Glenn Ligon: Pt II

II.



Feast of Scraps (1994-98), detail, photographs and text, 29.2 x 52.1 cm. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Glenn Ligon.

ART iT: We were just speaking about how art balances between transgression and aesthetization, and how what is considered dangerous at one moment is normalized the next. Two projects that relate to this are the installation you made for the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991-93), and A Feast of Scraps (1994-98), where you’ve taken images of black men from different sources and recontextualized them through additional interventions. Do both works emerge from the same concerns?

GL: I think they do. The first one focused on Mapplethorpe’s Black Book (1986), a collection of all of his photographs of black men. I took the book apart, literally cut the illustrations out and framed them, and then juxtaposed them with quotes about the images, about the history of the representation of black people, about issues of censorship and homophobia. The quotes also included commentary from people I interviewed, some of whom had actually sat for the portraits. It was a way to think about all these debates around Mapplethorpe’s images – and his images of black men in particular – in the public space. I didn’t want to say, “You can’t look at these images because I, Glenn Ligon, think they’re racist.” I want the viewer to be able to look at the images, but to look at them within the space of the debate that happens around them. Viewers had to choose. It would have been fine if they simply looked at the images without reading the text, or they could read the text with the images. But ultimately I thought the project was limited because it was only about one photographer’s take on black people, and there are many other takes. I thought, if I were to do this project a different way, how would I do it? One of the critiques of Mapplethorpe’s photographs is that the men in the photographs never appear in groups, never appear with any context that speaks to their social lives or family histories; there’s nothing beyond the photographer’s studio. I thought that what I should make is a work using the images that were the source material and inspiration for Mapplethorpe’s photos, so for Feast of Scraps I collected pornographic images of black men, but put them in a new context, the family photo album, where they were juxtaposed with images that you would see in anybody’s photo album, such as photos of weddings, picnics, little kids.
For me this was a way of thinking about several things. One was context: these men have families, communities that they come from. But I was also thinking about the family album as a space where families represent themselves to themselves, and how often gay sexuality is not represented in those spaces, or is represented in covert ways. I remember looking at my own family albums and seeing a picture of two men together, and when I would ask who they are, the reply would be, “Oh, that’s cousin George, and his ‘friend.'” There was no explanation of who the “friend” was. When I was older I understood what that was about, but it struck me that there’s always a silence around this kind of representation. The family album can’t really contain it.


Notes on the Margin of the “Black Book” (1991-93), detail and installation view, 91 offset prints, 78 text pages; offset prints 29.2 x 29/2 cm each (framed); text pages, 13.3 x 18.4 cm each (framed).

ART iT: With the pornographic images for Feast of Scraps, were you aware of who had made the images in the same way that you were with Mapplethorpe?

GL: No. It wasn’t like I found “good” images to counter Mapplethorpe’s “bad” images. Working on Notes on the Margin it was important for me to realize that Mapplethorpe’s images were neither good nor bad, and that’s what the project was about in a way. I had actually planned to divide everything into either good or bad images, but I quickly realized that would be a limited project because there were so many images about which I couldn’t decide. The quotes became a way to think about the images in general without putting a rubber stamp on them.
With Feast of Scraps, I took a risk because I didn’t know who took those photos and what the circumstances were that produced them, so in some ways I was laying myself open to the same critique I was making of Mapplethorpe. But I feel the context is important for allowing a different way of reading the images. If they appear in a family album they’re not just pornography any more, because you’re seeing them in a new context.
The great thing about images is that we don’t all agree on what they mean. We can look at the same images and have different readings of them. That’s what those projects were about for me.

ART iT: Another work that emerged from this exploration is a group of large silkscreened canvases dealing with the Million Man March, held in Washington, DC, in 1995, in which you decontextualize the source images. In this case were you shifting the critical lens to focus on how not just a person but also an entire event can be misrepresented?

GL: Yes. With newspaper images there’s always a caption, a frame that explains to viewers what they’re looking at: “This is a march of black men in Washington about black solidarity, and this is what it means.” Newspaper and magazine images come with a text to explain the images. But I felt the Million Man March was a much more ambivalent event than that. It seemed strange to organize a march around black visibility in America when black people have been here since the country was founded. Why do we need to organize marches to be visible? It seemed the whole premise of the march was wrong.
I took images from newspapers and magazines that had been used to explain the march and removed all the explanations. Suddenly freed from their media context, the images became open to different interpretations. When I looked at the images I thought, the images don’t explain what they think they’re explaining, or the images have more in them than the captions explaining them say, or can say.
In some ways my bigger project always returns to this dynamic between abstraction and legibility. Images with captions are readable; images without captions are less readable. I was taking something that appeared to be very legible in the context of the newspaper and making it less legible, but in making it less legible other things appeared.


