Glenn Ligon Interviewed for Through A Lens Darkly by Thomas Allen Harris
The first major mid-career retrospective of works by New York-based artist Glenn Ligon recently opened at the Whitney Museum in NYC. In this 2008 interview with Thomas Allen Harris, for the upcoming film Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and Emergence of a People, Ligon reflectes on some of the influences in his life and work.
“I remember that we always had family, … and because I had a very large family, my mother had 11 brothers and sisters and they migrated from the South to the North, to Washington D.C. and New York City, … the family album became a way of keeping in touch, a way of thinking about how the family stays together in its separateness across the distances that we lived. So how you keep in touch with relatives in South Carolina or Virginia — they send you pictures basically of family outings and gatherings and things like that. So I think I was always aware of the family album as this place where the family represented itself to itself.
Glenn Ligon: American @ The Whitney Museum of American Art through June
“Well one of the things that’s always interested me about photography is that every picture has a back story,
“…When I look at a photograph I’m always trying to figure out a narrative. I guess in some ways, I’m very literal, I don’t know if I understand metaphors. So I’m always looking for the story of the photograph and that story seems to me very literal. So when I first started looking at [the Robert] Mapplethorpe photographs [in The Black Book] I was looking at the story. Who are these guys, where do they live, what do their parents think of this — … very literal kinds of stories. … [My creation of] Notes on the Margin of the Black Book began with that simple fact of just wanting to know more. But I think we all do that, or at least, I don’t’ know, I shouldn’t say we all do that, but I think that photographs sort of invite stories, they have a story to tell, they invite us to project stories onto them. And that’s always what I’m interested in when I’m looking at a photograph. And it could be any photograph, an art photograph or a family photograph or an ad on a bus. It’s just the way photographs operate for me, they provoke stories, they invite stories.
“The subsequent work that followed Notes on the Margin of the Black Book was called Feast of Scraps, and it was a project that was done for a catalogue and it took off on the Mapplethorpe work because …when I was looking at the Mapplethorpe images, I was thinking about this question of placement, context, who are these men, where do they come from. And I thought wouldn’t it be an interesting piece to basically fill in the back story, figure out who these men are, and it wasn’t really possible for me to do that. A lot of the men in the photographs had died of AIDS and so there wasn’t this sort of direct access that I could have had. So it was more in the level of fantasy, me imaging what those back stories were.
“And I thought what kind of story can I give these men in THESE photographs? And I thought, well, one story is the photo album, they come from somewhere, so why don’t we place these images back into the photo album, and use… the family photo album as a way of providing context. But that context is of course a place, the family photo album, is a place where the family represents itself to itself, but it doesn’t represent certain things – sexuality can be represented in certain kinds of ways and not in other kinds of ways. And so the project became about these jarring juxtapositions … as a way of talking about the silences that happen within the space of the family photo album, but also talking about continuity and context and giving these men the sense of their social history, their political histories – which I felt was one of the things that I was critiquing in Notes on the Margin of the Black Book – the lack of a sense of social history and context.
“There’s a great quote by an art historian named Darby English. He’s written a book called How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. And he starts out one of his chapters by saying: who will make black art when black artists don’t make it any more?
Glenn Ligon's Negro Sunshine @ Whitney Museum of American Art
“One of the things I think is interesting… is that our conceptions about who produces blackness have changed. I don’t think that blackness is, for a lot of young artists, perceived as their territory, that they’re sole producers of it. I think they see it as within a network, or a nexus of how ideas are produced, how subjects are produced, how discourses are produced. So they think that blackness as a subject matter is easily produced by people who are not black, that it’s not our territory. And in one sense, I think it’s in a way a resistance to a territorializing: black artist, therefore you must be dealing with your history, your experience — of course everyone deals with their history and their experience. But to imagine that black history and black experience is somehow separate from everything else, and therefore your territory, you know about it, we don’t know about it, you tell us — is a sense that what people sort of say when they mean post-black, when they say post-black artist, I think that’s the sort of thing that they’re trying to move away from, the sense that there’s a territory that is theirs and theirs alone, and don’t stray outside of it. But at the same time I think, and maybe this is the paradox, there’s a whole generation of artists very deeply invested in blackness, and its possibilities, and its expansiveness, and its elegance. And so it’s trying to negotiate those two different positions of not wanting to be reduced to something, but also not wanting to abandon something. And there is I think between those two poles a very productive, interesting place to work.”
Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, at the Whitney until June 5, 2011, features roughly one hundred works, including paintings, prints, photography, drawings, and sculptural installations. Special events around the exhibition take place at the Whitney on April 8, 21, and 28. For more info, go HERE. The exhibition travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the fall of 2011 and to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in early 2012.
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