Ellen Gallagher: Orbus
Until February 13; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Orbus is Latin for orphan. I looked it up, in an effort to make sense of Ellen Gallagher’s exhibition of the same name. Armed with this new clue, I feel one step closer to understanding it.

Gallagher represented the USA at the last Venice Biennale in 2003, and has been busy since then making much of the work on show at the Fruitmarket. Later this month, she’ll also open a show of 60 new prints at the Whitney Museum in New York. That’s surely too much to do in eighteen months, and I think it shows.

The politics of identity loom large in the New York artist’s work, from Afro wigs to African slave mythology. Because her father’s father came from Africa, Gallagher is routinely described as African-American, but with an Irish mother, she likes to point out that she’s just as much Irish-American.

Neither of which makes Gallagher an orphan, but the truth is that most people in the USA are culturally orphaned. Understanding their roots can become a strange obsession for Americans, as anyone who lives near a tartan shop will know.

For most African Americans, the story of their roots is brutal. Their ancestors were torn from their lives on another continent and shipped to America as slaves. Stolen from their motherland, they were cultural orphans who had to create a new identity for themselves with what they had left.

Ever since, that identity has been a complex mix of pride, assimilation and denial in varying degrees, and Gallagher makes no attempt to unravel it. Take the wigs, for example: the artist loves to use vintage adverts for elaborate afro wigs, as in her most spectacular work, Double Natural.

The wigs are accentuated with yellow plasticene, and the eyes are missing from the faces. The immediate impression is of people hiding behind masks. You could argue that, as the wigs are yellow, these people would rather be blonde, but on the other hand the shapes and names of the wigs are a celebration of blackness. Immediately, you have pride, assimilation and denial in one image.

Wigs also make a surprise appearance in one of the five short films in the show. Using bits of footage from the cult classic, They Came From Outer Space, the artist has scratched wild yellow hair onto the baddies to denote their alien status. “Don’t be afraid”, they tell their victims, “It is within our power to look like you…For a time it will be necessary to do this.”

While wigs take up much of the artist’s attention, most of the rest is spent on underwater creatures. On the harsh journey across the Atlantic, sick slaves used to be thrown overboard, including women in labour. Legend has it that these women and their babies survived and mutated underwater, populating the mythical aquatic world of Drexciya.

It’s a beautiful story, and a lyrical extension of Gallagher’s orphan metaphor. It ties in with the wigs too, the creatures sporting hair-dos quite out of this world. The artist carves them into watercolour paper with a knife, in tribute to the scrimshaw drawings, carved in bone, of whale-fishers like her grandfather.

Gallagher’s detailed carved drawings of exotic crustaceans bring to mind Victorian curiosity cabinets full of interesting specimens. The Victorians would have loved to find that on closer scrutiny, their specimens had beautiful African faces. They would have been cherished, as objects to own and display.

That’s the thing about exoticism. It may mean beauty, mystery and allure, but it also means alienation and the danger of being hunted down and caged. Still, black Americans have aspired to extraordinariness, if the wigs are anything to go by. Gallagher celebrates these extravagant creations with humour and romance.

After the wigs and the underwater creatures, there’s not much left in the exhibition. The artist continually revisits the same ideas in different materials, repeating them rather than reworking them.

In her animated films, underwater creatures wiggle about a bit. The films are disappointingly meagre, both technically and in terms of content. Then there is a big rubber collage of a woman sporting an afro, and a similar collage of an underwater island.

The wall drawing, consisting of wobbly lines, hand-drawn through carbon paper, is totally out of place. It's exactly the kind of low-tech aesthetic you'd associate with Glasgow's Transmission Gallery, and it's as if these blurry lines have sneakily gatecrashed Gallagher's show.

Judging by the interview screened in the video room, the artist is highly articulate and well worth listening to. But if this show is anything to go by, what Gallagher communicates in speech far outweighs what she manages to say in the art itself.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 02.01.05