Glenn Ligon in "History" - Season 6 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

In "Glenn Ligon: History" from Season 6 of "Art in the Twenty-First Century" by Art21, artist Glenn Ligon reflects on his artistic journey and the pivotal moments that shaped his career. Starting with an NEA grant in 1989, Ligon delves into his experiences at the Whitney Museum and his evolving artistic expression. Sharing anecdotes about his mother's opinions and inspirations from Zora Neale Hurston, Jasper Johns, and Richard Pryor, Ligon highlights the role of literature and American history in his work. His artistic exploration involves using language, neon, and unconventional materials like coal dust to challenge perceptions and narratives.

Highlights

Ligon received a pivotal NEA grant in 1989 that enabled him to focus on being an artist 🎨.
He started exhibiting at the Whitney Museum in 1991, a place he feels comfortable and familiar with 🏛️.
Ligon uses language extensively in his art to explore issues like legibility and history 📜.
His work draws from literature, with influences from Zora Neale Hurston and Gertrude Stein 📚.
Ligon transitioned from abstract expressionism to incorporating text and quotations in his art ✒️.
Using materials like coal dust, Ligon experiments with texture and meaning in his pieces 🌑.
Neon art arose from a collaboration with a neon shop, exploring unexpected art forms ⚡.
The process of creating art is iterative for Ligon, where perfection is elusive but inspiring 🔄.

Key Takeaways

Glenn Ligon was encouraged to become an artist through an NEA grant in 1989, which allowed him to pursue art full-time 🎨.
Ligon finds inspiration in literature and uses various mediums including neon and coal dust to explore themes of legibility, American history, and self-expression 📚.
His exhibitions, such as the one at Whitney Museum, show a consistent thread throughout his career focusing on language, art processes, and cultural narratives 🔍.

Overview

Glenn Ligon's journey as an artist is marked by pivotal moments and thoughtful explorations of text, history, and self-expression. Starting with a significant NEA grant, Ligon chose a path away from full-time jobs and devoted himself to his art. This leap allowed him to explore deeply personal themes, often revolving around the complexities of language and identity.

His exhibitions at prominent venues like the Whitney Museum have been a testament to his evolving yet consistent style. Ligon finds familiarity and relationship in these spaces, which house a large collection of his work. He explains how his art forms, each with a distinctive use of language and imagery, help connect the dots between personal and collective histories.

Ligon's works are a blend of his love for literature and his creative experimentation with different materials, such as neon and coal dust. Whether recreating sentences from famed authors or playing with visual mediums, Ligon’s art encourages viewers to slow down and contemplate. Through each piece, he offers a narrative on cultural identity and the ongoing journey of artistic discovery.

