8/31/2006

Ellen Gallagher

53 comments:

no-where-man said...

i think it is fair to say there is a "look of black Art" the whole entertainment likes packageable. it is safe and it sells.

do i sound racist? to not not mention it seems a greater crime. walk around chelsea and tell me about diversity.

flesheater99 said...

I fell for Agnes Martin's and Robert Rymans work once upon a time. There's a 25% chance that I could still care. And about a 10% that I actually do.

Gallagher's stuff I never got.

flesheater99 said...

"personal myth" ?. really? I thought one of the pre-requisites of a myth is that it be interesting. Or at least outside the boundaries/limitations of human design. Martin;s works are no myths and Gallagher's work has never manfested itself as childlike nor haveing 'childhood innocence' to me. Children would not indulge in such droll activities.

flesheater99 said...

it shows.

flesheater99 said...
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flesheater99 said...

it was kind of a joke(re:myths being 'interesting').

But my point is that if your going to make a personal myth it should elaborate/extrapolate/cast possibilities/look good on a Pegasus.

What is the myth/explanation behind decor designer colors (I like)and pinstripes/color bars? Seriously. I'm curious.

flesheater99 said...

artist myth that is boring=Matthew Ritchie

flesheater99 said...

yeah maybe cornfused here too.

I don't think that personal myths are boring. nor is cutting paper/repetitive marks--Matisse/Arp;Twombly/Riley respectively-->badasses. But I do think if Martin;s got a personal myth to air in her work it's snoresville...nay snoresipoli.

To elaborate--Really enjoy Ritchie's work rreeaallyy loathe the 'myth'/personal rationalization/legitimization. Unnecessary and barely interesting.

ad3pt said...

personal myth? give me a break. if you really want to think so hard about it, then maybe engineering is a better field.

i dislike ritchie because of his cartoonish/illustration tendencies. I do however respect the fact that hes got his own language and symbol references.

hating on agnes martin? are you crazy? dudes, shes epic. the only reason your hating is because your art teach profess who makes appropriated nonsense told you it wasnt cool to like abstraction.

and to that point, needless to say thats a good thing. the more ppl that do exactly as they're told, the easier it will be for those that break rules.

long live painting.

zipthwung said...

STOP IT! You all sound like the same person. Definitely the same person.
Yeah. Voice.

Agnes Martin said "my work sells" - ergo, it has a paying=devoted audience. I dont know anyone who is in her audience, but Id sure as fuck burn the theater down if I could. Fire Fire Fire, Liar. Transcend farenheight 451, bitches.

The Dia as an institution was built by a few devoted followers. I like Fred Sandbacks yarn - talk about reaching the limits of material and still having presence. Jeeze that is the thinnest picture plane ever. Infrathin- an imaginary number, the lonliest of all numbers, the fulcrum -key to the void.

Stellas bung hole painting below covers up the void, the sphincter is blocked by a the parallel lines that also intersect in non-euclidian space, which is curved space-time, which is what allows the universe to fold in on itself, like a sphincter, holding back cosmic shit - or demons - depending on your weltenshwang.

You people have an axe to gring with Miss P-Town?
DO tell.

flesheater99 said...

If memory serves, Arp made cut-outs and dropped randomly...pasting wherever the chips so desired to fall.

actually, ad3pt, those professors you speak of are the ones who taught me to dig Agnes Martin. My own path has led me to realize that they are thin and non-relative to my own progression.

zipthwung said...

Well I was wondering if she was black, and if so, what makes you black. Maybe someone could direct me to some reading so AD3EPT sticks around so I can kick it in the shins.

Bell Hooks? Alistair Crowley? I read Zizeks "Looking Awry" and I think maybe blackness is defined by whiteness, or something like that.

Objet petit a.

Or maybe black is poop and white is CoolWHip.

flesheater99 said...

It's a stretch that sphincter...and he knows it. But nice try. Hell, I'd take "a spincter holding back cosmic shit" as a personal myth anyday. Too bad it's just a cool Stella painting.

zipthwung said...

here

here

feed me

zipthwung said...

AWESOME!

no-where-man said...

took in the show while back @ Gogo.. bamboozled.

Michael Cross said...

Strong statement in this painting. (Expecting strong disagreement here.) But for me, this is like an Agnes Martin painting slipping away down and out of the frame... and what is left? Well, there's the true void. This artist is asking herself and others "What will fill the space A. M. has left?" And, more generally, when a style passes out of currency, what comes next? It has much in common conceptually with Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish republic paintings. Same sense of loss...

(I always come too late to these discussions.)

zipthwung said...

Is Matthew Ritchie black?

zipthwung said...

short-sheet

PRONUNCIATION: shôrtsht
TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: short-·sheet·ed, short-·sheet·ing, short-·sheets
1. To make (a bed) by doubling back a single sheet so that the bed looks properly made but will not allow a person to lie at full length in it. 2. To short-sheet the bed of (a person) as a way of playing a trick.

youth--less said...

