Blue Black Ecstasy: Ellen Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic, Oceanic Feeling, and Mysticism in the Flesh

Ellen Gallagher's ongoing series 'Watery Ecstatic' depicts real and imaginary underwater life through drawings, films, reliefs, and paintings. The article argues that this series engages with mysticism, (para)religion, and constructions of blackness, humanness, and animality. Placing the series in conversation with Sigmund Freud and Fred Moten, the author identifies a particular kind of mysticism called blue black mysticism: an experience of sociality that, through the oceanic, refuses categorical distinctions and modes of identification that ground normative and racialized ideations of humanness and subjectivity. This mysticism, by engaging the alterity of the ocean, troubles the racialized, hierarchical boundary between human and nonhuman animals.

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Abstract

Abstract Since 2001, visual artist Ellen Gallagher has been working on “Watery Ecstatic,” an ongoing, expansive project that depicts real and imaginary underwater life through drawings, films, reliefs, and paintings. Thus far, this series—indeed, Gallagher’s oeuvre—has not been studied by scholars of religion. Arguing that the series provokes an extended conversation about mysticism, (para)religion, and constructions of blackness, humanness, and animality, this article addresses this lacuna. Placing the series in conversation with Sigmund Freud and Fred Moten, I argue that “Watery Ecstatic” displays a particular kind of mysticism that I call blue black mysticism: an experience of sociality that, in and through the oceanic, refuses the categorical distinctions and modes of identification that ground and mark normative and racialized ideations of humanness and subjectivity. I suggest, further, that blue black mysticism, because it engages the alterity of the ocean, offers a prime site to trouble the racialized, hierarchical boundary between human and nonhuman animals.