Glenn Ligon
Condition
Report
Silkscreen on Iris print
2000
Purchase
Silkscreen on Iris print
2000
Purchase
What it means to be queer has become a frequent discussion not only among my students but also among my peers who had long ago embraced LGBT identities. Reclaiming the term “queer” from the realm of pejoratives, which had once signified the right to and pride in living lives unfettered from heteronormativity, suddenly held new possibilities, particularly in the context of a tide driving LGBT people into normalcy. While no one regretted the demise of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell or the Defense of Marriage Act, the prospect of a new normativity raised issues about the desirability of that status.
In a Spring 2013 course I taught at Parsons called “Homonormativity and the American Ideal,” art historian and artist Catherine Lord visited my class, to speak about “To Whom It May Concern…”a site-specific installation she had created at the One Archives in Los Angeles. That project focused on dedication pages in the books the archive had collected. She talked about the color of the pages, the typeface, the bleeding print, the telegraphing of indecipherable massages that conveyed biography, politics, intentions, passions, fears, and other qualities. She talked about the power and “queerness” of those pieces of paper. Often those pages were not only different in design and content from the rest of the book, they possessed an autonomy that often inflected readings of the texts that followed. It was about that time that I began thinking about grounding future queer as a project would de-stabilize the ways in which we see our environment, and foreground approaches that demand, in some cases, attention to the details of the worlds they critique and the visions they present; in others an openness to the spirits they embody.
The works on view in grounding future queer represent a mining of The New School Art Collection for works by artists whose work and lived experience present options to heterosexual norms. From more than a two thousand works in The New School Art Collection, spanning a period of 85 years, these works were made by an international group of practitioners between the period 1929 to 2012 who have experienced changing political circumstances and cultural responses to issues pertaining to sexuality and gender.
The works run the gamut from the 1929 allegorical work of Russian émigré Pavel Tchelitchew to the 2012 work of Aziz & Cucher responding to the complexities of their responses to turmoil in the Middle East, from the minimalist image of a poem about a young man’s abuse by John Giorno to works by Frank Moore, David Wojnarowicz and Ross Bleckner that are direct responses to the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, from the work of Joan Snyder who calls out the names of Biblical women to a photograph by Catherine Opie recording performance artist Ron Athey creating scarification on the back of Divinity Fudge (a.k.a. Darryl Carlton.) Together, they lay bare the contradictions and ambiguities of defining queer experience while simultaneously peeling away the assumptions that underlie our world.
Tony Whitfield, Curator of grounding future queer
This blog has been created to provide an ongoing context for discussion of the individual works in grounding future queer as well as other related works in The New School Art Collection. Please contribute any thoughts you have about the ways in which these works inform our understanding of queer culture as well as any information you might have about these works.
Glen Ligon’s dual pieces entitled Untitled(I AM A MAN) and Condition Report are two monochrome prints installed as a diptych. The first one created in 1988 and the second, in 2000. The words “I AM A MAN” are silkscreen printed in a bold sans serif font centered in a white field. The two prints are almost identical with the exception of the handwritten lines, dots, and scribbles that radiate around the border of the Condition Report print. The handwritten text is almost illegible and the relationship between the handwritten lines, dots, and scribbles are reminiscent of running plays from a football game. What is interesting about these prints is the context in which this rendering of the statement, “I am a man” first appeared in this way versus the context in which fine artist, Ligon presents it. For these pieces Ligon borrows the text from a placard carried by striking sanitation workers in 1968. The men who carried these placards during the civil rights movement were protesting against the low pay and poor working conditions and the inhumane treatment that African Americans were facing. Condition Report is presented as an object where the handmade marks are annotations making note of the aging and weathering of the print over a twelve year period in the possession of friend of Ligon’s who is a fine art conservator. In an interview Ligon explains how these marks are not only supposed to highlight the wear of the material, but the shift in understanding the subject and content of the work. By so doing, Ligon places himself in the work. Known through his work and the media surrounding his create practice, Ligon, juxtaposes the reality of sanitation workers in 1968 with his reality as queer black male who is positioned in a place socially and economically far from the men who originally created placards declaring their manhood.
ReplyDeleteRahmiek Bowen
Multiple complexities and transfigurations of meaning seem embodied in the workings of Glenn Ligon’s Condition Report; most transparent is conversation between this work made in 2000 with Ligon’s 1988 work, Untitled (I Am a Man), but what is Ligon trying to whisper in our ears?
ReplyDeleteOstensibly the slogan “I AM A MAN” is grounded in the Civil Rights Movement, grounded in 1968, in Memphis and hundreds of striking black sanitation workers holding the very physical sign above their heads demanding dignity.
But what happens when a sign held aloft in 1968 vanishes to reappear in 1988? There is something much more at work here than mere political sloganeering. Darby English, an art historian, says of Untitled, it was “…manifestly the first” of his works “ in which Ligon’s desire to fuse ostensibly irreconcilable representational modes–the formalist painting, the political statement and the private question–resulted in something fraught but whole.*”
This pivotal work in Ligon’s oeuvre, one of his first experimentation’s with text within painting, language outside signification, comes into conversation with an altered sign adjacent to its right, the placid milky background of Untitled marred by hastily written commentary and judgement.
Embodied in this conversation between 1968, 1988, and 2000 is something at once personal: Ligon’s own artistic struggling and recognition with form, expressionism, and abstraction–and the socio-political: how has the simple statement “I AM A MAN” altered over the decades, and has this objective of pushing back against dehumanization gained progress or lost traction? In the shuffling of signs and origins, the picket line, the austere gallery, Ligon raises elemental points about how we relate to language and politics in context.
Colin Marston
* Darby English, “Glenn Ligon: Committed to Difficulty,” in Glenn Ligon: Some Changes, 44.