"not only this but "New language beckons us'" @ NYU

Vernissage at Fales Library and Special Collections, NYU

For those in NYC or visiting before July 27, 2013, do check out a wonderful exhibit organized and curated by Andrew Blackley for Visual AIDS at New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections, entitled "not only this, but 'new language beckons us'." 

The exhibit features original works by artists in NYU's collections as well as new works by authors in conversation with these artists and their works, including Julie Ault, Dodie Bellamy, Gregg Bordowitz, Nancy Brooks Brody, AA Bronson, Elijah Burgher, Kathe Burkhart, Sean Carrillo, Peter Cramer, Lia Gangitano, Matthias Herrmann, Jim Hubbard, Doug Ischar, William E. Jones, Kevin Killian, Nathanaël, John Neff, Uzi Parnes, Mary Patten, Nina Sobell, Ela Troyano, Ultra-red, Jack Waters, Joe Westmoreland, Danh Vo, and yours truly.

People viewing the cases

As Andrew's announcement states:

This exhibition is composed of archival objects from the Fales Library's Downtown Collection coupled with newly commissioned texts from contemporary artists and writers. Each text corresponds to a figure or object from the collection and highlights interpersonal affinities and adjacencies, influences and recollections. These couplings give voice to still-present narratives and discourses orbiting the intersection of art and HIV/AIDS—a theme that speaks to Visual AIDS' ongoing mission: to serve as an advocate for artists with AIDS and to recognize art as a tool for education and activism in the fight against AIDS.

Some of the texts on display

My contribution is a prose piece riffing specifically on "Hypnos and Thanatos," as well as the drawing books and other artworks by the late painter, graffiti artist and collector, and set designer Martin Wong (1946-1999), onetime lover of the playwright and poet Miguel Piñero (1946-1988) and an important figure in the emerging 1980s Lower East Side/East Village art scene. Other pieces include essays, meditations, poems, one-line provocations, and new visual pieces, and the works from the Fales Collection range across genres, but offer glimpses of a world, or worlds, now almost completely invisible, if not gone, in hypergentrifying Manhattan and New York City. Below are some photos from the opening, which took place on May 23.

A Peter Hujar/David Wojnarowicz piece at left,
with a corresponding response

The exhibit, at NYU

In the Life @ Whitney Museum Today!

For any and all in and around New York, a wonderful event will take place this afternoon! Please come if you can.

BLUES FOR SMOKE PERFORMANCE SERIES  

GREGG BORDOWITZ: “IN THE LIFE”

A READING OF WORKS BY GAY BLACK MEN FROM THE 1980S AND ’90S

SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 2013  2 PM   

FILM AND VIDEO GALLERY

For “in the life,”* artist and writer Gregg Bordowitz will host readings from the literary work of gay, male, African American poets and writers, who chronicled sexuality, illness, and death during the height of theAIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s. Many of the writers are now dead, and their works have been collected in anthologies, such as In The Life, edited by Joseph Beam, and Brother to Brother, edited by Essex Hemphill. Bordowitz will be joined by a diverse group of readers including Ari Banias, John Keene, Rickey Laurentiis, Glenn Ligon, Eileen Myles, Other Countries, Robert Reid-Pharr, and Pamela Sneed to pay tribute to artists such as Donald Woods, Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs and many more.

*In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology was a groundbreaking collection of writing edited by Joseph Beam and published in 1986.

Free with Museum admission; no special tickets or reservations are required. Members enjoy complimentary and express entry to the Museum.

Now Dig This! From LA to NY Symposium

Sanford Biggers' "Cheshire"

As part of the Museum of Modern Art PS1's current--and excellent--exhibition, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, a day-long symposium took place on Friday, February 8, 2013, at MoMa's Manhattan headquarters, in the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2. The symposium's aims included exploring the connections and parallels between the African American artistic communities in these two cities through an examination of the social and cultural atmospheres in both during the 1970s and early 1980s, in part by giving voice, literally, to some of the artists, gallerists, and critics featured in the show. Now Dig This! originally ran in Los Angeles as part of a series of exhibitions gathered under the theme and title of Pacific Standard Time, and will continue at MoMA PS1 until March 11, 2013. See it before it's gone!

Goode Bryant showing a clip of David Hammons selling snowballs

Goode Bryant showing a clip from her film

The foolscap strips

The first panel, which I was unable to attend, took up this thread directly, with organizer and scholar Kellie Jones, Cheryl Finley, Komozi Woodard, each delivering talks, moderated by curator Franklin Sirmans. The first afternoon panel focused on the legendary Just Above Midtown Gallery, a black-owned space on Franklin Street that served as a laboratory, launching pad, training ground, and "club house," as its founder, filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant put it, for a number of figures who have since gone on to great fame, including David Hammons, Fred Wilson, Lorraine O'Grady, Senga Nengudi, and Ulysses Jenkins, the latter three of whom were present and all gave presentations or performances related to their experiences with and at JAM. Naima Keith moderated the Q&A session that followed.

