Gleen Ligon How Does He Chose His Text in His Art
Since the 1980s, conceptual artist Glenn Ligon has incorporated practices of literature, Abstract Expressionism, photo-based media and appropriation to critically explore problems of identity, politics, sexuality and personal desire, to dazzling effect.
The materials Ligon employs to create his large-calibration, often monochromatic works are as varied and textured as the subjects he explores. He moves seamlessly beyond screen printing, oil paint, white neon painted black and even coal dust, and uses quotations from Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin and comedian Richard Pryor in many of his well-nigh widely recognized works.
In 2011, Ligon's first major mid-career retrospective, "Glenn Ligon: America," was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Although drawing comparisons to artists such as Jenny Holzer or fifty-fifty David Hammons is tempting though tenuous, a more than precise parallel is to Abstract Expressionists such as Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg, whom Ligon ofttimes cites as early influences.
The High Museum of Art's inclusion of Ligon's 1988 work "There is a consciousness we all have …" in its electric current exhibition "Fast Forward: Modern Moments" is felicitous. The piece — a relatively small rust-colored work of oil on paper — uses the text from commentary by former High Museum Director Ned Rifkin (then chief curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden) in a New York Times write-up on the celebrated sculptor Martin Puryear. The quotation reads, in its entirety: "There is a consciousness we all have that he is a black American artist (by madison 
ArtsATL spoke with Ligon in accelerate of his artist lecture at the Loftier Museum this Thursday, Jan 10, at 7 p.m. Following is an edited excerpt of our conversation.
ArtsATL: In the summer of 2011, I went to your retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was actually interesting to see the progression from some of the earliest works to the electric current neon "America" works, so I wanted to start off by simply talking about that progression a lilliputian scrap. I of the things I noticed was this shift from the apply of color to a lot of blackness-and-white monochromatic works and then back to color in the mid-to-tardily 2000s. I'grand thinking of those very early on more personal works. What acquired that shift from more colorful personal works to using other text or to reappropriating text in your work?
Glenn Ligon: With the works that have color in them — the Richard Pryor joke paintings and the coloring volume paintings — I recall the shift there was in some ways trying to call back about colour once again, because I started out as an abstruse painter. And then earlier the text work I was doing abstractions, but they were merely abstractions and very involved in color and composition. I decided that that wasn't the direction in which my work was going.
The Pryor paintings were a mode back to colour [while] however using text; it allowed me to think about color more only besides think about it in human relationship to someone like Andy Warhol and his self-portraits from the 1960s. And also it's just a very elementary idea that Richard Pryor needed to be in colour.
ArtsATL: The Richard Pryor works are interesting. They are so bright that they're about kind of difficult to expect at, because if you lot stare at them besides long, they commencement to kind of vibrate.
Ligon: Yes, I call up, partially, if you wait at the Warhol portraits, he'southward a main colorist. A lot of combinations accept that kind of electric charge, and their juxtapositions go hard to look at or obscure the image — that's what I was interested in. Besides because I retrieve Richard Pryor's a comedian only he's not funny, and then I was really interested in work that made the viewer piece of work to see [information technology] but was hard to look at.
ArtsATL: With a lot of your work, yous really make the audience piece of work for information technology. When y'all [read it] deeply, all of these complications arise. I'k thinking of the text piece of work created with oil stick on merely a white background, where the text starts out as this clean line and gradually crescendos into this mass at the bottom of the sail y'all can barely read. When I expect at this work, information technology reminds me of music in the sense that you are using a pre-existing phrase, but you are making it your own or replaying it much like a score in your ain way. Obviously literature is a big influence in your work, only I wonder if music is anything that yous recall about as well.
Ligon: I was but recently at a concert by Steve Reich, and he was talking about some pieces from the '60s — "Come Out" and "It's Gonna Rain" — and the use of repeating, out-of-sync human voices. I'd been listening to Reich for years, and I'd never idea about it in terms of my work. Then suddenly I thought, "That's ridiculous! Why accept I never idea virtually it?" It makes perfect sense. It's my work, basically.
So it was interesting to retrieve most how music has been important, though it'south not been in the forefront. I did a piece for the pianist Jason Moran for a concert based on Thelonius Monk called "In My Listen." What he asked me for, or what I thought he asked me for, was something for an anthology comprehend or poster, and so I took that phrase "In My Heed" and repeated that and made a drawing out of information technology. When I went to the concert, in that location was a whole department where that drawing was existence projected on the screen behind the musicians and they were playing, as Jason said, to the spaces in the drawing, and using the spaces as pauses.
I thought that was amazing, this relationship to music in the piece of work, although non something I had thought about consciously simply something Jason understood. Then yeah, I retrieve music has been a kind of touchstone, peculiarly Monk, who I recollect was influential when I was thinking well-nigh making the Richard Pryor paintings, because the playing is so idiosyncratic and and then much his ain, but absolutely masterful and virtuosic.
