lily Safra Muriel and Freddy Salem Dasha Shenkman Uli and Rita Sigg Michael S Smith Norah and Norman Stone John J Studzinski, CBE Maria and Malek Sukkar Mrs Marjorie Susman David Teiger Mr Budi Tek, The Yuz Foundation Mr Mario Testino Mr Robert Tomei The Hon Robert H Tuttle and Mrs Maria Hummer-Tuttle Mr and Mrs Guy Ullens Michael and Yvonne Uva

Mrs Ninetta Vafeia Corinne and Alexandre Van Damme Paulo A W Vieira Robert and Felicity Waley-Cohen Diana Widmaier Picasso Christen and Derek Wilson Michael G Wilson Mrs Sylvie Winckler The Hon Mrs Janet Wolfson de Botton CBE Anita and Poju Zabludowicz Michael Zilkha and those who wish to remain anonymous Tate Modern Corporate Supporters Bank of America Merrill Lynch Bloomberg BMW BP Guaranty Trust Bank Hildon Limited J.P. Morgan Laurent Perrier Le Méridien Louis Vuitton Qatar Museums Authority RLM Finsbury Sotheby’s Statkraft Unilever Vodafone Group and those who wish to remain anonymous Tate Modern Corporate Members AIG The Brooklyn Brothers Christie’s Clifford Chance LLP Deloitte LLP Deutsche Bank Diageo Great Britain Limited Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer GAM Hanjin Shipping him! research & consulting HSBC IPC Media The John Lewis Partnership Kingfisher plc Linklaters Mace Group Ltd MasterCard Worldwide Mazars Morgan Stanley Native Land and Grosvenor Pearson Tishman Speyer Wolff Olins and those who wish to remain anonymous

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