Benny Andrews, in a clip from Goode Bryant's film

Ulysses Jenkins

Lorraine O'Grady, showing a clip from her diaporama

A still from Ulysses Jenkins's film of Conwill's "Cake Walk" © 1983.

I'd heard of the gallery but knew little about it except that it had been a cynosure during its existence, but seeing Bryant's film clips, and hearing her talk about how and why she started it, who passed through, and what the gallery meant and still means was illuminating. One of the video clips showed Hammons urging artists to stay out of/away from the gallery world, an admonition it's clear most of the younger generation, who can more easily and freely participate in a system that excluded their elders, have ignored. As she spoke, she invited everyone in the room to tear pieces of newspaper into strips which she would later use as part of her vermiculture efforts at community gardens all over New York.

Jenkins showed an excerpt from and talked about making his video Cake Walk (© 1983), which captured a performance by Houston Conwill and other dancers at Just Above Midtown. Jenkins talked about the challenges then of video-filmmaking and the shifts occurring since that moment. He also talked about how important the experience was for him personally and for his artmaking. Lorraine O'Grady, who is also well known as a critic and theorist, showed stills--together forming a diaporama--of her 1982 Central Park performance, RIVERS, FIRST DRAFT, an allegory of her journey into the art world, and which featured a very young Fred Wilson, among others. With and against the captioned images she read first an introduction, which discussed her and others experiences at JAM, followed by a more poetic text. Finishing the sesions, Senga Nengudi strolled the perimeter of the theater, calling out "The people all said sit down, / sit down if you're rocking the boat," as she kicked a box around the room, stopping only when she reached the stage, whereupon she broke it down, transformed it into a small sculpture, and then proceeded back to her seat.

Lorraine O'Grady, showing a clip from her
diaporama of RIVERS, FIRST DRAFT
(Fred Wilson is the young man in the green shirt)

The panel discussion that followed contained a lot of quotable lines, but one of Goode Bryant's first comments struck me most. She noted that the words "They won't let us..." annoyed her tremendously, and that her response had been to defy such expectations or lack thereof, and say "Fuck them. Start our own." This was part of a larger ethos, certainly, of the moment in which she and the other artists worked, and it continued well into the 1990s, though institutional creep, conceptually and materially, has changed the terms by which many younger artists think and operate. Senga Nengudi eventually echoed Goode Bryant's comments, penning "AGAIN / FUCK / 'EM" on a clipboard. Goode Bryant underlined that her guiding idea was "being in integrity with" oneself, an approach she and many of the artists in her milieu had striven to adhere to, and, as is clear with her current projects, that "art can directly affect the condition of the environment where it is made." Both she and Nengudi invoked the late musician Lawrence "Butch" Morris, who had been one of many talented music makers in the constellation of artists around the gallery and in the New York black and broader arts scene.

Senga Nengudi's performance

Keith, Goode Bryant, Jenkins, O'Grady, and Nengudi

Nengudi writing on the flipboard

A final panel comprised five younger, contemporary artists--Xaviera Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas, Kira Lynn Harris, Steffani Jameson, and Sanford Biggers (of "Cheshire" fame)--who spoke about the influence of the earlier generation as well as their individual experiences with the contemporary art world. Every single one of them showed formally polished artworks. Kalia Brooks moderated the discussion following their presentations, and nearly all these artists appeared to take a different approach from their predecessors. Hank Willis Thomas put it as bluntly as a hammer blow when he stated that he doesn't "believe in the engaged artist," or the statements "art is..." or "the artist should...." Although she concurred, Xaviera Simmons ended the panel discussion by stressing a point she'd made earlier, which was how "fortunate" all of these younger artists were, in part because of the sacrifices and gains of their predecessors.

A detail from one of Sanford Biggers' installations

A detail from one of Sanford Biggers' films

Brooks, Harris, Biggers, Willis Thomas, Jameson, Simmons

Hassinger's piece

Concluding the day's events, Now Dig This! artist Maren Hassinger involved the entire audience in the auditorium in a participatory art project, which entailed extracting a length of rope, all of differing lengths, placed beneath everyone's seat, and then extending them and tying them together to whomever they reached. When completed, the entire room had been transformed, we had individually and collectively created a network and new environment, and the resonances of using the rope were no less powerful.  Both simple and effective, it was a demonstration of the ideas and practices she and her peers have been conveying for years in their work, made visible and material for everyone present.

