THE ART WORLD UNHIDDEN IDENTITIES

A Glenn Ligon retrospective. BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

oung artists go where the glamour of School. After graduating from Wesleyan the moment is; it’s how art history University, in 1982, he became a student movesY along, if not how it progresses. in the Whitney Museum Independent Today, that means a frenzied international Study Program, a hotbed of critical theory market and its auxiliary organs, such as art and conceptualist styles. His love of paint- fairs, which, grading all values by prices ing—he has singled out Willem de Koon- paid, make each artist a player, ready or ing, Cy Twombly, and Terry Winters as not. It’s hard now to recall that, less than tutelary heroes, and the importance to his two decades ago, fashion exalted politically work of Jasper Johns’s stencilled lettering themed work, which, backed by institu- is obvious—made him something of a tions and academic criticism, cast artists as conservative on a scene whose preferred agents of social change. (A down market mode was the appropriation of photo- eased the way to virtue; nothing else was graphic images, in works conceived to ex- selling very well.) “Glenn Ligon: AMER- pose and mock the malignities of patriar- ICA,” a striking retrospective at the Whit- chal, “late capitalist” culture. (Leading ney Museum, rescues a star of the era of lights of the movement included Barbara identity politics from a blind spot in the Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Jenny Holzer, present art world. Hans Haacke, and Richard Prince.) Early -born Ligon, now fifty, drawings in the Whitney show, from makes combative points of being black 1985, find Ligon duly juxtaposing images and being gay. He is best known for paint- of African-American hair products with ings in black oil stick (and, sometimes, images of canonical modern sculptures, by coal dust) of stencilled, racially charged Brancusi and Giacometti, that display prose, such as a work from 1990 that influences of African tribal art. But the sa- quotes a line from : “I tirical point is a mite blunted by Ligon’s feel most colored when I am thrown palpable liking for the sculptures. against a sharp white background.” The Ligon’s most apposite forebear is the words repeat, from the top to the bottom charismatic and elusive black conceptual- of a tall, white-painted board, becoming ist David Hammons, whose needling tac- increasingly smudged and illegible. But tics—like setting up as a street peddler of the show also includes fine, less familiar snowballs priced according to size, outside works in photography, sculpture, and Cooper Union, one winter day in 1983— neon. Handsomely and sensitively in- channel discontents of race and class with- stalled by the Whitney curator Scott out recourse to philosophizing, and with- Rothkopf, the show communicates an ap- out insulting past masters of art. In the pealingly complex sensibility that is subject Whitney show, another precedent both to self-doubt and aesthetic yearning, even surprises and makes telling sense: Richard when it is forcefully on message. Ligon Pryor. emerges as a companionable spirit in an I hadn’t known Ligon’s series of word endemic ordeal of American democracy— paintings of chipperly profane racial jokes who we are, beset by what we are taken to from Pryor’s standup act, in a series from be—which most afflicts those, of course, 1993-96, which Ligon resumed in 2004. who are most swiftly and carelessly cate- (An example: “Niggers be holding them gorized, as by skin color. dicks too. White people go ‘Why you guys Ligon’s father was a foreman at the hold your things?’ Say ‘You done took ev- General Motors plant in Tarrytown, New erything else motherfucker.’ ”) The paint- York; his mother was a nurse’s aide. Grow- ings’ hot, flashing colors are as hard on the ing up in the South Bronx, he won a schol- eyes as their texts are on the nerves. Ligon arship to Manhattan’s progressive Walden has said that he backed off his first engage-

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TNY—2011_03_21—PAGE 76—133SC. ment with Pryor’s scorched-earth hilarity pat. “To Disembark” (1993), named for a Today, a Ligon painting, “Black Like because its intensity scared him. That may book by the poet , dra- Me #2” (1992), hangs in the private be understandable on two counts. First is matizes the story of a slave who had him- quarters of the . That’s not the social chasm between an artist trained self shipped North, to freedom, in a crate. ironic; that’s progress. If ’s in sophisticated manners of fine art and a Crates emitting recorded voices, including election didn’t end identity politics in performer who was brought up in his that of Billie Holiday singing “Strange American culture, it certainly complicated grandmother’s brothel. The second possi- Fruit,” are augmented with descriptions of the matter. The President’s color is only ble root of Ligon’s unease is an emotional Ligon, written by friends, in the antique one of the many characteristics that make stance, which might be called aggressive- style of “Wanted” posters for escaped him both a person and a symbol, standing passive, and which he shares with the co- median: a fury at unjust suffering, the ex- pression of which strips bare a personal, humiliated vulnerability. Pryor’s incendi- ary poetry burns to a core of humanity from which all customary divisions among people appear ridiculous. He let audiences feel at one with him, for spans of redemp- tive laughter. His genius steeled him to decide that he had nothing to lose by that. But an equivalent attitude in art would have set Ligon at odds with the judgmen- tal righteousness of his social-critical peers. In effect, he rides Pryor into regions of lonely anguish that he can’t brave alone. Ligon’s anxiety plays out by fits and starts in the show, on notes that are comic or angry or just bemused. Elegance steadies him. The artist’s superb com- mand of painterly and presentational rhetoric impresses because it has crucial work to do: it gives public poise to private conflict. I remember being irritated, at the notorious, politically minded of 1993, by what seemed to be a didactic air in Ligon’s “Notes on the Mar- gin of the Black Book.” He scavenged pages of ’s “The Black Book” (1986) for its ninety-one erotic photographs of mostly nude black men. He framed the images and arrayed them with framed quotations—from crit- ics or theorists or patrons of gay bars whom he interviewed—that assess the Ligon gives public poise to private conflict. Photograph by Lyle Ashton Harris. work or offer some reflection on race and sex. At the time, it was widely assumed slaves. The work comes off as an ingenious for a diversity that can’t be sorted out on that Ligon shared a politically correct goof. Also relatively slight, albeit gor- a demographic chart. Certainly, Ameri- condemnation of a white photographer’s geous, are neon inscriptions, inflected with can racism persists, as does the rage that “objectifying” presumption. But it’s plain black paint, of the word “AMERICA” and a it incites. But this and other issues that now that he was moved in part by the phrase from : “negro sun- galvanized Ligon’s generation of artists classical form and the libidinous glory of shine.” Stein was being fondly indulgent are, at least, less clear-cut. Ligon deserves Mapplethorpe’s vision. The only thing of black folks, in an old vein of white clue- honor for foregrounding, in the famously that remains annoying about the work is lessness. Ligon punctures more recent liberal but chronically lily-white art world, the vapid starchiness of so many of the variants with quotes, in paintings on voices such as those of Hurston, Brooks, highbrow texts. Being black and being paper, from reviews of his own work, such and James Baldwin, as well as Pryor, and gay, and an aesthete as well, launched as one that defensively praises him for not for helping to normalize public assertions Ligon—and us, vicariously, as we con- being defensive “about mainstream Amer- of gayness. The fact that he could do so template the work—into a crossfire of al- ican art,” unlike “many other minority art- without compromising his personality lurements and compunctions. ists.” In fact, that hapless wording points and his artistic standards is a sign of more “UNTITLED (FACE #18 GLENN)” (1998)/CRG GALLERY “UNTITLED (FACE Some of Ligon’s ironies seem rather toward a truth of Ligon’s significance. than hope. 

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TNY—2011_03_21—PAGE 77—133SC.—LIVE ART R20652—CRITICAL­ PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT ENTIRE PRESS TNY—2011_03_21—PAGERUN 77—133SC.