Sniffing Elephant Bones: The Poetics of Race in the Art of Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher Painter

What she said once, unforgettable, was that the      stereotype is the distance between ourselves—our      real, our black bodies—& the image ¹

  [T]he greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; . . . for to use metaphors well is to see the similarity in dissimilars.

—Aristotle, The Poetics

Image, body, text: These three sites have been crucially linked in recent cultural theory and practice. Thirty years old and a native of New England, painter Ellen Gallagher has been described as working “in the gap between image and body (the gap that is language).” ² That understanding of her project, of course, simultaneously echoes and significantly revises a late modernist agenda epitomized by Robert Rauschenberg: “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” ³ Post-pop, post-painterly, and post-minimal, Gallagher operates in a space cleared by contemporary feminist, semiotic, black, and cultural studies discourses. Yet her art negotiates these busy intersections in a starkly independent fashion.

In conversation, she readily shifts from charting the ancestry of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse (whose origins, she informs me, include both the legendary black “river rat” Steamboat Willie and the once-despised Irish “Mick”) to quoting 19th-century New England’s quintessential poet, Emily Dickinson. Indeed, poetry and pop culture are key sources of Gallagher’s art—a conjunction that aligns the painter with the Dark Room Collective, a Cambridge-based group of African-American writers. Authors of poetry and fiction, their diverse literary manners and modes cohere around a shared ability to “code-switch with the same fast dazzle” and a common pool of black pop cultural knowledge. ⁴ Given her fascination with troublesome bits of Americana like minstrelsy, in which she sees a theatrical “embodying of language,” as well as her preoccupation with “culturally-embedded imagery,” it makes sense that one of Gallagher’s first exhibitions took place at the Dark Room in 1989.

Despite these literary ties, Gallagher insists on mining imagery from the process of painting. In each canvas, she explains, “the narrative comes from the legacy of the marks.” And while she favors simple forms, they often have complex genealogies. In many of her paintings of the past two years, for example, tiny, coffee-bean-shaped lozenges mass in various formations. They stem from a cloud of red pigment that appears in a 1992–93 canvas, Untitled (Doll’s Eyes). Reading the red smudge as a lipstick stain eventually led the artist to draw small, disembodied pairs of stylized black lips: the sort of rubbery, banana-shaped lips that were standard elements of the grotesque rendition of African features in 19th- and 20th-century U.S. mass media, advertising, and entertainment, as well as in objects ranging from tea cosies to children’s toys.

In an untitled 1995 painting in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, large blocks of paper are collaged onto canvas and smaller, stacked rows of lips are painted there. Both types of semi-rectangular forms have concave or convex edges, instead of Gallagher’s usual straight sides. These flexed contours come from the round opening of the hoop skirt worn by a minstrel puppet or doll in a pencil drawing called Delirious Hem (1993). The title, in turn, comes from an Emily Dickinson poem in which a suicidal urge is evoked by the image of a woman being tugged into a well by her skirt’s “delirious hem.”

Such practices of generating imagery or formal elements via synecdochic allusion give Gallagher’s work the rich, multi-referentiality and semantic compression of the best poetry. But the resultant brand of textuality is profoundly visual, producing a lexicon of forms based on fragments of other forms and/or images. A pair of small (22 x 24 inch) paintings in oil and pencil on canvas makes clear the artist’s will to merge socio-culturally “thick” references with imagery arising solely from a confrontation with her materials. The blonde canvas features large, rectangular patches of blue...