Ellen Gallagher's not an artist I was very familiar with. I'd seen a slide projection of Sigmund Freud she'd made at Visions of the Self:Rembrandt and Now at the Gagosian in Mayfair back in May (and I'd barely remembered that) but other than that I knew next to nothing about her. But she had a free show on at Tate Modern, just a small one - one room, and I was in the area for a Spanish lesson and a drink with a couple of friends, so I thought I'd take a look at both that and the Kara Walker installation while I was there.
I was glad I did. While Walker's Fons Americanus was the standout experience, I felt Ellen Gallagher's room was a highly satisfactory accompaniment. Not just because, like Walker, Gallagher is an African-American woman born in the sixties but because both their works address race and gender in ways that are a little more prismatic than they are overtly political.
Of course it's not obligatory - or at least it shouldn't be - for a female artist of colour to make works about race and gender but in a world where there is still so much inequality it seems inevitable, and necessary, that many will. Gallagher, from Providence, Rhode Island, at least does it well.
Bird in Hand (2006)
Even if that's not always immediately apparent. Some works grab you straight away. Others need time and explanation. Some didn't sink in until I started to write about them!
The room was so small it was hard to get a firm grasp of her intentions and her style but it certainly whetted my appetite to see, and learn, more. Her work looks to science fiction, marine science, and magazines (especially those about Black 'lifestyles') from the 30s through to the 70s and her style and the media she uses are just as varied. She paints, she draws, she prints, she cuts, she sculpts, and she collages. A woman's work is never done!
Some of the exhibits appear, initially, abstract though closer inspection reveals minute figuration. Elsewhere they're anything but abstract. Bird in Hand is the most eye catching piece in the room. It's made of sheets of inked and stained pages, densely layered and then knifed open to reveal streaks of colour. A hint of the Lucio Fontana but much less violent.
The idea is to create an image of a subterranean, undersea, landscape (the Detroit techno act Drexciya have been a big inspiration) but I can't say I saw it. I did, however, spot the wooden legged pet inspired by real life vaudeville star Clayton 'Peg Leg' Bates (no, me neither) and Captain Ahab from Melville's Moby Dick. Gallagher has said of this painting that she thinks it's "an origin myth of sorts, with a kind of evil doctor, perhaps related to Doctor Moreau or Frankenstein, at its centre".
Well if she doesn't know for sure, I certainly can't help. It looks good though. I couldn't realistically say the same of 1996's Paper Cup and at first it disappointed. After being informed she's paying homage to the grid that was so popular with abstract painters of the sixties but, somehow, subverting it at the same time I was only marginally more impressed.
The subversion, and it's as light and subtle a subversion as you're ever likely to find, comes from Gallagher using sheets of lined paper (used for handwriting practice) but allowing the sheets to overlap and drift off at an angle so that when she's drawn tiny symbols resembling lips much like caricatures of black people used in minstrel shows. With this I now understood, and admired, her personal and political intentions.
With Afro Puff (1996) she's done much the same but this time, instead of lips, it's afro hair. It's a clever, and sharply pointed, trick, and one worth repeating twice, but I'm not sure it's one you'd get unless there was an information board next to it to tell you what that trick is.
The room was so small it was hard to get a firm grasp of her intentions and her style but it certainly whetted my appetite to see, and learn, more. Her work looks to science fiction, marine science, and magazines (especially those about Black 'lifestyles') from the 30s through to the 70s and her style and the media she uses are just as varied. She paints, she draws, she prints, she cuts, she sculpts, and she collages. A woman's work is never done!
Some of the exhibits appear, initially, abstract though closer inspection reveals minute figuration. Elsewhere they're anything but abstract. Bird in Hand is the most eye catching piece in the room. It's made of sheets of inked and stained pages, densely layered and then knifed open to reveal streaks of colour. A hint of the Lucio Fontana but much less violent.
The idea is to create an image of a subterranean, undersea, landscape (the Detroit techno act Drexciya have been a big inspiration) but I can't say I saw it. I did, however, spot the wooden legged pet inspired by real life vaudeville star Clayton 'Peg Leg' Bates (no, me neither) and Captain Ahab from Melville's Moby Dick. Gallagher has said of this painting that she thinks it's "an origin myth of sorts, with a kind of evil doctor, perhaps related to Doctor Moreau or Frankenstein, at its centre".
Well if she doesn't know for sure, I certainly can't help. It looks good though. I couldn't realistically say the same of 1996's Paper Cup and at first it disappointed. After being informed she's paying homage to the grid that was so popular with abstract painters of the sixties but, somehow, subverting it at the same time I was only marginally more impressed.
