Glenn Ligon by Gregg Bordowitz

Author:Gregg Bordowitz [Bordowitz, Gregg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846381935
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2019-02-19T06:00:00+00:00

The protest signs occasioned a conjuncture for Ligon that included the history of the civil rights movement viewed from the historical present of the 1980s. That decade in the US imposed a conservative framework. The gains made in the 1960s and 1970s by liberation movements were under direct attack. George H.W. Bush’s presidency followed Ronald Reagan’s, carrying forward Republican policies that ignored the AIDS crisis and fostered a deadly homophobic atmosphere. Politicians also focused on so-called ‘law and order’ policies that targeted African Americans in particular. Adding to these elements, within the art world debates raged about the resurgence of masculinist authorial tendencies located in Neo-Expressionism – predominant in the art market. Ligon was synthesizing a number of historical vectors to produce works informed by the cultural theory of Stuart Hall and other oppositional forces to the right wing in the US and Britain, as well as drawing influence from historical conceptual art, feminism and formalist abstraction.

Art historian Darby English wrote on Untitled (I Am a Man) for the 2005 exhibition ‘Glenn Ligon: Some Changes’ at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, stating that it was ‘manifestly the first work in which Ligon’s desire to fuse ostensibly irreconcilable representational modes – the formalist painting, the political statement and the private question – resulted in something fraught but whole’.53

Untitled (I Am a Man) is a site for the instantiation of a third mode of experience that is both painting and sign. Scott Rothkopf notes that the canvas seems to oscillate endlessly between the two.54 I agree. Ligon insists on the work’s status as a painting. The fact that the painting refers to a protest sign often overdetermines the reading of the work as a sign, diminishing the qualities of the painting. (Neither English nor Rothkopf neglect the painting’s complexity as a material object.) There were many references Ligon could have used to make the painting as a sign – ‘Warhol for example when he gets rid of all the expressionism – just pow, the race riots.’55 Ligon didn’t do that. He made a hand-rendered text painting.

Ligon first saw a framed original ‘I AM A MAN’ protest placard in the office of US Congressional Representative for the state of New York Charles Rangel in the summer of 1981, when he was interning at the Studio Museum in Harlem. A group from the museum visited Rangel’s office in the state building across the street. Untitled (I Am a Man) was inspired by the artist’s contact with an original placard, but the painting was made from photographic examples sourced from history books. Photographer Ernest Withers’s image is the most famous, but Ligon’s painting is not based on that photograph specifically.56 It is based on a number of archival photography sources, all black-and-white. That’s important, because some if not all of the original protest signs in Memphis 1968 were printed in red. At the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, a display shows figures representing the striking sanitation workers carrying red-lettered signs.57 Various internet searches yield more images of the signs printed in red letters on a white ground.

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