Gregg Bordowitz - I Am A Man: Glenn Ligon

First published in 2018

by Afterall Books

Afterall

Central Saint Martins

University of the Arts London

Granary Building

1 Granary Square

London N1C 4AA

www.afterall.org

Afterall is a Research Centre of

University of the Arts London

Directors: Charles Esche, Mark Lewis;

Publishing Director: Caroline Woodley;

Administrator: Beth Bramich;

Researchers/Editors: Ana Bilbao, Louis

Hartnoll, David Morris, Lucy Steeds;

Associate Member: Yaiza Hernndez;

TBA21 Graduate Research Assistant:

Rose Thompson; AWP Intern: Ella Sweeney

One Work Series Editor

Mark Lewis

Editor

Caroline Woodley

Assistant Editor

Louis Hartnoll

Copy Editor

Deirdre ODwyer

2018 Afterall, Central Saint Martins,

University of the Arts London,

the artists and the authors

All images of works by Glenn Ligon 2018

the artist and photographers, courtesy the

artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, Regen

Projects, Los Angeles and Thomas Dane

Gallery, London

eISBN 978-1-84638-193-5

eISBN 978-1-84638-194-2

eISBN 978-1-84638-195-9

Distribution by The MIT Press,

Cambridge, Massachusetts and London

www.mitpress.mit.edu

cover:

Glenn Ligon,

Untitled (I Am a Man), 1965/66,

oil and enamel on canvas, 101.6 63.5cm

Photograph: Ronald Amstutz

d_r0

One Work is a unique series of books published by Afterall, a Research Centre of University of the Arts London, located at Central Saint Martins. Each book presents a single work of art considered in detail by a single author. The focus of the series is on contemporary art and its aim is to provoke debate about significant moments in arts recent development.

Over the course of more than one hundred books, important works will be presented in a meticulous and generous manner by writers who believe passionately in the originality and significance of the works about which they have chosen to write. Each book contains a comprehensive and detailed formal description of the work, followed by a critical mapping of the aesthetic and cultural context in which it was made and that it has gone on to shape. The changing presentation and reception of the work throughout its existence is also discussed, and each writer stakes a claim on the influence their work has on the making and understanding of other works of art.

The books insist that a single contemporary work of art (in all of its different manifestations), through a unique and radical aesthetic articulation or invention, can affect our understanding of art in general. More than that, these books suggest that a single work of art can literally transform, however modestly, the way we look at and understand the world. In this sense the One Work series, while by no means exhaustive, will eventually become a veritable library of works of art that have made a difference.

For Glenn Ligon

Contents

The canvas is 101.6 by 63.5 centimetres, portrait orientation. The partially underlined uppercase letters of the phrase I AM A MAN are painted in black enamel, in three rows, the As aligned vertically. Letters are executed by hand in the manner of professional sign painting. Brushwork does not show the clean lines of stencil use. Pencil marks are visible. The ground is deceptively subtle it is not merely white oil paint out of the can or tube. Close examination yields much information. Thick application now cracking all over in a web pattern. A single strand of hair stuck on the surface. Grey, blue and green tints are visible through the layers of the white. A small rust line, possibly the residue of an iron nails oxidation, can be seen on the bottom edge. Along the edges of the unframed work, regularly spaced staples affix the canvas to stretcher bars. The canvas is painted to the perimeter of the picture plane, where vestiges of an underpainting are evident in glimpses of orange, red, brown, black, green and blue.

The artist admits that he covered over an abstract painting to make Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988, When the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC purchased the painting in 2012, X-ray analysis revealed that an earlier painting was covered over in black paint, and the whitish ground applied over the black. Ligon had covered the abstraction with black paint before proceeding to execute the work.

The National Gallerys website overview describes Ligons painting as part of a body of intertextual works that re-present American history and literature, engaging in racial and gender-oriented struggles for the self, leading viewers to reconsider problems inherent in representation.

Untitled (I Am a Man) is [] a representation a signifier of the actual signs carried by 1,300 striking African American sanitation workers in Memphis, made famous in Ernest Witherss 1968 photographs. Prompted by the wrongful deaths of two coworkers from faulty equipment, the strikers marched to protest low wages and unsafe working conditions. They took up the slogan I Am a Man as a variant on the first line of Ralph Ellisons prologue to Invisible Man [1952], I am an invisible man. By deleting the word invisible, the Memphis strikers asserted their presence, making themselves visible in standing up for their rights.

Through didactic means, in descriptions, scholarly essays and statements from the artist himself, we learn that this painting refers to protest signs carried by striking African-American sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. That fact is surely significant and central to this analysis. Yet, I propose that this painting is not a sign. It is not a reproduction of a sign. Here sign is used to refer to a placard, and the word also carries all the theoretical weight of sign used in linguistic (semiotic) theories. At the very least, Ligons painting is not simply reducible to a sign in any sense of the term. This is no small matter, and this book will refer to other thinkers who see that the urgency of this artworks importance requires both aesthetic and cultural analyses. It demands nothing less than a novel theory of meaning.

By way of an analogy, C.L.R. Jamess classic book Beyond a Boundary (1963) considers how an art form can also be an embodiment of the politics of colonialism. For James, the sport of cricket shares with visual art the characteristics of the finest paintings because mere illustration or competently achieved verisimilitude to the paintings subject is not sufficient to realize a great work of art. Merely witnessing is not enough. Watching the finest cricket players induces an excitement of flow in the senses. So, too, a great painting can stimulate an experience of movement in the viewer. However, the painter faces a unique problem. The artist possesses a set of tools and skills to induce the sensation of flow, a sensation that is distinctly different from live action. The great challenge that a painter must meet is to distil motion into one significant form so that the viewer may sense, feel, anticipate all the possibilities of motion suggested by the formal elements of the painting. Through, line, colour and composition the artist creates a compelling sense of turbulence, strongly felt by the paintings viewers.