Friday, March 18, 2005

Ellen Gallagher + More Lives Cut Short

I've known Ellen Gallagher since way back when. Or more accurately, I first met Ellen when she was just out of art school and living in Boston, back in the late 1980s. I had just joined the Dark Room Collective and Ellen was often at the Inman Street readings, exhibiting her artwork, drawing, hanging out, and generally being a lovely, gentle, and warm spirit. I didn't know her well, but we did chat from time to time. What else I recall: her smile mixing amiability and canniness, her quiet manner, and her determination to create art, which was what the Dark Room was in part about. She's kept on creating art, very fine art, in fact, for which she's now become quite famous.

Gallagher
Last fall the prestigious Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan held a solo show of Ellen's work, and just a few months ago, an exhibit of her recent work, "DeLuxe," opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in Manhattan. The specially created photogravures in "DeLuxe" rework imagery taken from black magazines, focusing on hair: she has painted over wigs in ads she's collected, from the late 1930s through the 1970s, geared to black women, with variously colored plasticene bouffants and bobs, while covering, framing, masking and otherwise transforming the figures' faces. She has grouped some of these images into larger grids that, like her earlier work, don't immediately disclose their complexity, careful draftspersonship, or profundity.

"Deluxe," from what I can tell, is chatting over the fence in terms of familial resemblance with Adrian Piper, in its deployment of grids, its mingling of media, its movement between conceptual abstraction and ontological critique, its utilization of process, its historical consciousness. It defies, unlike the work of some other contemporary artists, easy ideological analysis. Like some of Nayland Blake's works, it avoids a reductive reversal of (racial or sexual) stereotypes. Whitney CatalogLike both Piper and Blake, Gallagher is playing on a sometimes fraught black cultural aesthetic and prosthetic--here hair, and in specific, the wig and black female imaginary, and more specifically self-representation, as viewed both intraracially and extraracially. The images, as shown in Edward Lewine's January New York Times review, were arresting (I intend to look at them more carefully this upcoming week, when I hit the exhibit), but on first glance, I immediately thought of palimpsests; the underlying faces and heads were not exactly or completely erased or effaced, but rather transformed, revised and revisioned, with a futuristic edge. "DeLuxe" is conversant with Gallagher's prior work, and like it continues to mark out new spaces for (black) art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Check out Ellen's show if you can. It runs till May 15, 2005.

***
Today, on Bejata.com, guest contributor Mark Tuggle details another life cut short, that of 52-year-old black sgl Bronx-resident Marvin Page, who was horifically murdered in his apartment, right across the street from a police precinct. The police apparently have no leads, and as Tuggle points out, the local media are resorting to their usual dismissive rhetoric, which in essence says, "Black, gay men's behavior is the problem" and "Black and gay people have little to zero value."

On Keith Boykin's Website, he notes the death of Washington, DC LGBT activist Wanda Alston, who was found slain in her home. Last fall, Mayor Anthony Williams had appointed her to head the capital's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Affairs office, and Keith also notes that she had previously served as the mayor's special assistant to the District's gay community, as a DC delegate to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and as a former board member of the National Organization for Women (NOW). A friend from DC, who knew her, is as shocked by the killing as Keith is. Though I didn't know either Marvin Page or Wanda Alston, my heart goes out to both their families and friends, to all who knew them. With each bit of news like this, amidst all the other grave problems our society and world are facing, I feel ever more steeled to pose and answer the question, "What can we do to turn things around?"

A smaller and more immediate gesture: write these names down and say them aloud, repeat them, at some point in the future, to ensure they're not forgotten, as an act of memory, and resistance, and love.

2 comments:

  1. here's a ritual for healing by Wendi O'Neal, who invented it after the gay man was beaten at Morehouse a few years ago:

    "Invite three of your closest friends and prepare your favorite food for each other.Eat picnic style sit on the ground with at least one persons back touching a well rooted tree.Take a ribbon with the names of wounded healers written on one side and your dreams/wishes/goals for healing on the other...weave the ribbon through the hands of each friends and around the trunk of the tree so that the three of you and the tree and linked with your wishes and dreams and the faithful example of wounded healers. Make sure to make a plate of food and leave it on one of the roots of the tree. The only word that must be on the ribbon is Adodi...everything else depends on those present...enjoy eating food prepared with love, silent for long enough to savor the tasts, textures and smells of what you are enjoying in the present moment, and knowing that your soul is being nurished as your body is being fed. Take a moment to aclnowledge that this is nurishment is what you have to use for taking actions that bring healing and justice that honors those whose names are on the ribbon...finish dinner with a finger dipped in a bowl full of honey that you first kiss yourself, and then offer to your friend. Be sure to leave the food in the soil that the tree is rooted in..."

    This might be a time for Wendi's magic

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  2. Rogue D, thanks for this suggestion! I'll pass it on to some of the other bloggers, and also try it myself, if I can find other people who are interested.

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