In so many ways, Glenn Ligon’s art productionsare like illuminated manuscripts. The 49-year-old Bronx-born artist is probably most famous for his text paintings, which he’s made since the ’80s, appropriating words by everyone from Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison toRichard Pryor. Sometimes a line floats in the center of the canvas, and other times it repeats manically from top to bottom, covered over in paint until it’s almost aggressively illegible. Such sentences that flicker in and out of abstraction include: I do not always feel colored and Iwas a nigger for twenty-three years.
I gave that shit up. No Room for advancement. Clearly, Ligon relies heavily on the legacy of writers, but he also actively engages with the history of abstract painting. In other pieces, however, he takes that fight between readability and revolt away from the canvas and the oils—particularly in a number of neon works, where the white neon bar is covered over in black, giving the simultaneous sense of illumination and blackout. Recently, the artist even entered the film business. His piece The Death of Tom is an abstractionist restaging of the last scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the silent movie filmed by Thomas Edison’s studio in 1903. Ligon asked experimental jazz musician Jason Moran to create the soundtrack for the film—“playing to the shadows,” as the young musician puts it. Here, the two talk about the importance of learning things that aren’t always written down.
ason Moran: When did you figure out that art—with a big “A”—was an option for a lifestyle, versus, say, working for ups?
Glenn Ligon: You know, it took a long time to figure that out, because there wasn’t any precedent in my family for being an artist. Although, ironically, when my mother was younger, she wanted to be a singer, which I found odd because I never thought she had a good voice. [both laugh] But at some point she must have had a good voice. I remember seeing pictures of her from the ’40s, when she’d just gotten married. She was very glamorous, very stylish, and being a singer once must have been a possibility for her. When I started showing artistic talent at a very young age, she was encouraging.
Moran: What was your artistic talent?
Ligon: Drawing, mostly. But I also had a deep interest in literature, which became a big part of what my work is about. But back then I was just filling up notebooks with sketches and drawings. So my mother sent me to pottery classes after school. At this point she had separated from my father. My brother and I were going to private school on scholarship. There wasn’t a lot of extra money, but there was an attitude that money could be spent for anything that bettered us—in that black, working-class, striving kind of way. Culture was betterment. Anything we wanted to read was fine. Pottery classes or trips to the Met were fine. Hundred-dollar sneakers? No.
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/glenn-ligon/
Or Watch the interview
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/media/video/8887
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