Painting Beyond Painting: Ellen Gallagher | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 10

brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor the contemporary art world is vibrant and booming as never before it's a 21st century phenomenon a global industry in its own right brilliant ideas looks at the artist at the heart of this artist with the unique power to astonish challenge and surprise in this program American painter and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher ideas Alan Gallagher's work for me is all about wit and skill I think the few artists who possess the skill that she does just thinking about her approach to materials her draftsmanship the the quality of ideas but equally that she's often able to do that in such a playful and inclusive way to me that's what makes all the difference her work is attractive not merely on a visual level but because it is work that seems to encourage you to join her in the process of inquiry that she is on rather than being something which is confrontational or excluding or exclusive and I think the way that she is able to encourage us to make these connections through work that is technically incredibly accomplished and visually extraordinarily beautiful and culturally very very rich I find to work fascinating Ellen Gallagher burst onto the contemporary art scene in the early 90s and caught the attention of curators and collectors alike I immediately liked her work in every case they were fantastic and really powerful and important and you could see that she is going to be a great artist although one of the most highly regarded American artists in the world for Ellen creating work is full of challenges there's this thing that happens when you when you're starting work not just when you're starting it you can be well into it and it's just not happening and you ride home on your bike and it's the worst feeling it's just the worst possible feeling and it's really unresolvable so what's really nice are those few times where you go home and you're like there's literally a red connecting you back to the studio because you can't wait to get back the work becomes a being and and thus for me the most perfect time in the work that's the best Ellen was born in 1965 on the east coast of America to an african-american father and an Irish Catholic mother my sister and I were raised by my mom in Providence Rhode Island and so it was sort of the three of us is the kind of core of the family my mom was really seen as you know that was sort of out that she did that you know had two daughters on her own in you know in the 60s and now I think that's not really a big deal if you think about it I had a really pretty straightforward normal childhood I remember when I was really little the first painting I saw was in my school and it was a Botero of fat children and it made me cry and I thought it was really a hideous thing and it scared the out of me I just don't think I don't like her and I think it terrified me as a child and still does let it out and then there were some works that I saw really early on that really stuck with me like my mom had you know these kind of posters around the house of art it was this abstract poster she had and I never noticed until I think I was a teenager and moving out of the house that woven into it it said black is beautiful and I loved that to discover that and then I had a really amazing literature teacher blossom Kirschenbaum who was just the most wild teacher I mean you know she had me reading like Bernard Malamud you know age fourteen and you know and Sinclair Lewis and Toni Morrison you know and really creating this portrait of America through what we read and blossom was really a mrs. Kirschenbaum actually I'm saying blossom now but because I'm older but she was and she is an incredible visual person who made you see things and not just read things and comprehend them that but that they were actually visions that had meaning after graduating from high school Ellen decided to leave Rhode Island and travel to Boston to attend our college and even then I wasn't sure that I would be an artist I think I didn't really decide that I would try to be an artist until I went to a summer program in Maine called Skowhegan and that's when I think I decided that I would just try little did Ellen know that Oh Susanna her final painting at art school and the series of work she continued in Skowhegan would rapidly make her name in the cutthroat world at the New York art scene that hole Oh Susanna series in there in the mid-90s I think really grabbed everyone's attention in a very in a very undeniable way Ellen's piece Oh Susanna takes its name from this enduringly popular 19th century minstrel song the lips and eyes in this work mimic the makeup used by singers comedians and dancers to represent black characters onstage it's basically just this top to bottom left to right penmanship paper grid and the lips are generally like skin my skin tone brownish and then into that I started this map of my idea of what what was a blonde lady so the ladies seem to be activating this minstrel show there was something about coming across those and Braille like details of the eyes and the lips disembodied and then once you're able to figure out what they're actually referencing that they're able to disembody such a painful part of American history a painful part of my history and the artists history all of our histories and do it in a way that managed to be playful and funny and subversive and I'd never seen anything like it by now based in New York Ellen would continue to use humor and satire to explore the complexities of african-american history such as her peace deluxe