I always listen to what black people have to say. They never seem to be boring.

youth--less said...

Bamboozeled is a Spike Lee movie. You can google this stuff u no.

kelli said...

I appreciate Chucky bringing this up because there is a kind of identity art where someone just inhabits or emulates a tradition and the subversive nature and content of the work rests entirely on the person who made it. I don't think she falls into that category at all because there is something really unique and original about her. For me they are a little too slight and witty but I can't take away from the fact that she has made something very specific. There is something to be said for originality at least I believe in it.
I guess this is a hot topic because the art world is racist. It starts earlier than the gender disparity too in art school.

zipthwung said...

KW doesnt own shadow cut outs anymore than Keith Haring owns stick figures. Or agnes martin the grid.

THese people all appropriated a form and made it their home, like hermit crabs in fibonacci spirals.

KW has personality but its an institutionalized one, just as KH has an affected generic (calig)GRAPHIC quality.

Taking on GRAPHIC=corporate/symbolic forms is a way of "talking back" to mass media/societyy - something everyone does.

Tota-total toalitarianism.


God I love laughing at GWB.
But listening to him - its a mind fuck.

kelli said...

Naw I love Kara W she's the only person with the stones to make history painting and she occupies the tradition of sillouette in an aggressive manner. I don't like to single people out for abuse. Besides identity is one of the themes in this work not it's whole reason for being.

kelli said...

The grid could be interpreted politically either literally as a sign of Cartesian dualism ( we owe the grid to Descartes) or as a symbol of blue chip modernist art. I like that she screws with it, throws in personal stuff, clogs up the drain with hair. In a subtle, quiet playful way. Loud is good too but just recreating art history ( no names) is tired.

zipthwung said...

Kellie - with KW - I wonder what the goal is - the spread of the silhouette into ubiquity like unto a Luis Vuitton bag? I can dig that.

WHen i look at the silouhettes - what if Ralph Ellison re-wrote his book over and over, but just with different light bulbs?

This is something I dont want to be or do, however its probably a delusion that you can make yourself new every few years?

Definitely self defeating.

Unless you are in entertainment.

Look at how Madonna went from being a whore to a Kabalistic guru. How did she do that?

Also, identity must be big with people because they sure do like buying stuff with themes.

Look at Stella, my god, how he's changed!

youth--less said...

"That is what people do." If u want to elaborate on bamboozeled--go ahead.

Elaboration or shorthand. Definitions or bleeding borders. Its all good. Because as EG is proving, immanence and transcendence are happening simultaneously all around us all.

zipthwung said...

Inhabit. Indeed. I get really annoyed by people who claim to own stuff.

PROPERTY IS THEFT.

I heard Lucy Lippard lives off the grid. But she can do that because people on the grid call her and buy her books and stuff.

"I meant the way in which race is used and coopted in order to establish dominance or play the victim. See? Who is who. Everything is leveled out on the white man's grid."

I need to make more pawns.

Bamboozled is good - art in galleries is a broadcast medium, and so goes from being personal (micro) to public (macro)

I think Lucy said that too. Great minds think alike, or at least most people do.

zipthwung said...

transcendence is BIG BROTHER

Im afraid of the mother of all bombs.

zipthwung said...

SOmeone said neo-cons are hung up on content. Is that true? COuld I say that at a party?

Im not into anal chess.

kelli said...

Just to be a total pain in the ass and throw a wrench in the gears in the discussion of identity and identity art:

"There are plenty of Last Days signposts to persuade us that nothing is worth doing and that each one of us lives in a private nightmare occassionally relieved by temporary pleasure. Art is not a nightmare, not even a private dream it is a shared human connection that traces the possibilities of past and Future"
" I was in a bookshop recently when a young woman approached me. She told me that she was writing an essay on my work and that of Radclyffe Hall.Could I help?
Yes I said. Our work has nothing in common.
"I thought you were a lesbian" she said.
-Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects

youth--less said...

closeuup or close up, i know who u mean.

I just like the way EG finds connections among instances of social history and abstraction; personal and political. She is swimming around in deep waters, big circles.

kelli said...

Winterson is saying personal experience and identity matter but are not the only matter. She's an old fashioned humanist totally opposed to what she calls " the fad science of essentialism". Her work includes her sexuality but doesn't neccessarily create an oppositional voice. She isn't creating an opposition between personal and shared experience. It's a very old-fashioned view of the interconnectedness of humankind and art. So I thought I would throw this wrench in the gears.

zipthwung said...

JW apparently doesnt define herself publicly as a lesbian artist? What is she a god?

Im not human, I know that.

What if you never got accepted in the role you wanted?

"What a ROTTEN-bit-part-sidekicking-asswiping teletubby-ROLE!" You might paint on canvas.

Yes, all black people make and love african fractals. They are weirdly unique in that. Go to a black man for african fractals. Go to Sierra Leone for diamonds. Do not go to the asteroid and mine them yourself. Black men make fractals in my world. SOmetimes these fractals look like "forms" but I am not deceived. Black male art is like Leggo to me.