The subversion, and it's as light and subtle a subversion as you're ever likely to find, comes from Gallagher using sheets of lined paper (used for handwriting practice) but allowing the sheets to overlap and drift off at an angle so that when she's drawn tiny symbols resembling lips much like caricatures of black people used in minstrel shows. With this I now understood, and admired, her personal and political intentions.
With Afro Puff (1996) she's done much the same but this time, instead of lips, it's afro hair. It's a clever, and sharply pointed, trick, and one worth repeating twice, but I'm not sure it's one you'd get unless there was an information board next to it to tell you what that trick is.
Paper Cup (1996)
Afro Puff (1996)
Untitled (1998)
Equally obscure, both to view and to understand, is an untitled work from 1998. From a series titled the 'black paintings', Gallagher herself admits you're not supposed to understand, or see, them properly. She says "if you stand in front of them they go blank and if you stand at the side you see only a little". It seems, that with the addition of the Tate Modern lights, if you stand in front of them what you see is a vague mirror image of yourself. That's not what I need to see in any gallery!
Two of these were the first two works I saw on entering the room dedicated to Gallagher and I was mildly underwhelmed but Bird in Hand and Esirn Coaler were up next which meant, for me, that both artist and curator had turned it round. It even helped me look at the earlier works differently. That sometimes happens when you look at how an artist progressed throughout their career rather than drill down on one period.
Esirn Coaler, a plasticine and aluminium piece, is made up of words and phrases relating to pain, ailments, and medical treatment while the title is the name of a character Gallagher invented as a "witness to the abolition of pain".
Wouldn't that be nice? As ever with Gallagher, there's more to it than meets the eye though. The phrase 'an experiment of unusual opportunity' comes from a medical report on an event that became known as the Tuskegee experiment. A study conducted by the US Public Health Service into the effects of syphilis on African American men.
Between 1932 and 1972 over six hundred impoverished sharecroppers from Alabama (about two thirds who had syphilis) were told they would received free public health care for taking part in a six week experiment that actually lasted forty years. The men were never treated as those carrying out the experiment wanted to see what would happen if you left them untreated. What happened was that forty of their wives contracted syphilis and nineteen children were born with congenital syphilis.
Esirn Coaler (2007)
After the whistle was blown in 1972 and the experiments stopped it was a shocking twenty-five years before, under Bill Clinton, there was so much as an apology by any officials. This is an event that happened in my lifetime. That's shocking enough. That there's still so much healthcare disparity between black and white Americans, and rich and poor ones too, is even more worrying. Under Trump it's almost impossible to see this improving.
The aesthetically pleasing image of Esirn Coaler masks a brutal, cruel, and racist story. In that respect it's much like America itself. Skyscrapers and Cadillacs make up the surface picture but if you dig deeper it's food banks and people living under bridges. Esirn Coaler is the most powerful thing in the whole room. 2004/5's DeLuxe tells another story of how those of colour were made to feel inferior to white people. A slightly less nasty one but still not great.
Gallagher has collected sixty adverts from magazines that cover roughly the same years as the Tuskegee experiment, magazines that were aimed primarily at black readers who were looking to 'upgrade' their lifestyles. These mags carried ads for wigs, hair pomades, and skin bleaching products which, now, all seem to be suggesting that black people really ought to try and look just a little bit whiter if they wanted to get on in life.
Gallagher has cut and layered images of text to make these magazine adverts look even more ludicrous than they already are (at least with hindsight). Glitter, hair, something that looks like cheese, toy eyeballs, and plasticine (again) are all employed to mock and deny the products being pushed to people at a time when societal change was needed far more than personal change from those who had the least in society.
It was a neat way to end a tiny, free, and informative little exhibition about Ellen Gallagher and, as I wrote earlier, it made me want to learn more about her work and her career development. I was, at various points, confused, amused, delighted, and, perhaps most of all, angry. Angry that a supposedly democratic and open society, the most powerful nation on Earth, could be so racist. But then that's not news to anyone. There's nothing we can do to change the past but we can change the way we look at the past, the Kara Walker sculpture showed that, and we can change history. A good start would be to not be racist and to not vote racists into power. Either here, in America, or anywhere else.
DeLuxe (2004-5)
DeLuxe (2004-5)
DeLuxe (2004-5)
DeLuxe (2004-5)
DeLuxe (2004-5)
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