I think she's best known for her very large-scale grid-like compositions drawn from advertising in American magazines in Ebony and sepia drawn from the late 30s through to the 1960s and these adverts for wigs hair lightening products so predominately aimed at women but men as well she then manipulates and abstracts with a whole range of material from plasticine glitter coconut oil and really playfully makes us think about issues as diverse as race and gender and consumerism and society when they first came out they looked so fresh and they were so different and that's just as true now so I think effectively she's been able to play very well with the language of advertisement but to feed us back something new so we're not getting back the same thing in a way that's like pop art say the commentary comes in a much more nuanced fashion for example the black bass has become widely cheap she uses things like justice scene as well so creates a sort of absorbed nurse to something that was actually quite a dark chapter in American history I didn't want to make a picture of something that you already think you know I don't want to sort of I'm not making a critique in this sense it's absolutely not that I want to make a picture of something I feel like we are together making language for as we speak although Ellen had quickly become an important voice in American art it was her decision to move halfway across the world that would push her and her work in new and exciting ways I guess Ellen Gallagher is one of the most acclaimed artists to have emerged from the American art scene in the 90s her intricate works combined technical skill with wit and razor-sharp social commentary in 2001 Ellen decided to escape the art world capital of New York and set up studio in Europe Ellen Studio is in an old tin factory in the Dutch city of Rotterdam Europe's largest port I needed a city that was really still a city it's also for me it's in its the brownness city I've been in in Europe in terms of like the cultural mix of people that's important I think also just being directly on the port in this really matter-of-fact way that it's a working port it's not at all this kind of American space and that that in a sense my work here isn't it's not defined as such and so I feel like there's there's a lot of potential here for the work to grow but it wasn't just a change of seeing that prompted Ellen's move she came to Rotterdam to live with Dutch artist Edgar kleiner and it wasn't long before their personal relationship also turned professional his practice comes from a more documentary practice and he's also a musician so musicians are always in the world and I am a little bit separate in some ways my temperament keeps me that way so this is sort of a balance henkka has a background in film video and animation working together their first video work was murmur I think I had to pull you into murmur at first you weren't interested in the beginning I always wanted to work with Edgar I mean I met Edgar C I saw his work in Korea and so I think I always really responded to it and thought it was really lucid and in the world but I don't know that you really wanted to work on films with me it is fairly easy to actually have the ideas it is much more difficult to actually make make the films and actually make them happen but that is a bit the problem with the animation is they take so much work at such a long time that some of us lose interests the couple are currently working on ideas for a new piece which will explore what they see as man's continued disregard for nature and the environment the idea for the film eventually is that somewhere in a parallel universe or future we have decided as a human species to that we cannot live together with a nature and so we make a radical split and nature is transported to a subterranean world and man lives on the outer shell although the collaborations with Edie came later in her work Ellen has always sought inspiration from others it's that kind of surprisingly collaborative nature in her personality of not only wanting to to work with others but to find out where others are coming from that I think then ends up finding its way into the work in a lot of ways working with other artists or on their own Ellen keeps returning to a greatest inspiration books I love to read it affects me physically and it makes me see other possibilities I mean I guess that sounds corny but it's just really true it was one book in particular that would help Ellen realize one of her best-known works in 2009 Philip book lived them Leviathan had just come out and you know I come went through it I mean I devoured it and it gave me a lot of courage for OSA decks it led me to you know continue looking into this idea of whale fall which is what it's based on I made this piece it was about the osa decks worm the work gets its title from and this worm that bores into whale carcasses at the bottom of the ocean this sort of cycle of the kind of whale fall this idea of whales constantly falling through the ocean and becoming a kind of ecosystem and then continuing and then that those worms sort of becoming like dandelions and spreading out and starting looking again for more whale fall I think there's very much a sense of how film is able to tell a particular story that perhaps couldn't be told in any other way whilst Elenin Edgar continue to make installations it is our most recent paintings that are considered to be some of her finest work you everything she's done before makes sense seeing these new pictures that the new pictures you know were beyond anything she done before she gets stronger and stronger and I think more important she is these latest works