Glenn Ligon
Working at the words of others, Ligon transforms seminal texts into paintings that hover at the edge of abstraction. The formal obfuscation that characterises his text-based works, which appear always under erasure – sous rature – obscures the found cultural artefacts he works with. Such is the Stranger series (1996 onwards) based on James Baldwin’s 1953 essay Stranger in the Village. Baldwin holds particular sway in Ligon’s works, not only because he, too, was black and queer, but because he understood the symbolic effect of language on its subject. “The root function of language,” Baldwin wrote, “is to control the universe by describing it.” Using black oil sticks and letter stencils, Ligon traces passages from Baldwin’s essay onto canvas, the oil smudging as he works, leaving the sentences largely illegible. “Literature,” the artist says by way of explanation, “has always been a treacherous site for black Americans because literary production has been so tied with the project of proving our humanity through the act of writing.”
b.1960, New York
“Cultural translation, like any other translation,” the artist Glenn Ligon says, “is always involved with loss, the untranslatable, excess meanings, the indecipherable.” Recognised for his language-based conceptualism, Ligon’s practice cleaves cultural representation from its pictorial and linguistic signs. He works against the assumed legibility of black bodies to explore African American identity and queer sexuality, gesturing to the inadequacies of representation, to the imperfect translation of lived experience in image and word. He borrows widely from literature and popular culture yet disrupts the call and response these familiar quotations inspire, the recognition and implied meaning they have come to signify. Ligon invites the viewer to look again, to see anew, to re-evaluate the implications of these shared symbols.