Ellen Gallagher often uses the recognisable or
familiar as a means to seduce the viewer before confronting them with
complex ideas that reconstruct conventional opinion. Gallagher became well
known for works that subvert old-fashioned beauty advertising, from
African-American magazines such as Ebony and Our World, in which she sends
up the claims of the products to be a pathway to greater beauty and social
acceptance. These works examine the human desire for both change and
conformity and explore the symbols used to express this, the codes embedded
within advertising. While these works focus on the language of beauty, the
importance of symbols and codes is a recurring theme within Gallagher’s art,
alongside her explorations into transformation, both as a literal subject
matter and as the philosophical notion of constant adaptation and
mutability.
These themes reappear in Gallagher’s recent exhibition at the Freud Museum
in London, her first solo show in the city since 2000. Her approach to
presenting work at the museum was typically delicate and intellectual,
focusing on drawing out responses to Freud’s work as well as her own. ‘I
wanted the study to function as Freud’s study,’ she explains. ‘I wanted it
to be subtle enough so it would stop people and make them look around at his
collection.’ Gallagher’s intervention at the museum becomes something of a
collaboration with Freud, although not through the theories most typically
associated with him. Instead, the artist discovered a series of drawings of
the nervous systems of sea creatures, made while Freud was in his early 20s
and long before his writings on human sexuality would make him famous. For
Gallagher, Freud’s drawings not only revealed an unexpected side of his
work, but also linked to her own drawings from her ‘Watery Ecstatic’ series,
which show alongside his at the museum.
Gallagher began working on the ‘Watery Ecstatic’ drawings in 2001 and the
series has been shown across the US, as well as at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket
Gallery last year. The drawings derive from Gallagher’s interest in Drexciya,
the Detroit techno pioneers whose album The Quest tells of a mythical
underwater world inhabited by those drowned during the horrific and perilous
Middle Passage journey of slave ships from the West Coast of Africa across
the Atlantic. The theme of transformation reappears here. The drowned are
navigating between worlds and the Middle Passage is covertly alluded to as
an origin myth. The works contain a duality, referring both to the idea of
art, and historical knowledge, being used as a means to return somewhere,
but also to the significance of what is lost on the journey. ‘Certain losses
are irretrievable,’ explains Gallagher. ‘That, as part of an origin myth, is
interesting. It exists with you – I’m interested in the idea of mutability
and living with the loss in some form.’
The focal work at the Freud Museum is Gallagher’s adaptation of the Abu
Simbel photogravure, which hangs in Freud’s library. An important piece
within the museum, the directors were reluctant to comply with Gallagher’s
initial request to replace the work with an alternative image. However, her
next suggestion to simply rework it was met with enthusiasm. ‘You can’t
remove it, but you can completely deform it,’ commented Gallagher on their
decision, with the artist producing a replica of the photogravure adorned
with images from race magazines as well as bling bling crystals and the
spaceship from Sun Ra’s epic film Space is the Place, resulting in what the
artist describes as ‘a tricked-out, multi-directional flow from Freud to
ancient Egypt to Sun Ra to George Clinton’. The work acts as a link to
Gallagher’s earlier collages, as well as DeLuxe (2004–5) – her epic suite of
multiples compiled from archival advertising that was recently acquired by
MoMA in New York – while providing a humorous, pop-culture moment within the
serious atmosphere of the library.
Gallagher uses painting, collage and drawing, and more recently sculpture
and film, to comment upon and play with the codes and conventions that are
communicated in popular culture, as well as to explore the significance of
eternal themes such as mutability and mythology within contemporary life.
Commentary on her work has often been preoccupied with racial politics,
particularly in discussions of her advertising collages. This is a point of
slight frustration for the artist, who comments: ‘when race gets involved,
or the beauty idea, people have a hard time seeing because they are so
embedded in the language of race. Race is a current that runs through my
work but one of many currents.’ In fact, the politics within Gallagher’s art
are far from didactic, and she tackles ideas of race, origin myths and
Afrofuturism with a wit and sensitivity that combine with an intellectual
rigour to create works that linger in the mind and provoke thought long
after being viewed.
Eliza Williams is a freelance writer and Profiles Editor for Contemporary