combined in virtuosic skill with references drawn from history literature and geography were made for the grandest stage of all the venice biennale I guess this is the venice biennale one of the most prestigious events in the international art calendar and Ellen Gallagher has been invited to exhibit a series of new works each of which incorporate painting drawings and collage I really think that themes in the work travel in and out of paintings and drawings and I think a lot of times people categorize things by you know they want to categorize things as drawing or painting or film you know and for me it's all one thing as well as using an array of different media ellen has drawn inspiration from a wide range of subjects from literature to the physical beauty of the islands that make up the Caribbean for me the interesting thing about the archipelago or the idea of the archipelago is that it's this flip that happens consciously where it's it's on this one sense it's a description originally of the sea are broken up sea or the first sea on the other hand it's I've always understood it as a particular set of islands or nations together so it could be Cabo Verde or it could be you know Hawaii or it could be you know the Caribbean but the idea of it being both a kind of visible space and it and a less visible or less readable space is interesting to me that they exist together but it's not just the islands that inspired Ella it's also the ocean itself going underwater for me it's a really inspirational I mean it's it's more exciting to me than ideas of space travel I guess because it's more tangible this idea that it appears to be this surface that you see but in fact it's like all these actions that might just give this particular color gray today you know but they'll they're like a million things coming together that make that happen and I I find that really beautiful and that's that's true today but it might not be true tomorrow Ellen's fascination with the Caribbean in particular began during a formative journey she took to the island of Martinique aged just 20 sailing you know from New England to the Caribbean you you actually you sort of sense this passage of time that's not so great and it's it's immense in a sense you've ended up someplace and all of a sudden everybody at the docks was brown-skinned some variation of brown and I couldn't I'd never seen Mike you know it's like islanded on a new planet I'd never seen a brown planet before I'd never seen a black nation before coming from Rhode Island and and at the same time so it was like I'd entered you know it was my first experience of Africa in a sense I think it's exciting to to feel connected to places and that you are actually can pool sometimes can pull it into the work Ellen's final inspiration for the series came in the form of poems by Martin ikan writer a may say they're about the Caribbean archipelago he writes poems that deal with this idea of a kind of interlocked membrane that exists throughout the Caribbean nation and that there's a kind of you know as if it could be a nation Caesar imagines the islands of the Caribbean forever bound together by the shared memory of the horrors of slavery and so he creates a kind of life force but it's a life force that's forged in this crucible of pain so I came up with this this idea of a kind of vertebra something that's both separate and hinged together I mean and I like that flip between negative-positive like the archipelago as a group of islands but also as a disturbance within the sea Ellen's ability to weave so many ideas into a word is why many fields she's one of the most exciting artists working today she draws incredibly widely in terms of her references so popular culture from advertising and the media from American historic popular culture so minstrel particularly but also literature from Melville to Gertrude Stein and again referencing art and music and I think there are hooks for so many people to enter her work to approach her work because if a reference one reference escapes you another will chime as a museum curator I think our roles are constantly to think about how we look after collections for future generations and build on those and I absolutely see Allen Gallagher as one of the artists whose work will stand the test of time and I think the body of work that she's created is so substantial since the 1990s to the present that what we were able to see is not only a very particular and singular evolution of one artist practice but the way in which she's taken on many other references the way she's collaborated with others and we're able to glimpse in her work I think really the evolution of the nature of contemporary art I think it's fascinating how she uses her background as an inspiration for her odd and I also find it really interesting that because there isn't so much of a history or an archive of black history in this particular genre she creates a new black archive one of America's leading artists for over 25 years Ellen Lee surprised at just how far she's come I certainly didn't think I'd be talking to you by a port in Rotterdam I mean um I think I imagined you know I would have liked it sort of cleaned studio like I had in Boston and I sort of wonder where that all went and I sort of realized that no matter what I did I would be sitting pretty much alone in a room drawing for the rest of my life you brilliant ideas powered by hyundai motor

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 111,683

Rating: 4.806344 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, Ellen Gallagher, Artist (Project Role), brilliant ideas

Id: Yb3o3QYSXtU

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2015