File Note 91: Glenn Ligon

Glenn Ligon draws on repetition, silence and a teenager’s nervous slip to limn the expectant pause between call and response. When eighteen-year-old Daniel Hamm, arrested in the 1964 Harlem riots, was interviewed following a severe beating by the police, he described the officers’ refusal to get him to a hospital unless he was bleeding. ‘I had to like open the bruise up,’ Hamm explained, ‘and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them’— except he says ‘the blues blood.’ Listen for it in the opening of Steve Reich’s 1966 composition Come Out, an ongoing source for Ligon. In an electric blue familiar to New Yorkers from the lettering on police cars, the words in Untitled (Bruise/Blues) hang in the air as if spoken. Alternately blinking in tandem and out of synch, they mismatch response to call. 

This dynamic runs through Ligon’s work, which is often about correspondences between the past and the present. In contrast to his customary sources such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, or Jean Genet, the elements of the Call and Response exhibition come from music and stand-up, specifically Steve Reich and Richard Pryor. Through their work, Ligon continues to pose questions about what is noticed and what escapes notice, in particular with regard to the bodies of black men.

Pryor ‘most aptly applied the Dionysian signature to work and life,’ ¹ unequivocally insisting that Americans drop their characteristic claim to selective innocence. (‘People can’t talk about fucking in America. People say you’re dirty. But if you talk about killing somebody, that’s cool.’ ²) Live’s focus on the body has affinities with Notes on the Margins of the Black Book (1991–1993) but also with the Runaway series (1993). Like those pieces, Live poses questions about how training your gaze on one aspect to the exclusion of others leads to an overall construct of masculinity, race, sexuality — by the gazer, not the subject of the gaze.

Ligon first incorporated Pryor into his work in 1994, in a series of stenciled quotes from stand-up routines. There was no comedy precedent for Pryor’s often anarchic, expletive rich candor on sex, race and class. Paintings such as Silver Therapy #1 (2006) reveal the punch lines as less joke than aphorism: ‘If I have to die, which I imagine I will, I don’t imagine it, I just know I’m gonna have to — I wanna die like my father. My father died fucking. He did, man. He was fifty-seven, woman was eighteen. He came and went at the same time.’ Or, from the 2007 No Room (Gold) black-on-gold stenciled series: ‘I was a nigger for twenty-three years. I gave that shit up. No room for advancement.’ In these pieces, like Live, Ligon anatomises Pryor’s act, especially the simultaneous coming and going, the limbo between being and non-being. Ligon shifts Pryor’s act from entertainment to cultural artifact. (Even borrowing something of the Russian icon palette for the No Room (Gold) paintings.) But they are also deeply personal. An ardent Star Trek fan in his teens, Ligon nixed a possible move to Vulcan, planet of suppressed emotion, as it would have meant forfeiting his Richard Pryor records.³ 

Throughout Call and Response, the unseen and unheard presences of Hamm and Pryor suggest the existential difficulties of simply being a black-skinned man in America. In the fifty years since the Harlem riots, in the forty years since Pryor made explicit to his white audience what was implicit for his black fans, dismally little has changed. Despite a more blended civic life — working, learning, deploying together — Americans for the most part live and socialise in parallel worlds. In Call and Response, Ligon makes a subtle, elegant case for recognising the blinkered view that comes from keeping those worlds unimaginatively distinct.