Top: We’re Black and Strong (I) (1996), silkscreen ink and gesso on unstretched canvas, 304.8
x 213.4 cm. Bottom: Red Portfolio (1993), detail, suite of nine black-and-white photographs,
edition of 5 and 1 AP, 50.8 x 40.6 cm.

ART iT: The reverse also holds true in your Red Portfolio (1993), in which the captions replace the images.

GL: I made Notes on the Margin for the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which then traveled to Seoul, but the piece was so large that there wasn’t enough room to display it there. I decided to make a different piece that would also be based on Mapplethorpe, but deal more with questions of censorship that weren’t fully addressed in Notes on the Margin. I found a fundraising letter complaining about Mapplethorpe’s work written by Pat Robertson, who was then the head of a conservative organization called the Christian Coalition. Robertson essentially wrote, “You are supporting filth and pornography in the form of an exhibition by Robert Mapplethorpe that is being funded by tax-payer dollars. This is an outrage. I can’t show you the images, but if you open the red envelope inside this mailer, you will understand the filth and pornography that your tax dollars are funding.” In the envelope were written descriptions of Mapplethorpe photographs, and I simply photographed the descriptions, which were things like, “A picture of a naked man in bed with naked children.” I called the piece the Red Portfolio because Robertson’s descriptions came in a red envelope. In the American context, red is the color of sin. Robertson was very clever in putting this list of forbidden material in a red envelope, so that when you open the envelope it’s like you are opening up sin itself. Pat Robertson needs Mapplethorpe, needs sin and pornography, to get his message across. It’s a fund-raising letter. He perfectly understands that he needs people to be outraged to send him checks.
Many of the photographs that are being described in that piece are from a portfolio of S&M-themed images. It comes in a little black box, and when you open the lid, between each photo is a sheet of red paper. For example, you lift up the red paper and there’s a photo of a man being fist-fucked. I thought, Robertson’s staging the same thing in his fund-raising letter that Mapplethorpe is staging in the portfolio box for these photos.
Another thing that is interesting is that although Robertson describes one photograph as being of a “naked man in bed with naked children,” Mapplethorpe never took any such photograph. Mapplethorpe took photographs of naked children, and he took photographs of naked men, but never naked men and children together. It’s Robertson’s own fantasy – and he is the head of a very conservative Christian organization. Realizing that the photograph he was describing doesn’t exist told me a lot about how the mind works and the limits of this kind of censorship and morality that dictates we can only think one way, because the people who are telling you to do so aren’t even thinking that way.

ART iT: In that way the Red Portfolio connects to a series of drawings you recently made called the FOIA Drawings (2011), in which you white out all the text surrounding redacted passages in what were once classified documents. These initially may look like abstractions, but they are an incredibly vivid reflection of the mechanics of censorship.

GL: Yes, FOIA stands for the Freedom of Information Act. The work was based on thinking about documents that were declassified but still censored. Documents you could read but couldn’t read. The documents are now available to the public, but the things that were deemed secret are still secret. I downloaded all these FBI documents on Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers, printed them out, and then whited out all the text that you could read, so you have the crossed out black text indicating what was censored, along with white strips covering what was not. It’s interesting when you think of the lengths power goes to keep people in check, but also the fear behind that impulse. Even though Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers represented and wanted very different things for American society, the amount of surveillance on them was equally intense.


FOIA Drawings (2011), detail, 30 drawings, silkscreen and mixed media on paper, each
unframed 30.5 x 22.9 cm; framed 35.6 x 27.9 cm.

ART iT: To conclude, your works are rooted in an American context, but how do you see them traveling overseas, or in this case, Japan?

GL: The first time I saw Islamic calligraphy I realized that the prohibition in Islam against representing the Prophet enabled calligraphy to flourish because it had to stand in for what could not be represented. Even though I didn’t know how to read the Arabic that was in front of me, the way the letters were formed, the type of ink that was used, the paper support, all those things were interesting to me. I think that’s one way for a viewer to approach the work, through formal issues.
But also I think that if one has a little background and knows the basic story about Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village,” he’s talking about his specific experience, but it really is a universal experience of what it means to go some place and not be from there, and to literally be a stranger. I think the question of readability and unreadability projected onto a body is an experience all of us have to think about and understand.
I’m curious to see what people make of the work here in Japan. I think one of the problems of Modernism, particularly in architecture, is the idea that Modernism needed to reproduce itself in legible forms throughout the world. Well, it didn’t work. It had to be adapted. And that’s what makes it vital and interesting. Universal systems don’t work, they have to be adapted to local contexts and people have to understand those contexts. I think we’re beyond the notion that anything could possibly be read the same way everywhere, or even be legible, without some kind of work or dialogue. But that is not to say that there aren’t ways that things can be appreciated that are totally different from the intent of the makers. When you hear of those things it can be really liberating.

Pt I

Glenn Ligon: Ecriture/Erasure/Ecstasis

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