Ellen Gallagher: Preserve/Murmur Henry Art Gallery, 543-2281
Through May 9.
In the stairwell as you descend to Ellen Gallagher’s little survey of recent work, you pass Kori Newkirk’s To See It All, a paranoid, but somehow dull, urban landscape rendered in clear hair pomade. Among the work Newkirk showed during his residency last fall was a beaded curtain made of hair extensions and pony beads, and Gallagher is similarly interested in African-American hair. In Preserve, one of three sets of work currently at the Henry, she is showing annotated ’50s- and ’60s-era advertisements for wigs cut from magazines like Ebony; the artist tints the mouths magenta, or blanks out the eyes, or cuts out the faces, and then adds to them her signature abstract forms, bloopy eyes and lips based on the exaggerated features of racist caricature. It’s worth noting that one of the materials she uses to transform these advertisements–in this case to build them up sculpturally–is hair pomade.
Now, when the point of art about racial identity is to take apart stereotypes that have proven difficult to dismantle, even in our relatively progressive, tolerant times, doesn’t it seem that the successive appearances of Newkirk and Gallagher, two black artists, do more to buttress the stereotype than undo it? Or at least create a new one: the black artist fixated on black hair.
At any rate, by annotating the wig advertisements, with their prevalence of styles absolutely unnatural for black hair, Gallagher’s purpose seems to be to return them to a “real” blackness that is every bit as problematic, carrying as it does the signifiers of minstrel shows and blackface. But although the works in Preserve are very good to look at–vivid and patterned, with a bright contrast between the neat graphic design and Gallagher’s handmade annotations, and a slightly off-kilter serial-killer quality from all the mutilated heads–altering something offensive, asserting your will over it, either as a private gesture or a guerrilla tactic, isn’t a particularly original reaction to entrenched thought. What’s proposed by the works in Preserve isn’t very ambitious: an archive of falseness, to be sure, but one that in its accusation, no matter how accurate, is really rather literal minded.
This certainly isn’t always the case with Gallagher’s work. Her large-scale works from a few years ago were populated by thousands of those cryptic symbols–the lips, the eyes, the comma-like shape that represented wigs–all crammed obsessively together, and allowed to become nearly abstract. Encouraging charged images to lapse into abstractness is, both visually and morally, a much more damning and remarkable proposition than pointing out the falseness of advertising.
The five animated video works (a new medium for Gallagher) in Murmur are also a mixed bag; as with her drawings, the best one is the most opaque. In it, a swarm of white, Afroed, angel-like creatures swoop weightlessly around a black background. This, proposing a strange but specific parallel universe, is much more compelling than a clip from a sci-fi film in which everyone has been given white wigs (scratched right into the film), and which seems like an illustration of a cultural theory rather than art. Gallagher’s white-on-white drawings, carved into heavy white paper (from a series called Watery Ecstatic), approach more interesting territory, one informed by such diverse ideas as the myth of a black Atlantis, an alternative reading of Moby-Dick (the white whale representing a pile of cannibalized black men’s bones), and maps of imaginary islands with ports named for wig styles.
In these works, the eyes and lips and wigs show up periodically, but they are forced to do less political work than in Preserve; rather, they function as a signal that everything is not precisely as you know it, but is driven by a different set of codes and rules. The bubbles that come out of the mouths of sea creatures, both beautiful and horrifying, are little minstrel-like eyes; the billows of water around a fish are as curly as hair. But rather than admonishing the viewer about his or her racial prejudices–which is surely the most boring part of identity-driven art–here the symbols take over. In defining their own terms, they surpass their terrible history, and go on to do better, more complex things.