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34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Ulster
‘Astonishing Marine Living. Ellen Gallagher’s “Ichthyosaurus” at the Freud Museum’
Chan's Chapter 5 is pp102-115 of this innovative 288-page collection, edited by internationally renowned art historian Prof Griselda Pollock. The collection arose from a conference panel convened by Prof Pollock in the 2007 Association of Art Historians Conference, where Chan presented a paper on the work of American artist Ellen Gallagher. The collection includes a distinguished group of international researchers working on the interfaces between art and psychoanalytical theories, who dare to think psychoanalytically about the legacies of political violence and suffering in relation to post-traumatic cultures worldwide. It contributes to art historian Aby Warburg's project of combining social, cultural, anthropological and psychological analyses of the image in order to track the undercurrents of cultural violence in the representational repertoire of Western modernity.
In a consideration of Ellen Gallagher’s installation Ichthyosaurus (2005) at London’s Freud Museum, Chan’s chapter draws on post-colonial and feminist theories of art, culture and identity, to analyse the racialized politics of psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytical explanations of the traumatic operations of racism. She examines the installation’s complex engagement with Freud’s space of work through artworks inspired by Afro-futurist myths of diasporic feminine identity. The chapter makes the proposition that the Freud Museum is re-conceived as a diaspora space which reveals correspondences and connections between thinkers of Jewish and African diasporas. Chan innovatively theorises Gallagher’s radical representations of feminine identity derived from Afro-futurist myths of a Black Atlantis populated by survivors of the Middle Passage, by drawing upon Judith Butler’s work on the figure of Antigone. Chan’s chapter contributes to feminist cultural studies and art criticism by tracing inscriptions in Gallagher’s artworks, of an ethics of compassion and traumatic processing, to a non-Oedipal symbolic realm by extending Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s theories of ‘matrixial subjectivity’ to Afro-futurist aesthetics.
Hard back ISBN-10: 1780763166
Soft Cover ISBN-13: 978-1780763163
