Doo-Wop (That Thing)

I highly recommend that you seek out the work of Ellen Gallagher if you're not already on intimate terms with it. I was lucky enough to discover her sharp, pop collages at the Whitney a few weeks ago in DeLuxe, a slim yet highly provocative exhibition of her work (through May 15).

The Brooklyn Rail has an illuminating interview with the artist about a new portfolio of her work. To wit:

Rail: So you think it’s okay that a lot of it is impenetrable? This feels like something I could study for a while, or that I should. In a way, I want to ask you about historical allusions everywhere. It just feels like they’re stories for you to tell. But that’s not what is happening visually here. It interests me in wanting to know more. Is there a character that is being brought forward here?

Gallagher: I hope DeLuxe exists as kind of a picaresque. I like the structure of a picaresque novel, where it’s one character continually evolving through all these archetypal characters, which is so funny to me. I also very much like the form of Melville’s The Confidence Man. It starts off on a steamship, and at the beginning of each chapter or segment there appears a new character who inevitably turns out to be a huckster. The first image in the book is the sign “No confidence here,” meaning “no credit.” And it’s Melville’s meditation on the American character—is the American character a series of fractured sells or are we a single sell? The way the book takes form is you never know if it’s the same character in several different guises or whether we’re just a steamship filled with ourselves all pulling a trick. Are we a fractured self or are we just this one character—the con man. It’s basically a meditation that says if a culture loses its innocence, and we become so tough skinned that we lose our ability to be tricked, we lose that innocence. And what gets lost are the cords that allow us to give credit to each other. Those suspended links of disbelief. If you actually become so worldly and you lose that—if we are all so knowing, knowing of our own limitations, we can never really enter each other, we create these finite points ahead of time. What kind of culture are we, how can we really exist, if we have to be so future-fixed.

Rail: And ultimately so isolated.

Gallagher: I read somewhere that the word onos, which means “nostalgia,” appears for the first time in the Odyssey. So he is looking backward, but he has to go forward each time. He gets back in the boat, he has to continue traveling. He’s desperately trying to go home, but of course he must go forward and have all these adventures, and through his future he ends up back home.

You can read the whole thing right here.