Chapters

00:00 - 03:00: Introduction and Early Career The chapter begins with a horn honking sound followed by a statement from someone named Ligon, who identifies as an artist. Ligon credits his career to the National Endowment for the Arts, mentioning that he received an individual artist grant for drawing in 1989. This grant was pivotal, allowing him to make significant career decisions, including the possibility of leaving his demanding job where he worked 40 to 50 hours a week.
03:00 - 06:00: Retrospective at the Whitney The chapter titled 'Retrospective at the Whitney' explores the significance of a grant in supporting an artist's journey. The speaker reflects on how the grant allowed them the freedom to embrace their artistic ambitions. The setting of a lively party where invites are being managed highlights the excitement and chaos surrounding the event. There is a specific mention of having a retrospective at the Whitney, suggesting a moment of achievement and recognition in the artist's career.
06:00 - 11:00: Journey into Text-Based Art The chapter titled 'Journey into Text-Based Art' describes an individual's long-standing relationship with the Whitney Museum. Having been a part of the museum since 1991, the speaker has established a personal connection with the staff and curators, making it a familiar and comfortable place. Despite feeling off today, the speaker humorously notes that at least some things, like their cell number, haven't changed.
11:00 - 15:00: Exploration with Neon and Light The chapter discusses the experience of attending an exhibition opening, which the speaker compares to 'This Is Your Life,' as it brings together many people from their past. They express a mix of emotions, including pride and discomfort due to the scrutiny involved. The event is a reunion with family and artist friends while navigating through the crowded exhibition space with lines extending outside. The speaker feels the necessity of capturing moments with pictures amidst the busy environment.
15:00 - 18:00: Use of Coal Dust and Reflections on 'Stranger In The Village' The chapter discusses themes of coal dust usage and reflections on James Baldwin's essay 'Stranger In The Village.' It highlights the unexpected consistencies found in retrospective exhibitions, particularly focusing on the recurring themes of legibility and illegibility in artwork. The narrative intertwines personal experiences with broader artistic and societal observations, showing how various elements of the exhibition connect through these shared themes.
18:00 - 23:00: Material and Technique Reflections The chapter titled 'Material and Technique Reflections' reflects on the author's diverse use of language throughout their career, a consistent interest in American history, and a recurring exploration of color. The author notes that color is a significant element that appears both at the beginning and later parts of their career.
23:00 - 26:00: Incorporating Color and Humor The chapter explores the early artistic endeavors of the narrator, who as a child did not create original drawings but rather made copies of cartoon characters. This turned into a small business where the narrator sold these drawings to classmates. By high school, the narrator realized a desire to become an artist, encouraged by the mother who enrolled them in art classes at the Metropolitan Museum.
26:00 - 30:00: The Artistic Process The chapter reflects on the author's early exposure to art and how it was not a typical path within their family. Their mother enrolled them in art classes, possibly to ensure they were well-rounded, but not anticipating a full-fledged career in art. The absence of a family role model in the artistic field left the idea of pursuing art as a profession as something unfamiliar and somewhat worrying to her mother.