THe world would be a better place if everyone imitated urban poor youths between the ages of 16 and 65 (when they retire, if they live, many of them do).

I think that relates. You do the math.

no-where-man said...

chucky, - have u sceen it? i was thinking aesthetically in terms of the play on "painting black face" and images like Bouffant Pride, 2003
as well as the "personal myth" of the educated and 'other's relationship to what is a white male power structure and how that informs the work at large.

zipthwung said...

Shades of blue bloods? SHort sheeted bedpread? I dunno, I could go on.

Im relating stuff to personal experience.

According to Lacan or Zizek or whatever artists are like criminals and they want to get caught.

Caught at what?

Beign a pillar of the black power movement, obviously.

zipthwung said...

Shades of blue bloods? SHort sheeted bedpread? I dunno, I could go on.

Im relating stuff to personal experience.

According to Lacan or Zizek or whatever artists are like criminals and they want to get caught.

Caught at what?

Beign a pillar of the black power movement, obviously.

youth--less said...

zip is a puzzle maker. puzzles with bleeding edges.

look. the EG painting looks like a bed sheet...and he didnt even mention the quilts of gees bend, for once.

I think Ellen G is doing what Kelli says Jeanette W is doing. Alice N also? What do these artists have in common???

Duh.

zipthwung said...

Trust no one.

What Ive read of the situationists is interesting.

I allways get confused by sign-signifier talk or art/not art because I think meaning is embedded in an object - everything else is artifice, or as Picasso says, a lie.

Except lies are true in that they have usefullness in the order (to tell mystic truths).

One of these uses is the "VIP room lie" where there is an infinite regress of VIP rooms - each one better, of course, than the last.

My third grade teacher taught that concept in school. She gave us permission to tell lies in class. Probably because she was bored. I know I would be.

zipthwung said...

I guess what I really want to know, aside from if the artist is black or not, is whether this painting is classified as some form of visual pun.

for example is a culturally encoded tripple entendre, i guess.

zipthwung said...

here

Anonymous said...

In this work Ellen has more in common with Dan than Frank. The more quirky political stuff in nice, somehow drawing or pulling yarn from this particular state:
calm politic
funny calm

Anonymous said...

Dan below doug.
and.... yeah I didn't get chucky maybe chalk and cheese? or maybe It's part of the Nickelodeon?

Anyhow with these things you do have to slow down, kind of hard to do--and, at least I wasn't trained not to look for/at things. I don't know how many painters, artists, just let things come, and then it's very much a different sense and arrangement. Looking is sort of the same sort of way.

zipthwung said...

Anyone know anything about Tensor Calculus?

Because unless you do, I cant talk to you without a rebreather. Or whatever.

Status, rymes with dadas

kelli said...

Closeup I was comparing Ellen G. to Jeannette W.. Thanks for understanding. But do some statements artistic or otherwise only appear purely oppositional because of the pens society puts all it's different varieties of cattle into. Isn't Malcolm X's "I am the man you think you are" a statement of humanism?
I like seeing people screw with the grid.

kelli said...

I was comparing orientation in one person's work with race in another's. A subject within the work but not it's central reason except perhaps in the eye of a given beholder. The words are Winterson's. I think she is expressing a philosophical disdain for the reduction of identity to only one apect of one's personhood as well as contempt for the way certain artists are marketed and marginalized at the same time ( more obvious in the whole text).

kelli said...

Speaking of the mutated grid does anyone know where the expression "off the grid" came from or how old it is. I think about a decade. It definately comes from after the advent of credit reporting. I think in the past people routinely lied on their resumes and skipped the electric bill when they moved.

no-where-man said...

The Grid RULES

no-where-man said...

life in nyc for one, my explicit numerical index has corners... video all day, night - pixel party!, monitor frame with in a frame.. projector light on the wall, grid constructions. within energy.

never been a fan of shaped canvas.

no-where-man said...

no, not at all i love paintings and spend a great deal of my time looking at them... and a good deal drawing - y would i be on this site otherwise? media is not that important to me - voice and style are.

video is practical.

paintings are also effective, effected = by the grid, in form and context.

Michael Cross said...

Can't escape the grid. We live in a horizontal vs. vertical world. The symbolism is too strong to break out of. If humans lived in space where the horizon-tal and vertical had no meaning, maybe 2-D art would change.

Anonymous said...

Two eyes, a nose, and distrust: Very strange stuff--personally interpreted as getting over one's skill, and knowledge, to the Unequivocal.

Someone asked me a Language point and I replied, 'a prepositional pronoun has been passed down to us since and before the world was flat'.

Do words describe things, state, distrust? Or are they bridges, or are they surplus, I ask?

Anonymous said...

I will ask a silly quiestion that everyone seems to know already. What do Ellen GALLAGHER's images have to do with racial issues. Yes she has images of black people in her work but is not clear how they add up to commentary on race in culture and in art history. Please someone tell me.