I was thinking about that in terms of thinking about Pryor, who tin can seemingly get up and tell a story, just then realized that Paul Mooney was his writing partner [and] if y'all listen to unlike albums they are pursing their material. They inverse the jokes to make them more effective. It's very interesting when you lot realize he's not only up there telling stories. There'south a kind of deep dorsum and forth.
ArtsATL: What is it virtually text that you lot find then intriguing? I've listened to interviews where you lot've talked virtually your upbringing and how your mother would buy y'all and your brother books.
Ligon: Well, I recall for a blackness working-form family, educational activity is the cliché, education was the central, and then there's a lot of emphasis placed on reading and literacy every bit a sort of fashion to accomplish. Also when I was younger I was interested in writing as well, then I think I was more interested in writing than in art.
ArtsATL: Did you lot always want to be a writer when you were growing up?
Ligon: I did, simply at some point I realized that writing is as hard as making art, you know? Information technology got to the point where I could make art every bit a profession; I just idea, "Well, I know lots of artists write," but I find information technology as difficult. I've written a off-white corporeality for magazines, just it's maybe once a twelvemonth. We just published a book of writings right effectually the time of the Whitney testify.
I call back literature was effectually in my childhood, and it's also a place where you lot're legitimately immune to exist alone. I grew upwardly in the Due south Bronx; it was kind of a turbulent neighborhood. I couldn't justify staying inside all the time unless I was doing something that required existence within. So I remember literature became important to me early on on.
But I also grew upwardly effectually appropriation and text. Why write your own when there are texts in the earth? Appropriating text is a fashion of getting certain ideas into the work directly. In a way it'south very straightforward — similar, "Oh, I want these ideas in my work; well, simply use them."
ArtsATL: I recall a lot nearly advertising and the work of artists like Hank Willis Thomas, Barbara Kruger or Martha Rossler and this sort of engagement with the idea of beingness perpetually surrounded past language. It'southward how we navigate the world, and so I want to ask you about this interaction with public infinite and your surroundings and how that comes into the work. You're operating from this very interesting perspective, which is basically you're in this body, as am I, as an creative person, where you are incessantly navigating this idea of beingness a black creative person or being a gay artist or beingness an American artist, and in that location are all these things that play into the work in interesting ways.
Could you lot explain the process of creating "Notes on the Margins of the Blackness Volume," in which you juxtaposed images of by and large black nude men taken from Robert Mapplethorpe's "Blackness Book" with comments most the images collected from people at a bar that Mapplethorpe frequented?
Ligon: You're request a hard question. Specifically with that piece, I just idea that Mapplethorpe was an interesting figure because he was the subject of a big retrospective, also at the Whitney, very celebrated and because he had this torso of work that dealt with representations of black men. Because my work wasn't figurative, I thought it was an interesting project — to use Mapplethorpe's images equally a sort of ready-made textile on which to operate.
But instead of defacing it or whatever the impulse would be would seem very simplistic to me, I thought let's create this context for it. Put the work in the context of all these debates around black male representation, gay sexuality, censorship, AIDS, personal desire. Put all of that adjacent to the piece of work and let the viewers sort it out. And they can choose. They tin not read the text and look at the photos or read the text and sort through those issues in the same kind of procedure that I went through when thinking about that piece of work. It's just a way to open up upwards that work to a sort of larger context.
Sometimes I recollect I am interested in that, and sometimes it's more hermetic. I think I make abstract paintings. They're text-based but they're essentially abstruse paintings, then in some ways they're sort of rooted in the specificity of the text I'grand using, but in other ways they experience very far from it and it'southward the trace of that language [that] is more interesting to me than the specifics of what that linguistic communication is.
ArtsATL: Y'all've mentioned that some of your influences were people similar Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who are both Southern artists. Could yous talk near that?
Ligon: It's probably less about them being from the Due south, though I call up in that location's some interesting piece of work on Rauschenberg's paintings from the '50s which I love: "The Black Paintings" and "The White Paintings." There'southward a historian, Mignon Nixon; I retrieve she is actually from the South and she's at the Courtauld [Found of Art] now. She did some piece of work on Rauschenberg'due south "Black Paintings" and was asking, "Well, if y'all look at what was on the covers of those papers at that fourth dimension, it was all about civil rights groups."
I don't know what he fabricated of that or what importance that takes, just I retrieve it is interesting to think about how piece of work that is seemingly non near something can be about something. But I remember I was interested in Johns and Rauschenberg — I call back more than in Johns considering of the use of language, only now increasingly in Rauschenberg — because I'm very fascinated with how he made images work and with decontextualizing very familiar images. Johns, too, y'all know [American flags] and all of that, simply too because they were painters, and I gravitated more than towards them than I did towards Barbara Kruger or Joseph Kosuth. I wanted to remain a painter, and they provided certain kinds of models. Someone like Kosuth or Kruger provided certain kinds of relationships to theory and appropriation and critique of consumer civilization, then I was trying to walk the line between those.
