“...I was attracted to the magazines because the
wig advertisements had a grid-like structure that interested
me....”
“The paper itself, it’s not archival. It’s
archival in the sense of historical but it’s not
a fine art material. It will yellow and darken with time,
so no matter what it resists me in that way.”
“I really get excited by this idea that a printed
material can be so widely distributed. The black press
was widely distributed and there is a great American history
of manifestos.”
How did arrive at
collaging paper into your paintings?
GALLAGHER:
I didn’t really come from
a fine-arts background. Although I certainly went to museums
as a kid. I came from a carpentry background...and I worked
building a bridge (a floating bridge that has since collapsed).
I worked in the saw yard where we built the molds that the
cement was poured into...Basically, I built a box over and
over again for months. So when I went to art school that
was what I knew how to do, and that’s the way I built
my canvases. I built a latticework grid and
over that laid down very thin plywood and stretched the
canvas
over that. That way I could sit on the canvas as I began
gluing down sheets of penmanship paper from top to bottom,
left to
right. Then I began drawing and painting into the pages,
after they’d all been laid down in a skin. And they
really became something that can be read both sheet to sheet
and
as an overall skin.
The lines of the penmanship paper sort of line up and, from
a distance, almost form a seamless kind of horizon line. But,
up close, you see that it’s a kind of striated, broken
grid. So there’s this push and pull between the watery
blue of the penmanship paper lines and the gestural marks
made inside and around them. Penmanship paper is the found
material that I always see as a reference to how you make
your letters—what height, and where you dot your 'i,'—so
it’s always been a sign of gesture for me.
ART:21:
It seems like there's a variation of this practice in the paintings from the "eXelento" show at Gagosian, especially in the use of the grid.
GALLAGHER:
The large works at Gagosian are
made in a way similar to the earlier penmanship paper works—they
are built from found material. Now the paper itself isn’t
something that’s only a support as it was in the earlier
works. The paper is more readable, narrative. The characters
exist within the support itself—the page.
I’ve collected archival material from black photo journals
from 1939 to 1972, looking at magazines like "Our World,"
"Sepia," and "Ebony." Initially I was
attracted to the magazines because the wig advertisements
had a grid-like structure that interested me. But as I began
looking through them, the wig ads themselves had such a language
to them—so worldly—that referred to other countries,
La Sheba...this sort of lost past. I started collecting the
wig ads themselves. And then I realized that I also had a
kind of longing for the other stories, the narratives, wanting
to bring them back into the paintings and wanting the paintings
to function through the characters of the ads—to function
as a kind of chart or a map of this lost world...
ART:21:
How did they get conscripted?
GALLAGHER:
My mind is also activated by
the resistance of the material. The signs from a page of "Ebony"
come with their own specificity and undeniable drag—their
inability to be fully woven into my world. (Some model actually
modeled these wigs in 1939!) The way they resist me, even
before I manipulate them, or even after I blot out their original
stylings
with my own plasticine blobby wigs, is that I know I’m
looking at someone who was eighteen in 1939, as opposed to
somebody who was eighteen in 1970. And even though all the
signs have been uniform, or they’re now wearing my plasticine
form and their eyes have been whited-out and they are actually
reproduced only in a kind of snapshot form and not the full
advertisement itself, there’s a way in which their specificity
is undeniable. And I find that really moving. That was what
I felt after painting "Double Natural" (2002). No
matter what I did, this person’s specificity was completely
undeniable and unapologetic....I’m not only talking
about this idea of capturing somebody in her youth from 1939.
It’s also the specificity of that moment and what it
is about that—just in her face—that registers
that precise moment.
The paper itself, it’s not archival. It’s archival
in the sense of historical but it’s not a fine-art material.
It will yellow and darken with time, so no matter what it
resists me in that way. No matter how I may try to build it
into forms, or arc it, or cut it, it will darken and yellow,
which I like. It has its own relationship to time.
ART:21:
There’s something poignant
about figures stuck in time.
