Glenn Ligon: Pt I

ECRITURE/ERASURE/ECSTASIS
By Andrew Maerkle





Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) (1990-91), oil stick, gesso and graphite on wood panel, 203.2 x 76.2 cm. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Glenn Ligon.

Based in New York, Glenn Ligon is best known for his text paintings reproducing passages from literary sources that range from the works of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein and Jean Genet to the lyrics of the rapper Ice Cube. Made with stencils and thickly applied oil stick on canvas, these paintings imbue their powerful and at times shocking source texts with a powerful materiality that catapults different voices across history into a specific encounter in the present. Ligon’s light pieces, often made by dipping neon tubes in black paint, further explore the dynamics between the conceptual and formal aspects of text, and the mechanics of reading.

Ligon presented new and recent text and neon pieces in a solo exhibition at Rat Hole Gallery in Tokyo, held from March to June of this year. ART iT met with Ligon before the exhibition opened to discuss his work in greater detail.

Interview:


Installation view, “Glenn Ligon,” Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, 2013. Photo ART iT.

ART iT: I thought we could start with a broad question and see where it takes us. For me, one of the interesting things about your body of work is the dialectic it performs between image and abstraction, and of course one of the issues you deal with is the construction of race in the United States, which itself is predicated on a similar dialectic. For example, authorities create a racial profile to use in policing minorities, which is both a kind of representation and an abstraction, and even historically an interesting precedent is the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787, which was literally an issue about representational government, and was essential to the establishment of the US Constitution. How do you understand the dynamics between representation and abstraction in your own practice?

GL: My work generally has not been figurative, even though the text in the work often refers to the figure; or the format – the size of the image, the scale of the image – refers in some way to the figure. What’s been there from the beginning is an investigation of the notion of figuration without the figure being present, which, as you say, is a kind of abstraction. The very earliest paintings I did using text were made on door panels. I would take a single sentence from an essay and repeat it in oil stick down the length of the door. Those paintings were essentially about the body, because doors are scaled to the human body, and the texts I was using all had the word “I” in them, so there was the idea of the body or figuration through language, although not through actually representing the body. At the time the artists who interested me, such as Rauschenberg, Johns, Twombly, and later conceptual artists like Kosuth, Kruger, or Nauman, were all artists who thought about ways of using language.
Certainly another concern of the work – though not exclusively – has been racial representation and the complexities of how that gets figured in an American context. I think there’s the idea of refusal in the work too, because it goes from specifics – a sentence you can read – to abstraction, which is a kind of thwarting of identity. And that back and forth between the specific and the concrete, and from clarity to abstraction, parallels the way racial identity actually operates, as opposed to the fixed categories we imagine it to have.

ART iT: What does abstraction offer to you as a language that you don’t necessarily find in figuration?

GL: At the start of my career I was exploring what in some ways was a very clichéd idea from Abstract Expressionism about the freedom of the artist. The mythology of the artist wrestling with their demons alone in their studio surrounded by buckets of paint had great appeal to me. But when I started using text I realized that it might be interesting to merge the idea of this romantic notion of the artist’s freedom with the restriction that using text necessarily implies. When you see a text you want to read it. But if that text turns into something else – turns into abstraction – then it becomes loosened from its meaning. That process of transformation from something specific to something abstract is really interesting to me.


Warm Broad Glow II (2011), neon, paint and powder-coated aluminum, 73.7 x 614.7 x 11.7 cm. Photo Ron Amstutz.

ART iT: In the early works the text starts off quite legible and then gradually falls apart. However, over time you began to make works in which the entire text is somewhat illegible. Why was this?

