In a new series, ‘Artist on my mind’, writers discuss an artist whose work feels particularly visionary and relevant right now. Below, Bárbara Borges de Campos reflects on the work of the conceptual artist Glenn Ligon (1960-).
On the eve of his assassination on 4 April 1968 Martin Luther King was in Memphis supporting sanitation workers on strike. Later, the employees’ protest would be immortalised by their signs stating: “I am a man”. This was a fateful visit to the South that abruptly shortened the life of the most prominent leader of the American Civil Rights Movement.
African-American artist Glenn Ligon’s Untitled (I am a Man) (1988) is a direct allusion to this historic moment. In his artwork, Ligon painted with oil and enamel—two materials that when mixed disintegrate. This process of dissolution and degradation is aligned with Ligon’s interest in history as a mutable process in personal and collective memory. It is a perfect union of form, content and concept. Our callous proclivity to neglect the past, just like how the two mixed paints, that with time, crack and fade away, lead to the repetition of atrocities and prejudice.
Initially, Ligon’s work followed in the tradition of the New York abstract expressionists. Over time, his expressive canvases began to incorporate words and phrases, for example, Untitled (I am drawn to sleaze) (1985) includes a quote from a gay porn magazine. The painterly gave way to the conceptual and textuality—“I had a crisis of sorts when I realised there was too much of a gap between what I wanted to say and the means I had to say it with.” So, Ligon’s practice began examining the disparity between the legible and illegible.
"It leaves the task of decoding to the beholder. An undertaking complicated by a history of misunderstanding and blindness."
Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (originally published in 1928) served as inspiration for a series of works by the artist. In Untitled (I do not always feel colored) (1990) the phrase “I do not always feel colored” is repeated throughout the surface of a door. For Ligon, the door was the ideal canvas—doors are scaled for the human body and intimately connected to the experience of the self.
Doors are also a means of getting from one space to another, yet they do not belong to either. As such, the experience of being black is presented as transient. Tenuously integrated into a broader existence and society, yet without having a definite space, always along the margins. With use, the ‘printed’ letters in stencil become smudged, creating a tension between what is visible and what is not. Ultimately, reiterating ‘blackness’ as ambiguous, incomprehensible to others, and on the fringes of humanity.
Ligon’s interest in the study of legibility and visibility prompted him to experiment with black letters on black canvas, layering paint, oilstick and coal dust. In a series of works which quote James Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953) he adopts this method. In the piece, Baldwin describes his experiences with invisibility, so it is not incidental that Ligon opts for black-on-black in his reference to the text. In his corresponding work, Untitled (Stranger in the Village #17) (2000) words near abstraction—it is through their texture that they become palpable. The painting encourages a conscientious study, a decipherment of each letter and word. It leaves the task of decoding to the beholder. An undertaking complicated by a history of misunderstanding and blindness.
Baldwin encounters this invisibility in Western Europe: “I … find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence.” He goes on to argue that “the black man, as a man did not exist in Europe”—a damaging idea that persists to this day. Through remnants of colonialism—which separated black people to beyond the ‘nation’, to colonies—we have continued to isolate people of colour from our societies. The colonial trope of distance lingers in pushing black and people of colour to the peripheries of our cities and to the margins of society. This is not unlike the visual effects of Ligon’s Study for Debris Field #7 (2018)—individual letters appear in monochrome backgrounds, dense archipelagos against a backdrop of uniformity.
Ligon’s practice explores an enduring veil of stubborn prejudices that obfuscate humanity. As we look bluntly to America today, we must look, too, at ourselves: at Europe and its colonial history. There is no reason why the old dictum must remain an aphorism, history does not have to repeat itself.