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Glenn Ligon. A Small Band , 2015. Neon, paint, and metal support. Installation views, All the World’s Futures, Fifty-Sixth International Venice Biennale, 2015–2016. © Glenn Ligon. Courtesy the artist; Luhring Augustine, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London. 54 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00234 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00234 by guest on 26 September 2021 How to Hear What Is Not Heard: Glenn Ligon, Steve Reich, and the Audible Past JANET KRAYNAK In 2015, on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, Glenn Ligon prominently installed a large neon sign sculpture atop the façade of the Central Pavilion, one of the buildings in the historic exhibition’s giardini . The visibility of its site, however, stood in contrast to its muted presence and enigmatic message. Crafted from translucent neon and white paint and mounted on a horizontal scaffolding, the work comprised just three detached words (“blues,” “blood,” and “bruise”) that obscured the existing sign (for “la Biennal e” ). Extending an idiosyncratic welcome to visitors, the three words, at any moment, were illu - minated or not, yielding a playful, if nonsensical semiosis. Fragmented from any semantic context, the words were bound together only by the rhythmic sound pattern suggested by their repeating “b’-b’-b’s.” A Small Band , as the work is titled, that silently plays. 1 Ligon has used this strategy—of simultaneous citation and deletion—many times before, most notably in text paintings where he appropriates language only to subject it to processes of distortion and fragmentation, so that words succumb to illegibility. As Huey Copeland eloquently describes, Ligon’s visual - izing of absence functions strategically as a form of historical intervention, whereby the “selective occlusion of the past falsif[ies] our imagining the present.” 2 Consistent with this approach, the words found in A Small Band have a charged history. Taken from a recorded interview with Daniel Hamm, one of six youths—the “Harlem Six”—arrested for a murder they did not commit, the texts testify to the “long hot summer” of 1964, when the African-American community of Harlem erupted into visible and audible rebellion. 3 Hamm’s interview, one of a series conducted by social worker Willie Jones from the now defunct, community services’ organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), took place in the basement of the Friendship Baptist Community Center—under the occasional watch of the police peering through the windows. 4 Resulting in ten reels of audiotape totaling about seventy hours, the tapes stand as direct records of the young men’s otherwise silenced voices— Grey Room 70, Winter 2018, pp. 54–79. © 2018 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 55 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00234 by guest on 26 September 2021 one instance of a brutal, repetitive history of auditory occlusion. 5 How and why Ligon came to borrow or appropriate Hamm’s speech is part of the story I want to explore here, where questions of the place of aesthetic manip - ulation—of radical fragmentation and decontextualization—face the material - ity or, to be more precise, the aurality of political struggle. Ligon’s repurposing and the multiplicity of his production—with differing versions of A Small Band , as well as a series of Untitled paintings, again featuring Hamm’s words— come at a secondary remove, as they were first borrowed by minimalist com - poser Steve Reich in his now well-known experimental tape work from 1966, Come Out . The dialogue between Ligon and Reich, as well as numerous other actors and multiple remediations of the original recordings, reveal a complex narrative: of black resistance, silent accused, pleading mothers, a white civil- rights activist and a white avant-garde composer, a black social worker and a black journalist. And a pile of reel-to-reel audiotapes. | | | | | It all started with an upturned fruit cart. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964, a local shopkeeper’s fruit cart was accidentally knocked over by some school - children, who then tossed around some of the fruit, prompting a call to police. Yet the police of Harlem had recently been armed in riot gear—a militarization of law enforcement that consistently follows the struggle for civil rights—and proceeded to pum - mel the children. Hamm, along with two other boys (Wallace Baker and Frederick Frazer) and two men (Fecundo Acion and Frank Stafford), heard their moans and came to their aid, leading to their arrest in what came to be called the “Little Fruit Stand Riot.” 6 After they were taken into custody, the five experienced brutal beatings from police, who charged them with Left: Glenn Ligon. A Small Band , 2015. Neon, paint, and metal support. Installation views, All the World’s Futures, Fifty-Sixth International Venice Biennale, 2015–2016. © Glenn Ligon. Courtesy the artist; Luhring Augustine, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London. Opposite: “Sunday Morning in Harlem: The Area Shows the Marks of a Night of Rioting.” Photo spread accompanying Peter Kihiss, “Harlem Riots Spread Over 3 Decades,” New York Times , July 20, 1964. 