GL: It’s partly because my method changed. In the early paintings it was about a method derived from artists like Sol Lewitt, who would set up a system and follow it out to its end. I would start at the top of a door panel with letter stencils and oil sticks, and I would stencil a single sentence over and over again until I reached the bottom of the panel. As I stenciled the text it would gradually disappear. In the later works I’m dealing with a paragraph, a large body of text, so the process of disappearance is different. The entire surface becomes a kind of abstraction. The paintings all have different degrees of legibility and illegibility, but because you know there are letters there, and because they are difficult to decipher, they mirror the difficulty of their subject matter. The struggle with the text in the paintings, the struggle to read something, to understand something, came out of attempting to use a text entitled “A Stranger in the Village” by the American author James Baldwin. The essay was written in the 1950s when Baldwin was living in a tiny village in Switzerland and realized that for many of the villagers he was the first black person they had ever seen. The essay tries to deal with the notion of what it means to be an “other,” what it means to be both hyper-visible and illegible at the same time. Everybody in the village knows him, yet nobody knows him. So that back-and-forth between legibility and abstraction got worked out on the canvases as I made the text go in and out of focus. But I also think my paintings became more abstract when I started working with neon, because the texts in the neons are very clear and they freed the paintings to be more abstract. The neons I make – which are all text-based – do not want to be abstract, even as I play with the way the words appear in order to move them towards abstraction. The simplicity of the neons allows me to be clear, but in a complicated way.

ART iT: One of the mechanisms of the paintings is that through their illegibility they incorporate the contingency of language, or specifically reading. If you can make out one letter, you can make out a whole word, and if you can make out one word, you can make out the word that follows, but at some point it breaks down. In English we have idioms like “set in stone” which suggest that the written word is fixed, real, law, but what your paintings get at is that, actually, that’s not the case. Reading is as projective as any other method we have for processing what’s around us.

GL: I think any painting I do is a kind of argument with the text. It’s about agreeing and disagreeing. James Baldwin spent a lot of energy trying to unpack what it means to be a racialized subject, and in some ways I’m very interested in that desire to be clear. But I also realize that the self is beyond clarity or closure: James Baldwin can’t have the last word on it because it keeps evolving as a concept. So the paintings in a way are asking, where are we now with the concept of the self? Are we still at the moment where we think things need to be, or can be, explained? Maybe we’re at the point where things are not ever going to be clear, and this space, where things are unclear and uncertain and impure, is a more interesting space to be in. Maybe that’s the space we’re at rather than the moment in the 1950s, when Baldwin was writing, when there was a necessity to speak and be heard and to articulate identity succinctly. Maybe there’s power in acknowledging that these things will never be clear or totally transparent. That’s just not how humans work.

ART iT: “Stranger in the Village” is a text you have seemingly returned to more often than other sources. What keeps bringing you back?

GL: “Stranger in the Village” is a very powerful, dense complicated text and I keep coming back to it because there’s always something new for me to find there. But also because I’ve used it so much I can almost ignore the text. Being able to ignore the text allows me to deal with formal things like the balance of light and dark, surface, density, etc. It’s a sneaky way for me to be the abstract painter that I started out as, while at the same time using a text that’s very specific, that is rooted in a particular cultural history or set of issues. I use the text so much because it allows me to do opposite things at the same time, to be both very specific and create an abstraction.


Mudbone (Liar) (1993), oil stick, synthetic polymer and graphite, 81.3 x 81.3 cm.

ART iT: I imagine that another reason for this dynamic between specificity and abstraction is that, although it probably takes a long time to make one of the paintings, for viewers the initial impact is immediate, and then it’s up to each person to decide how much time to spend attempting to decode the text or simply appreciating the formal aspects of the work. In contrast to this, you have another group of paintings with the jokes by Richard Pryor, which take on a more performative approach to language.

GL: Those paintings are difficult in another way. Richard Pryor was an interesting comedian, because he told jokes that one laughed at but weren’t really funny. Also, so much of his comedy was about how he used his body. He acted out his texts. He was a very astute critic of American culture, and he was a favorite of mine when I was a kid. I decided to start using his jokes to make paintings because I realized that the same critique of American society that many of the authors I was reading were making could be found in Richard Pryor’s comedy routines. Also I found it interesting to use a text that didn’t come from literature with a capital L, but instead came from popular culture.
The joke is where a lot of the things that usually can’t be said in America get said. When I first started using Pryor’s jokes it was hard because they have words like “nigger” or “faggot” in them, all sorts of things that people don’t want to see on the walls of museums and galleries. So it was difficult to make those paintings and difficult to display them. They pushed all my self-censoring buttons. But eventually I got over it and realized that their “in-your-faceness” is part of their power, and that I could use that idea of transgression in the work.

