 Condition Report, 2000 Silkscreen on iris print, Diptych; each 32 x 22 3/4 inches Glenn Ligon Some Changes "Glenn Ligon: Some Changes" surveys the breadth of Ligon's oeuvre over the last seventeen years. Ligon is at the forefront of a generation of artists who came to prominence in the late eighties on the strength of conceptually based paintings and photo-text work that investigates thesocial, linguistic and political construcion of race, gender and sexuality. Incorporating sources as diverse as James Baldwin's texts, photographic scrapbooks, and Richard Pryor's stand-up comic routines, Ligon's art is a sustained meditation on issues of quotation, the presence of the past in the present, and the representation of the self in relationship to culture and history. "Glenn Ligon: Some Changes" provides a rare opportunity to view nearly fifty significant works including "Untitled" (I Am A Man) (1988); "Runaways" (1993); "The Richard Pryor Paintings" (1993–2004); the award-winning web-based project, "Annotations" (2003); and the installation "The Orange and Blue Feelings" (2003), among others. Over the course of nearly two decades, Ligon has developed significant series of elegant oil and mixed-media paintings whose essential characteristics and subject matter remain resolutely abstract. Painting is the compass for Ligon's trade in ideas, especially those informed by modernist aesthetics and the inconsistencies of attempting to comprehend society's and the media's take on the black body politic. These formative ideas are transferred repeatedly to artworks in other media, but invariably the same ideas are reconstituted and transformed again in Ligon's ongoing process of painting. Painting, however, is but one of his self-declared "touchstones," and his choice of medium is based entirely on his ability to create resonance between his subjects. The process of revision enriches the work in other media and facilitates a dynamic meditation. It is a deliberately circuitous process whose forms and subject matter double back on themselves, re-informed and re-energized by the artist's ongoing investigations. It is also a selfreflective artmaking that engages a variety of forms and media including moving images, installations, found photographs, large-scale photo transfers and other media and techniques. Rather than diverting attention away from concerns central to his artmaking, each foray into another medium triggers a reaction in Ligon's painting that provides unsettling reminders that modernist painting can remain open-ended and receptive to new information without abandoning its dual ideals of universality and timelessness. The sense of a pervasive, gritty reality underlying his appropriated literary sources alternately sustains another, more emotional reading of Ligon's text-based work, one that evokes both inspiration and despair. Ligon expresses a consistent and meticulously considered view of the world-one that is deeply concerned with the practical politics of a personal voice speaking for the experience of many. He stretches a modernist vocabulary for painting to establish new critical positions. Ultimately it is not the range of Ligon's interests as a painter that is so unusual; but his ability to shift visual and literary meaning, by making personal the exploration of what may seem historically weighted texts and images. His appropriated narrative forms and literary subject matter, for example, can be both personal and timeless. It is an inter-disciplinary, inter-generational approach to a visual-literary reading of black identity through the zoom lens of 20th-century African-American culture, ranging from the doctrines of philosopher W.E.B. Dubois to the bawdy humour of stand-up comic Richard Pryor. Ligon repeatedly engages subject matter that pulls historically specific literary narrative into contemporary focus by asking viewers to revisit, for example, the words of American authors such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison. His text paintings are politically and racially charged personal statements, Zora Neale Hurston's words from 1928 stand out: "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." Ligon adopts an implied autobiographical voice and body to stand in for the collective generational experience. This approach challenges the farreaching assumptions of a mainstream white culture whose reality is often regulated by the institutionalized containment of race relations and "diversity management." To coincide with the touring exhibition, The Power Plant is publishing the first significant monograph on Ligon's work. Catalogue essayists Huey Copeland and Darby English interpret the development of Ligon's oeuvre as a continuum of public and private constructions of identity, a performative investigation of appearances and the gaze that links disparate appearances to form a critical representation of reality. Each author brings forward the contradictions of an artist who has invested considerable energy in questioning what is essential to his artmaking by asking himself, "What isn't possible?" Contributions by Wayne Koestenbaum and Mark Nash reflect on selected works that exemplify Ligon's ongoing process of revisiting modernist concerns by pulling and probing the complexities of race and representation. As English and Copeland also note, this revisioning process unfolds in myriad ways over time, from one generation to the next, in various media. Koestenbaum's essay "Color Me Glenn" critiques the artist's series of paintings realized, in part, with the creative assistance of children between the ages of four and eight through the Walker Art Center's educational outreach department. Ligon asked Minneapolis children to apply crayons to a range of 1960s colouring-book images that in their day sought to reaffirm confidence in an emerging, modern and largely mythic black culture. The impartiality of a child's eye is a form of colour blindness that, in Ligon's hands, offers surprising coherence, penetration, lucidity and (above all) a challenge to one's preconceptions of an era of public consumption of black culture. In May 2005 a group of Toronto-region four-to-eight-year-olds were given the opportunity to revision the red-and-white national flag of Canada as well as the stars and stripes of the United States. Participants were asked to use their imaginations to colour in the outline of each flag. Needless to say, the inspired colouring of both icons produced markedly different results. Mark Nash's essay provides an analysis of "The Orange and Blue Feelings", a video installation focusing on an encounter between a client (Ligon) and a therapist. In the video Ligon and the therapist discuss issues associated with creativity and being gay, but the video installation format itself, as it relates to Ligon's oeuvre, also becomes the object of analysis by Nash. The final catalogue text is a revealing interview by Toronto artist Stephen Andrews, Ligon's friend and confidant. A more candid recollection of childhood and the first inkling of selfhood as an artist would be difficult to imagine. Andrews coaxes Ligon to think about the humour and pathos, hope and despair that run through his work over the past seventeen years, and provides a rare glimpse into the future. Wayne Baerwaldt "Glenn Ligon: Some Changes" is co-curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, Director, The Power Plant, and Thelma Golden, Deputy Director, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Ligon's work has appeared in Documenta XI, Kassel (2002); the XXIV Bienal de Sao Paulo (1998) and the Venice Biennale (1997). His extensive exhibition history includes solo shows at Kunstverein Munich (2001), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1996), and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (1993). His work has been included in important group exhibitions such as "Singular Forms" (Sometimes Repeated), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004); "The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-2000", the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art", the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1994) and London ICA and "Dark O'Clock", Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo and Plug In Inc., Winnipeg (1994). Exhibition: 25 June - 5 September 2005 Gallery Hours: Tues-Sun noon - 6 pm, Wed noon - 8 pm Closed Mondays. The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery 231 Queens Quay West CAN-Toronto, Ontario, M5J 2G8 Telephone: +(416) 973-4949 Email: powerplant@harbourfront.on.ca www.thepowerplant.org |
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