GALLAGHER:
I am certainly moved by the
idea. There used to be a store called A&S on 42nd Street
that I would go to to collect these magazines before 42nd
Street
got cleaned up. Among other magazines, there were "Our
World," "Sepia," "Ebony,"
and before about 1960 they’re pretty radical. They’re
certainly not the "Ebony" magazine
that I remember. There were interviews with Haile Selassie,
a Richard Wright article next to a slasher text—they
were dense. There was a necessity to them as a press—as
a black press. They were entertainment, but they had a
kind
of urgency and a necessity to them, also a worldliness. Articles
about drag queen balls in the Bronx way before Jenny Livingston
made "Paris is Burning."
Nightclubs like Lucky’s that were of mixed race. There
was this sense of loss that I felt reading them, but also
it was
exciting
this collection of data and information. They seem radical
compared to what I’m reading today.
ART:21:
How exactly are the paintings
made?
GALLAGHER:
The material is archived. I make
a disk, so it’s digital, which means what you’re
looking at could be from an ad that was two inches or ten
inches big—scale is really infinite and it can shift.
The plasticine is meant to allude to that idea of mutability
and shifting, because plasticine is used in animations and
claymation. Much the same way that penmanship paper is not
a fixed material, the plasticine will always continue to be
vulnerable. Next I build a grid of these 396 pages with this
idea of what will relate to what. Then the sheets are cut.
The wigs are removed with a knife, and then the sheets are
glued down to the canvas. At that point I begin at the top
left corner and work my way across and down, building these
blobby plasticine forms. And they’re really built directly
wig to wig. There’s a kind of improvisation that happens.
You’ll do about nine wigs a day, or nine prosthetics
a day. And they relate to each other over time. You can see
shifts which is also why I like to show more than one painting
together, because they mark quite a long time period in making.
Using paper as support for printed
material has always been central to my work, from the earliest
penmanship paper works to "DeLuxe," the print project
at Two Palms Press where I’m working in collaboration
with printmakers and people building alongside of me.
What was exciting for me here was that what happens as whimsy
in the drawings or as a decision made with an improvisational
spirit (for example, when I would make a choice to blindfold
characters or obliterate names underneath characters) would
have to be structured so that it could be repeated twenty
times. And it was exciting to see, repeated as a language,
something that was usually a one-to-one experience. I would
make these little squares and they would then be hand-cut
and traced, so each sort of whimsical obliteration or recovery
would be created into a kind of structure or language, back
and forth. That was really exciting, in terms of looking at
my work and my language, and having it mean something even
in its refusals to be completely readable. There’s this
call and response that you actually feel directly as you’re
working in this kind of collaboration.
I really get excited by this idea that a printed material
can be so widely distributed. The black press was widely distributed
and there is a great American history of manifestos. I was
always jealous of writers because their story could be in
so many different hands—it didn’t have to occur
only in a gallery or a museum. There is a possibility for
distribution and freedom.
ART:21:
Is there anything about your
work that needs to be debunked?
GALLAGHER:
Debunked, hmm. What’s seen
as political in the work is a kind of one-to-one reading of
the signs as opposed to a more formal reading of the materials,
how it’s made, or what insistences are made. I think
people get overwhelmed by the super-signs of race when, in
fact, my relationship to some of the more over-determined
signs in the work is very tangential. What I think is more
repeated than that in the work is a kind of mutability and
moodiness to the signs. And that’s more what I think
the work is about than a one-to-one reading of the signs,
however over-determined they may be. You may think that’s
what you’re supposed to be translating. In fact, it’s
this other thing, which requires a kind of confidence that
you have to enter that realm. And I think that’s where
you can talk about race in my work...that idea of the abstract
'I'...what it means to look at somebody who was eighteen in
1939...whatever she was. That’s specificity. It’s
impossible to know who that was. But try anyway to have some
kind of imaginative space with that sign. I think that takes
more balls than to just understand it as some kind of critique
of black hairstyles.
ART:21:
Talk about the elements of joy,
pleasure, and beauty in your work.
GALLAGHER:
I think maybe it’s hard
for some people to look at grid of wig advertisements or
a
group of women. They might be able to see the Andy Warhol
"Sticky Fingers" album cover
but they don’t have the depth that Andy Warhol had
when he looked at that and thought those women were beautiful
and
altered them. Sometimes it’s hard for people who don’t
make things to understand labor, joy, attention, and whimsy.
But it’s in the work—I don’t think it’s
something I need to explain.
