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Ellen Gallagher, La Chinoise, 2008

An homage to Godard
The title of Ellen Gallagher’s La Chinoise is a tribute to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film of the same name. The film was inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China, which was still in its early stages at the time and led to the deaths of several million people over the course of a decade. It centers on the members of a Maoist Parisian commune who debate socialism, the Vietnam War, and the necessity of violence in the struggle against the establishment. Yet their simplistic, black-and-white worldview and their practical ineptitude cause their grand plans to collapse in a slapstick and bloody manner.

The political revolution is the form
In this film, as in his other works of the 1960s, Godard breaks with conventional narrative traditions and follows no clear plot. He quotes, montages, collages, and comments; he incorporates comics and comic-book language; he experiments with editing, sound, and color. While the revolutionaries in the film fail, the film itself approaches the medium of cinema in a revolutionary way. The real political revolution lies not in the narrative, but in the cinematic form through which revolution and film themselves are examined.

Fragmented narratives
Through her drawings, paintings, and collages, Gallagher transfers this approach to twenty-first century visual art. Here, too, the focus is on form and on fragmented narratives that reflect on the medium itself. Moreover, her work addresses liberation from centuries of oppression. Gallagher explores colonial history, African American identity, the African diaspora, racism, and the loss and recovery of Black narratives.

Afrofuturism
Gallagher’s art is often discussed in connection with Afrofuturism, an aesthetic, philosophy, and artistic movement that combines elements of science fiction, fantasy, history, and technology with the experiences of the African diaspora. Indeed, many of the historical, mythical, and fictional figures that appear in her work recall characters from horror and fantasy films such as Black Panther or Blood & Sinners, which are influenced by Afrofuturism.

Snail-like alien
La Chinoise is the title of two collage works in which strict geometric forms encounter organic elements. In the work from the Deutsche Bank Collection, one can discern a grid of rectangular pieces of paper and text fragments from which ghostly heads with cardboard locks and a snail-like extraterrestrial creature emerge. The grid structure alludes to Minimal Art, a movement of the 1960s and 1970s dominated by white men that was characterized by its clean and geometrically reduced forms. Not only the blob and the heads disrupt this aspired-to purity and Zen-like emptiness, but so do the pasted-in text fragments.

History as a construct
One text describes the fighting style of Sonny Liston (1932–1970), a Black boxer who was twice world heavyweight champion in the 1960s before being defeated by Muhammad Ali. Liston struggled with drug addiction and had connections to organized crime; he could easily have been a typical Godard character. The other text addresses the government of Félix Éboué (1884–1944), a Black French colonial politician who served as Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa. The fragmented blocks of text running through the image are reminiscent of Godard’s cuts and montages, and his approach of not retelling history in a binary way, but disrupting it and questioning it as a construct.