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GLENN LIGON |
Glenn Ligon is best known for his use of language as an element of art and a tool for communication. In his paintings and prints, he combines a keen sense of formal abstraction with the strategies of Pop art, appropriation, and Conceptualism to create images that draw on the history of American black culture from nineteenth-century slave narratives to the Million Man March. Frequently using fragments of texts taken from authors such as James Baldwin, Zora Neal Hurston, and Ralph Ellison, Ligon has said that he wants to " . . . make language into a physical thing, something that has real weight and force to it."
The text in this painting was excerpted from an essay by James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village," written in 1953 during a writing retreat in a small village in Switzerland. In the essay, Baldwin, an openly gay African American, spoke about his experience as an outsider, not only in that tiny Swiss town, but in pre-civil rights America as well. The dense blackness of Ligon’s painting evokes the rage in Baldwin’s essay. In fact, the top line of text reads, in part, "The rage of the disesteemed." But the words have been stenciled onto the canvas in such a way that they are largely illegible, disappearing into the luminescent surface that is made more so through the addition of coal dust. The result is a stark, Minimalist field, infused with politically and racially charged content that the viewer cannot fully access. Ligon says: "I think what I have done by rendering text in paint in the space of the painting is sort of met the text halfway. The struggle you have to go through in reading the text in my painting adds something to the text."
Excerpt from James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village," 1953, the concluding essay of his Notes of a Native Son, published in 1955:
The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever. This is a fact which ordinary representatives of the Herrenvolk*, having never felt this rage and being unable to imagine, quite fail to understand.
*A German term, meaning "men folk," used ironically to refer to those of privilege, i.e. whites
- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects