ART-PRESENTATION: Glenn Lignon, What We Said The Last Time

Glenn’s Ligon paintings and sculptures examine cultural and social identity through found sources to reveal the ways in which the history of slavery, the civil rights movement, and sexual politics inform our understanding of American society. In his paintings, the instability of his medium transforms the texts he quotes, making them abstract, difficult to read, and layered in meaning, much like the subject matter that he appropriates.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Luhring Augustine Archive

Glenn Ligon presents at Luhring Augustine in New York, “What We Said The Last Time”, an exhibition of new work and “Entanglements”, a curatorial project by the artist. The exhibition features a suite of 17 archival pigment prints that document the paint-spattered pages of the artist’s well-worn copy of James Baldwin’s seminal 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village”. Written during a stay in a remote Swiss mountain hamlet, Baldwin’s text examines complex and urgent questions around blackness, culture, and history. Since 1996, Ligon has used the essay as the basis of his “Stranger” series, including prints, drawings, and dense paintings made with oil stick and often coal dust that oscillate between legibility and obscurity. While creating these canvases, Ligon kept pages of Baldwin’s essay on his studio table for reference, and over the years they became covered with random smudges of black paint, oil stains, and fingerprints. Intrigued by this accumulation of marks, Ligon transformed the book pages into a suite of large-scale prints, using the full text of the essay for the first time in his career. The resulting work is a palimpsest of accumulated personal histories that suggests Ligon’s long engagement with Baldwin’s essay, as well as a new strategy in his ongoing exploration of the interplay between language and abstraction. Also on view is “Entanglements”, a curatorial project by Ligon that examines how artists use the studio as a base from which to engage momentous cultural shifts and political events in both direct and oblique ways. “Entanglements” features artworks and ephemera by: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, On Kawara, Glenn Ligon, Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper, Bob Thompson, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Andy Warhol. Key to the exhibition is Bruce Nauman’s “Violin Tuned D.E.A.D.” (1969), a video that presents the artist repetitively playing a single note on a violin with his back to the camera. While discussions of Nauman’s video works from this period have focused on issues of performativity, endurance, and the body, Ligon was interested in how Nauman’s discordant note can be heard as a soundtrack to the war in Vietnam or the brutal violence faced by civil rights workers. Bruce Nauman’s work served as a point of departure for Ligon to consider other works in which the artist’s studio has acted as a conduit for contemporary events.

Info: Luhring Augustine Gallery, 531 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 27/2-2/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.luhringaugustine.com