ArtsATL: Because your work is so closely connected to linguistic communication and is also ofttimes connected to American history, I desire to ask about context. I'm thinking nigh James Baldwin's Stranger in the Hamlet, which you've besides referenced in your work. How practise you feel that your work changes in different environments? What are the responses to your work outside the Us?
Ligon: Well, I had a funny sort of encounter. I had a twelvemonth-long fellowship in Berlin in 2000, and I was making work for Documenta that Okwui Enwesor curated, a torso of paintings based on Stranger in the Hamlet. I had an interview with [American critic] Blake Gopnik, who was doing an commodity about American artists living overseas. He came and picked my brain and then when I got the article it said, "Glenn Ligon'south issues don't translate in European context." And I thought, "Well, James Baldwin? Stranger in the Village… what doesn't translate?" I thought that was fascinating, this kind of blindness or the disability to extend the reading of a text from a different era to a present situation.
I have a bear witness coming upward in Japan in March, and ane of the neon works I was thinking near using is ane that says "negro sunshine," which is from Gertrude Stein. I asked the curator if she could observe the Stein book that information technology'south from and tell me what the translation is into Japanese. And she said, "Well, it's non then good. It's 'the sunshine of blackness people,' " and I thought that was keen. It's fascinating, but information technology loses the specificity of the give-and-take "negro," a discussion in American context that evokes a particular fourth dimension menstruation.
That kind of slippage is actually interesting. It's not something I've worked with extensively — most of the piece of work I've done has been in English language — simply it is an area that I'm thinking more than most exploring. But information technology's catchy, because ane has to sort of dive into a language that's not your ain or trust people's interpretations.
ArtsATL: Right. It is actually tricky. It'south also interesting, this sort of discomfort you feel with not being entirely fluent in a language and having to trust somebody to translate for you.
Ligon: I estimate also it's trying to understand what kind of cultural presuppositions come out of thinking about translation. That word "negro" is not really translatable into Japanese, and and then it's "black people." Why didn't they just leave it? If you can't translate it, just leave it. So I found that all kind of fascinating; whether I can piece of work with that equally material, I don't know. It's increasingly interesting to me as I start to show in places outside the United States.
ArtsATL: I want to talk nearly the very beginning of your career. I just turned 29, which is correct effectually the age yous were when you received your New York Foundation for the Arts grant. Could you talk a little bit about that transition? I know you were working; you lot had a "solar day job" then you got this grant and it freed up time that immune you lot to become a total-time artist.
Ligon: My mother joked that the twenty-four hour period I knew I was an creative person was when the government said I was an artist. The NYFA doesn't trust artists with private grants any more — they now have to be administered through a handler — and so this was back when the authorities would actually ship you a check. I just decided information technology was a moment where I could endeavor to be a full-time artist for a while.
I don't remember the amount of the grant, only information technology was enough to accept some pregnant amount of fourth dimension off from piece of work, and I thought, "Well, what does information technology mean if I first working full time or try to accept a proper studio?," because I was working out of a basement in my house. So that was a huge, huge shift — I gauge that was in '89 — and I had just started to evidence, a few works were selling. It just became this sort of launch pad for this thing called "being an creative person" which I was already doing, which I was just sort of doing part fourth dimension and kind of decided to exercise it total fourth dimension then.
ArtsATL: Information technology'southward really interesting, because very rarely do I get the opportunity to hear artists talk virtually that progression or that bound between working in your basement, or your mother's basement, and and so suddenly becoming a total-time successful artist.
Ligon: Well, too I didn't get to graduate schoolhouse, so it took me a long time to go a working practice. . . . I never had two years where all you had to do was exist in your studio.
ArtsATL: I read somewhere recently that y'all're working on a piece based on Walt Whitman'south work.
Ligon: Yeah, it's a big neon slice for the New Schoolhouse. It'southward going to be in the student center in the new building they're making.
ArtsATL: What fabricated yous choose Whitman for this project?
Ligon: Well, I think because the New School has such a history of social engagement. It was started by refugees from Europe during the '30s, and not started by but stocked with refugees from Europe. There are some very famous Orozco murals there that were illustrating the history of Communism basically, that are kind of fantastic, and they as well collect widely and exhibit work in their diverse buildings. So I just idea that the history of the New School was almost a certain kind of populism, and it would exist interesting to think virtually some writer who embodied that. The piece concentrates on Leaves of Grass, more specifically on the city as subject matter and thinking about bodies and how one encounters bodies in the city and desiring those bodies. So essentially it's a big slice nearly cruising in the student cafeteria. I don't recall they know that.
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