ON VIEW

Glenn Ligon (born in the Bronx, NY in 1960) is an internationally recognized artist who uses a variety of media - painting, printmaking, neon, photography and video - to explore the complex dynamics of subjectivity, race, language, representation, and African-American and national history. Invisible Man (Two Views) is an early, monochromatic diptych from 1991, and it exemplifies Ligon’s distinct artistic vocabulary and fusion of painterly techniques and conceptual strategies. Ligon was first an abstract painter, but after participating in the theory-heavy Independent Studies Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1985, began to incorporate texts by authors including Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison into his canvases. Ligon has said that in his early abstract practice "too much of my life was left out when I walked into the studio." (1) Text afforded an alternative and allowed Ligon to use paint as a tool to grapple with significant social and cultural topics, among them subjectivity and race in America.

For Invisible Man (Two Views) Ligon used thick, black oilsticks to hand-stencil the opening to the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel of the same name onto two canvases, each twenty-eight by twenty inches. The opening of the prologue reads:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

Ellison’s award-winning, first-person narrative charts a black man’s experience in mid-century America, a society and nation plagued by racism and fear of difference. The novel unfolds a series of graphic and violent events that illuminate the harsh inequalities of the white-centric national paradigm. Over the course of the novel, the narrator abandons a passive attitude toward social oppression and develops a politicized perspective about his blackness. He becomes prideful of his racial identity, and he advocates for the integration of black subjectivity into the American social, cultural and political body.

Ligon brings Ellison’s text to life and grapples with its meaning in the present. He worked from upper-left to lower-right and transcribed Ellison’s text letter-by-letter. He repeated this action to build up thick layers of paint, literally giving form to Ellison’s words and creating a textured surface. Through this performative action, Ligon takes on Ellison’s voice. For Ligon "the text is something that I wanted to inhabit and the way I chose to inhabit it was to make paintings that have quotes that create confusion about who’s speaking."(2) The first words on Ligon’s canvas read, "I am an invisible man." Who is the "I" - Ligon, Ellison, the novel’s narrator? Ligon collapses his voice with Ellison’s and the narrator’s and poses the question, "What does it mean to take on another person’s words as a way of talking about the self?" (3)

Ligon also embedded portrait silhouettes within the fields of text on each canvas, further entangling subjectivity with Ellison’s words. The left canvas includes a back-view of a head, and the right-most canvas features a side-profile. Ellison’s words literally give shape to an anonymous image of a man. These embedded silhouettes, however, are visible only when the canvases are viewed from a distance. When the canvases are experienced up-close, the portraits dissolve into Ellison’s text. This back-and-forth between history and present, visibility and invisibility suggests that perception and subjectivity are unstable.

The text on each canvas is also hard to decipher and evokes questions about legibility and the complexity of language. Over the length of each canvas, Ellison’s words increasingly degrade into abstract, monochromatic compositions. Ligon purposefully "frustrates communication" and requires visitors to observe Ellison’s text up close and to experience it anew.(4) In Ligon’s abstractions, Ellison’s words fall apart and open a space for their re-examination. Ligon comments that we are in a particular moment when "race and identity and things have become very difficult and blurred - they always were, but I think more and more, those questions tend toward abstraction." (5)

Written by Nina Bozicnik

NOTES
(1) Glenn Ligon, quoted in Glenn Ligon: MATRIX 120 [exhibition brochure], by Andrea Miller-Keller (Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1992), 3.
(2) Glenn Ligon, quoted in an interview with David Droger,Museo Magazine 14 (2010). Accessed September 17, 2010. http://www.museomagazine.com/802505/GLENN-LIGON.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.