Glenn Ligon in "History" - Season 6 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21 Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 [horn honking] [LIGON] I'm an artist because the National Endowment for the Arts used to give grants to individual artists. So I got a grant for drawing in 1989. That grant allowed me to make a decision, which was, I could keep working the job that I was working, 40, 50 hours a week,
00:30 - 01:00 or I could use that grant money to take some time off and really dive into this thing called being an artist. And so that grant was pivotal, actually. - Invites, please. - I'm so sorry about this party. Like... - It's fine. - Okay. [laughs] - It's all good. - It's all good. - Everybody wants to come to this party all of a sudden. - We're gonna, like... LIGON: One of the things about having a retrospective at the Whitney is that I feel
01:00 - 01:30 like I am coming to a place that I know very well, because the Whitney has the largest collection of my work in the country. I started showing at the Whitney in 1991, in the biennial. I know all the guards and I know all the curators. And so it’s a very easy place to navigate. - Today I was, like, awful. - That's all right, but you haven't changed your cell number?
01:30 - 02:00 - No, no, it's the same. - All right, all right. Any opening of an exhibition is a bit like, “This Is Your Life.” So there were people that I haven’t seen in 30 years. - I'm so proud of you, i don't know what to say. Lots of family and lots of artist friends. - I mean, the line is outside... - We only just glance from room to room. - I know, we have to have a picture, a picture time. - Picture time. [ laughs ] LIGON: I won’t say it was fun to be there because I don’t like that level of scrutiny
02:00 - 02:30 and attention. But I think it was interesting to be around so many people who wished me well. LIGON: The surprise of, of retrospective is that there’s more consistency than I had thought in how the work appears. There are several threads that tie together the show. One is an interest throughout the work in issues of legibility and illegibility.
02:30 - 03:00 I’ve used language in various kinds of ways throughout my career. Another is concern with American history. Another thing is the return to color. And it is at the very beginning of my career, the earliest works in the show, but it returns towards the end as well.
03:00 - 03:30 I didn’t really do drawings when I was a kid. I, I made copies of things. So I would, I had a good business when I was a kid, doing drawings of cartoon characters from the newspaper. And I would cut them out and sell them to my friends in school. And when I was in high school I knew that I wanted to be an artist. And my mother had sent me to after-school classes at the Metropolitan Museum.
03:30 - 04:00 And I think my mother sent me to art classes because she thought that’s what a well-rounded citizen should have education in. Sort of arts in a general sense. But there was no one in my family who had been an artist and so there wasn’t really any role model for it. But I think the idea that I actually was going to be an artist horrified her,
04:00 - 04:30 because artists don’t make any money. And what did she say? The only artists I’ve ever heard of are dead. And she meant Picasso. I think the artist that I was interested in when I first started working were de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock. That whole generation of abstract expressionists.
04:30 - 05:00 At a certain moment I decided that being an abstract expressionist wasn’t quite going to do it. And that produced a kind of crisis in the studio. And what I decided to do was to incorporate the things that I was thinking about, the things I was reading into the work directly. And the models for that were people like Jasper Johns or,
05:00 - 05:30 Rauschenberg. People who had used text in their work. When I first started doing that, I decided that I was just going to use my handwriting. And then after a while I decided, I’m not interested in telling my own stories. I’m interested in what other people have to say. There’s nothing wrong with self-expression, it just has its limits. And I think that the
05:30 - 06:00 things that I was interested in were already in the world and so they didn’t need me to create them again in that way. They just needed for me to have them be brought into the work you know. The work became more about quotation, using texts from various literary sources.
06:00 - 06:30 I read lots of things. I just read whatever I feel like reading. And if something stays in my head long enough it might turn into art. It was the one thing that when I was a child my mother would allow me, any book I wanted, no matter the cost. Expensive toys, or clothes, no.
06:30 - 07:00 But any book. So that kind of uh, attention to books was, love of books came early. Ideas take a long time to be born, you know. They take a long time to gestate. They take a long time to come into the world. And that process is hard.
07:00 - 07:30 - Gloves on. I guess what I’m committed to is, I don’t know, not love of painting, but love of the idea of making ideas. The first text paintings I made were single sentences by an author named Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance.
07:30 - 08:00 The way I was making the paintings was to use plastic letter stencils and oil crayons. If you’re using letter stencils, you’re trying to make something with a sharp boundary, but oil crayons want to break out of those boundaries. They’re messy, they don’t keep their shape. And for about six months I think I tried to figure out how to make these oil crayons make nice, neat letters. And then I realized that the fact that they didn’t make nice,
08:00 - 08:30 neat letters was actually much more interesting. Smudging them and transforming these letters into abstraction was what the paintings were about, but it took six months to figure that out. [ chuckles ] You know? At first it was really important for me that I made these you know from start to finish.
08:30 - 09:00 Now that’s not so important to me. It’s more important that I come in at a certain point where there is a base for me to work off of. And I find it interesting to work on something that’s sort of started out of my hands basically. The kinds of line breaks and kinds of spacings that they would make in presenting a text is very different than what I would do. And I often find that when I’m working,
