Sometimes a career survey doubles as a scan of social history. This is true of Glenn Ligon’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a tight but ample show that refers back to America’s slave-holding past and forward to the Obama present but focuses on the late 1980s and 1990s, a too-seldom-revisited stretch of recent art.
Mr. Ligon, who is 50 and was born in the Bronx, did his first breakout work in 1985. At that point, halfway through Reaganomics and already well into the AIDS crisis, a tide of what would come to be called identity politics was building but had not yet penetrated the gated New York art world. The 1985 Whitney Biennial didn’t have a single African-American among its 84 artists. Outside the gates, though, the cultural waters were stirring. A new generation of black artists was rewriting existing scripts about race. Young gay artists who’d seen the inside of a closet only long enough to pack up and get out were making art about the options ahead of them.
Mr. Ligon, just a few years out of college, was committed to painting in a brushy, romantic, abstract expressionist mode. But he was also acutely aware, as a gay black man, of the political ferment around him. His problem became how to make a traditional language of painting expressive of who, and what, he was.
Mr. Ligon, just a few years out of college, was committed to painting in a brushy, romantic, abstract expressionist mode. But he was also acutely aware, as a gay black man, of the political ferment around him. His problem became how to make a traditional language of painting expressive of who, and what, he was.
His initial solution was to keep painting, with de Kooningesque strokes, but to add new content in the form of words, specifically brief anecdotes lifted from gay pornographic literature and incised with a pencil point into his pigment-swiped surfaces. Like graffiti scrawled in wet cement, or the Latin phrases written on a Cy Twombly painting, the words were a defacement, but they were also a territorial marker, a tag that made his art really his. Four of these small paintings are among the earliest pieces in “Glenn Ligon: America” at the Whitney. And they are the first in what has become a long line of language-based works by an artist who is equally an object maker and a conceptualist, and as interested in the past as in the present.
He modeled another early painting, “Untitled (I Am a Man)” from 1988, on a historical artifact: the simple placard, with the words “I Am a Man” in black on a white ground, carried by striking black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, and documented in a famous photograph by Ernest C. Withers.
But Mr. Ligon’s oil-on-canvas version isn’t a copy of the placard; it’s a reinvention of it — the words are differently spaced; the surface is differently textured — as a semi-abstract painting. It’s a new kind of object, with an old history, and you perceive it in stages: first as words, a reading experience; then, as you get closer, as a looking-at-art experience; then, holistically, as a thinking experience. (If you linger over his work a little, give yourself to it, you’ll get something from it. The temptation, with visually reticent art, is to breeze through the show, but that’s like keeping your iPod on at a concert. You get a sense of what’s going on, but you’re preprogrammed and sticking with that.)
The shift back and forth between reading and looking, object and idea, is the basic dynamic emphasized by the show, which has been organized by Scott Rothkopf, a Whitney curator. And it represents an effort, very much of the current, formalist, post-’90s moment, to position Mr. Ligon as being as much a craft-conscious painter as a social commentator.
The positioning is valid, because the dynamic is demonstrable even early on. And it grows more complex and nuanced as the range of texts he uses expands to include fiction, autobiography, the popular press and oral history, and as his forms become more varied, moving into photography and sculpture.
Always, though, language is at the center. In 1988 Mr. Ligon made a series of paintings using epigrammatic passages taken from dream-interpretation guides popular among African-Americans when he was growing up. He stenciled the phrases, character by character, with oil stick, a thick, viscous medium that creates a slightly raised, braillelike relief, and used colors that suited the words. For example the phrase “Honeycomb: To suck honey from a honeycomb denotes pleasure” is stenciled in copper-colored letters on a brown-gold ground.
This series would be his last use of color in text painting for quite a while, with the exception of a group of pictures based on scabrous racial jokes by the comedian Richard Pryor done in eye-aching complementaries (electric blue on bright red, etc.). Black and white would become the norm, and stenciling a primary expressive medium.
In several paintings beginning in 1990 Mr. Ligon covered wooden doors or door-shaped canvases with stenciled sentences pulled from different sources: an autobiographical essay by Zora Neale Hurston (“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”); Genet’s play “The Blacks” (“I’m Turning Into a Specter Before Your Very Eyes and I’m Going to Haunt You”); a poem by Jesse Jackson (“I Am Somebody”).