ART iT: With these works you also render the paintings through layers of different colors so that the text shifts in and out of legibility, but there’s an added distraction because these are literal transcriptions of spoken words, incorporating verbal tics and stuttering.

GL: Yes. Up until that point a lot of the texts I used had been from literature, and Pryor isn’t. It was important to me that if I was going to use his jokes I should use them the way he delivered them, with all the stuttering and verbal tics included, in order to make the paintings speak. So they are paintings that you read, but they are also paintings about voice and speech.


Top: Narratives (1993), detail, suite of nine photo etchings on chine collé, edition of 45 with 10 APs, 71.1 x 53.3 cm each. Middle: Runaways (1993), detail, suite of 10 lithographs, edition of 45 with 5 HCs; composition (irreg): 31.9 x 22.7 cm; sheet: 40.7 x 30.5 cm each. Bottom: To Disembark (1994), wood crates, synthetic polymer, audio recording, 10 lithographs and nine etchings with chine collé, dimensions variable.

ART iT: In the exhibition “To Disembark” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1993, you presented works including the series “Runaways” and “Narratives,” which are modeled on historical documents related to slavery and the abolitionist movement. How much research went into those works, and how much research goes into your practice in general?

GL: I’m not a good historian, I can’t keep facts in my head, but I like to do research and find things. Even though my work often seems to be about text, the research is more visual than text based. I’ll usually start a project by looking at images. For example, “Runaways” and “Narratives” came about because I was at the New York Public Library, where there is an archive of images called the “Clipping Files.” These were images that were compiled by librarians – pre-Internet – who would go through old magazines and newspapers and cut out images that were then organized by category. So if you look at the file labeled “US Presidents,” for example, it contains hundreds and hundreds of cutout images of US presidents. I was looking at the file called “Slavery,” and came upon an image of a lithograph from around 1849 depicting a box with a man emerging from it. The caption read, “Henry Box Brown, a slave on a plantation in Virginia who, to escape slavery, was nailed inside a box and mailed to Philadelphia to an anti-slavery society.” That image was so riveting that I had to find out more about it. A whole body of work was based on seeing that one image. So even though the work was ultimately very much about text, it started out with that image.
Right now I’m thinking about another project based on Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. It’s impossible to do a project “about” Invisible Man – it’s too big – but I plan on making a film exploring the life and relationship of Ralph and his wife, Fanny. This project started because I saw a fantastic photo of the couple in their apartment in New York, and thought, we seem to know a lot about Ralph Ellison but do we know anything about Fanny? She was a fantastic figure in her own right, but at some point she decided that Ralph was the genius and that she was simply there support him. I want to make a film that explores that dynamic.
So research is a way to make connections to things I wouldn’t normally make connections with. It’s a way to get new ideas into the work, a way to get out of the studio.

ART iT: Pointedly, one of your “Narratives” addresses your own ambivalent position with regard to these works, advertising an account of your “commodification of the horrors of black life into art objects for the public’s enjoyment.” Why did you feel that was necessary?

GL: The problem of art is that one is making aesthetic objects, and these aesthetic objects can’t help but clean up messy, complicated things. I think art always has to deal with this issue. It’s not only the artwork that deals with history that confronts this problem – it’s any kind of work. Think about the reception of Jackson Pollock: when he started showing his drip paintings in the 1950s people were outraged. Now if a museum has a Pollock show there are lines around the block. So what is transgressive and dangerous at one moment gets consumed by the culture over time and becomes normalized or even celebrated. This is a difficulty that we always have to confront.

Pt II

Glenn Ligon: Ecriture/Erasure/Ecstasis

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