09:00 - 09:30 it’s the mistakes or it’s someone else’s suggestion or intervention that pushes the work forward. You know it’s the things that I didn’t think I was going to do that end up being the thing..... And sometimes that means you have to lose a little bit of control over things. You have to let them go to someone else. Let someone else work on them, collaborate with people. So often people say, "I get your message," but I don’t know think that message, if I have a
09:30 - 10:00 message, is so separated from what the object is, how it’s painted. Indeed that’s where the work starts from, a kind of making rather than a message that is then layered into an object.
10:00 - 10:30 There’s a series of paintings called The Coloring Book Paintings, which were based on the kids’ drawings. Often when I look for source material, I don’t know where I’m going to find it. And sometimes I don’t even know what I’m exactly looking for. When I found these, it was quite a surprise. I didn’t know they existed.
10:30 - 11:00 So it’s the moment when educators are trying to figure out, how do you teach black history? So they create these coloring books that have images that any coloring book would have in them. Boys playing basketball juxtaposed with images of people like Harriet Tubman. I thought this was going to be an easy project for me.
11:00 - 11:30 I really had to kind of inhabit the way a kid would hold a crayon or paint a painting. You know Picasso said he had to spend his whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child. And I know what he means now, it’s hard. But it was very instructive for me. That disconnect between what the kids imagine those images to be and what I
11:30 - 12:00 as an adult bring to an image of say, Malcolm X was what the work was about. I first started doing neons because there’s a neon shop in my building. And one day I was walking by the neon shop and the owner, Matt, um, said, do you want a tour? And I said, sure.
12:00 - 12:30 He makes work for corporations, but he also makes work for artists too. And I thought that was an interesting pairing. I’d been to that point, making paintings using black text on white backgrounds. So really just as a joke, I said, um, you know is there such a thing as black neon?
12:30 - 13:00 And the owner of the shop, Matt, said, that’s against the laws of physics, because black is the absence of light. But then we started talking about it a bit and I realized that there was a way to do it, because one can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it, it would also read as neon, because there would be light coming from behind that black letter. And once I realized that was
13:00 - 13:30 possible, it became the connection between my painting work and these neons, using text. Lots of artists have used neon, so there are precedents for what I was doing.
13:30 - 14:00 - Wait, what is that? Oh, so this is sort of telling you what the color’s going to look like when it’s lit inside. - Wow. How long do you have to pump the gas into the letter? SERGIO ALMARAZ: Ten, fifteen minutes, forty minutes. This is a neon gas, this is argon with mercury. And this is a mercury. - And then this is helium. - Right.
14:00 - 14:30 - And then this is argon gas. Argon with no mercury. - Right. INTERVIEWER: Glenn, you’ve been working with neon and you never got the explanation for it? LIGON: No, it just kind of arrived, done. [ laughs ] It just arrived. First Neon was based on a little fragment of a Gertrude Stein novel called "Three Lives" and it says, "Negro Sunshine." I was interested in Gertrude Stein because she is interested in America, American history,
14:30 - 15:00 trying to describe what America means, which I think is one of my projects too. For me, using neon was really about finding the connection between the work I was already doing and the neon. And until we had that discussion about black light, that hadn’t happened.
15:00 - 15:30 There are paintings that emit light. The coal dust paintings do... Because they have this shiny black gravel-like substance called coal dust on top of them. And when you shine a light on that, it sparkles and glistens.
15:30 - 16:00 And I started using coal dust in relationship to paintings because I was thinking about James Baldwin and the essay that I was using "Stranger In The Village." He’s an American author. He’s gone to Europe to work on a novel and he’s in this little Swiss village. It was written in the ‘50s. And the essay is about his relationship to the people who have no relationship to black Americans.
16:00 - 16:30 And he’s trying to think through what it means to be a stranger somewhere. The kind of fascination and fear that strangers produce. I like the idea of using coal dust because it’s a waste product. It’s left over stuff from coal processing. The way it’s used on the paintings was interesting to me and seemed to be a kind of parallel to what Baldwin was talking about.
16:30 - 17:00 It gets sprayed with this acrylic glue, cause otherwise all that coal dust is going to fall off the drawing. Glue and sprayers don’t really go together. So when it dries, it dries clear. Basically fancy Elmer’s Glue and water. Nothing very mysterious.
17:00 - 17:30 Et voila. Paint is a very sensual material. It’s lovely to work with and lovely to look at. It’s also inefficient. We’re used to seeing text printed, we’re not used to seeing text
17:30 - 18:00 made out of paint. And there’s a kind of slowness and inefficiency about rendering text in paint that’s interesting to me. It slows your reading down and it slows the viewer down in front of the paintings. And I think we’re in a world that’s very fast, so things that slow you for a minute, give you pause I think are good.
18:00 - 18:30 LIGON: If you use jokes by a comedian like Richard Pryor, they need to be jokes in color. So the paintings have to have color in them. They allowed me to go back to my abstract expressionist days when I made paintings that were very colorful.
18:30 - 19:00 - [ laughing ] [ voices overlapping ] [ LIGON ] Well the struggle is always that the idea you have in your head about what you want to
19:00 - 19:30 say in your work versus the means you have to say it with or your abilities or your skills or, the technical limitations of the medium you’re working in. So it’s, there’s always sort of, like, the ideal painting in your head, and you never quite get to that. And so you make something, and it’s almost there, it’s not quite right, you make something else. It’s almost there,
19:30 - 20:00 it’s not quite right. You make something else. It’s almost there, it’s not quite right. But that process doesn’t end, you know? Eventually just, that, that is the process. You know, you just keep going.