56 Grey Room 70 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00234 by guest on 26 September 2021 “incitement to riot and assault,” as Hamm’s mother recounted at the time. 7 Refused treatment unless they were visibly bleeding, Hamm proceeded to “open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them that I was bleeding,” as he notes in the interview. A short time later, on April 25 of that year, a local shopkeeper, Margit Sugar , was murdered, and Hamm and Baker, along with four others (Walter Thomas, Willie Craig, Ronald Felder, and Robert Rice), were wrongly accused of the killing. 8 The six, denied legal counsel of their choice, were subsequently found guilty the following year and sentenced to life in prison, sparking protests and a call for a retrial. At the time, the case of the Harlem Six attracted prominent voices of protest, included those of Louis Aragon, Amiri Baraka, Ossie Davis, and James Baldwin, a number of whose names appear in a series of advertisements titled “Georgia Justice for Harlem Six” that appeared in the New York Times and the Village Voice in July 1967 after the youths’ retrial had been denied. 9 Shortly after their arrest, fifteen-year-old James Powell was killed by Thomas Gilligan, a white lieutenant in the New York Police Department, further fueling the community’s simmering anger over police brutality and mistreatment, sparking six nights of protests and rioting that would extend to Bedford Stuyvesant, another center of black life and culture in New York City. 10 “So, last week, the ‘long hot summer’ of Negro discontent began,” one New York Times article reads. “In Kraynak | How to Hear What Is Not Heard: Glenn Ligon, Steve Reich, and the Audible Past 57 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00234 by guest on 26 September 2021 Harlem, in Brooklyn and upstate in Rochester there was rioting, shooting, charges and counter-charges. The race struggle had reached a climax and no immediate way out was indicated.” 11 Soon dubbed the “Harlem Race Riots,” the events of the summer of 1964 brought the turmoil of southern battles into the symbolic heart of African- American culture. “The police responded with live bullets,” Michael W. Flamm writes in a reflection on the incident’s legacy. He goes on to cite James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality: “‘I saw New York’s night of Birmingham horror,’” Flamm quotes Farmer as saying, adding that the latter was “referring to the water cannons and police dogs used against black children in Alabama a year earlier.” 12 Similarly, news anchor John Rolfson reported from the scene that “[b]ricks, bottles and flaming Molotov cocktails” were “answered with live ammunition and night sticks,” and Langston Hughes later described “listen[ing] to gun fire” and “hear[ing] cries sharper than any words speakers speak.” 13 Baldwin adds additional urgency to this chorus, writing of his experiences with “the thunder and fire of the billy club” and “the paralyzing shock of spittle in the face.” 14 Threading through all of these accounts is a dissonant, polyphonic soundtrack of racial strife: “Now, Harlem be nice! Harlem behave yourself,” Hughes writes with biting sarcasm. “Kill me! Go ahead, kill another one of me! You killed James Powell! I have been killed before.” 15 But despite the case’s notoriety, the events of the summer of 1964—a sim - mering stew of racial antipathy, police brutality, and media irresponsibility— largely faded from collective memory. “The Harlem Riot of July 1964 was soon forgotten,” Flamm remarks, “overshadowed by more deadly rebellions and other ‘long hot summers’ in Los Angeles, Newark and Detroit. But in an important sense, James Powell was the first casualty in a larger conflict that has subse - quently done great harm to generations of African-Americans.” 16 To Powell’s name, we can add Hamm’s and those of his codefendants, whose saga will continue for a decade more until they are all (with one exception) finally released from prison in 1973: their release precipi - tated by another tape recording––this one recorded in secret by the men’s attorneys–– of a witness who had refused to testify in the original trial. 17 To what ends, therefore, does Ligon revive these pains of the past in 2015— and in the center of contemporary art’s global spectacle, no less? In addition to A Left: Helmeted policemen wield their clubs on an African- American man lying on the sidewalk at 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue, Harlem, New York, July 1964.

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