Forming the links

People right next to me (Simmons at left)

A view from above

Maren Hassinger herself

George Dureau @ Higher Pictures + Rotimi Fani-Kayode @ The Walther Collection

Laurence Patterson, 1970s (© George Dureau, Higher Pictures)

By splendid coincidence, two exhibits, both quite small but nevertheless impressive, of queer photography from the heyday era of the late 1970s through the mid-1980s are still up in New York City, so yesterday, despite the heat, which turns Manhattan sidewalks into griddles and the subway stations into kilns, I ventured out and over (or under) to catch both.

The first was a tiny exihibit at Higher Pictures gallery, on the Upper East Side, entitled George Dureau Black 1973-1986, totaling only 15 pictures total by the New Orleans-based photographer (1930-), who has been taking photographs for over 50 years, and snapped these as studies for his paintings. All of these were black and white prints from 1973 through 1986, and to my astonishment, it turned out that this is Dureau's first solo exhibit in New York. I'd first seen Dureau's work in book form when I was in my early 20s and working at the old Glad Day Bookshop in Boston, and flipped through it often enough; in that volume, which included many of the images in the show, Dureau creates portraits, suffused with homoeroticism, of young working-class and poor men, some of them with physical challenges.

The portraits bear strong similarities of focus and style with those of Robert Mapplethorpe, but it was Dureau who influenced the younger photographer, who went to New Orleans in the early 1970s to meet and study the senior artist's work, evening restaging them in some cases. Unlike Mapplethorpe's work, Dureau's portraits manage to portray without objectification, possessing a simplicity of composition and manipulation of light and shadow without being simplistic, a casualness of depiction that never feels like happenstance, and an eroticism, even with the nudes, that leaves a great deal to the viewer's imagination. Far more so than Mapplethorpe's work, the subjects of the portraits seem to retain their subjectivity, their individuality, the richness of lives only captured for an instant by the photographer in his studio or on the street. In the gallery's news release, the literary scholar Claude J. Summers describes the difference between the two as "foremost a matter of empathy."

Though we cannot see the milieus from which these men emerge, we can imagine and glimpse them in a way that is not always possible with Mapplethorpe's images. Nevertheless, though Dureau's have documentary power, they represent their subjects as more than indices of a particular time and place; they come alive, as works of art, burning through the moment of their original creation to touch the viewer today. But I don't want to belabor the contrasts; Dureau's pictures speak for themselves. If I have any complain I only wish there were many more on display. Several things I found myself wondering, as I always do when I see such work, is who these men are, what their lives were like, whether they're still around to answer these questions.  Dureau's rich images keep me wondering, and thinking.

The exhibit closes on July 13, 2012.




Alphonse Dotson, 1977 (© George Dureau, Higher Pictures)




***

I took the 6 downtown to Union Square and switched over the L to get to Chelsea, where The Walther Collection is featuring the first solo New York show (no less astonishing), Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Nothing to Lose, of the late Nigerian-British photographer (1955-1989) whose work represents some of the most evocative visual cultural production from period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Black Diasporic queer arts and letters truly emerged.  As with Dureau's photographs, I first came across Fani-Kayode's in books, anthologies and journals when I was in my early 20s and he was still alive, and to this day I associate them with the wide array of Black queer art of that moment, but I'd never had the opportunity to see them up close until today, and for that I thank the Walther Collection tremendously. (The exhibit runs until July 28, 2012.)

Gathering a little over a dozen large color and small-scale black-and-white portraits that Fani-Kayode, who was born in Lagos and emigrated with his family to the UK in 1966, after the Nigerian military coup and burgeoning conflict that became the Biafran War, produced during the final years of his life.  Fani-Kayode studied at Georgetown University and Pratt Institute, and got to know Robert Mapplethorpe, even drawing upon the latter poet's body of work as he constructed his own.

© Rotimi Fani-Kayode, The Walther Collection

If I may quote The Walther Collection's press release,

the photographs on view at The Walther Collection Project Space represent ke works from the series "Nothing to Lose," commissioned as part of the 1989 group exhibition Bodies of Experience: Stories About Living with HIV, which feature primarily portraits and self-portraiture; and from the series "Ecstatic Antibodies," included in the 1990 group exhibition Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology, which display transformations of the body through the use of masking. In addition, a selection of other black-and-white and color photographs, produced between 1986 and 1989, will also be on view.

The color photographs, some of which have become iconic, depict Fani-Kayode and others in spiritually grounded, ritualistic poses that queer elements of Christian and Yoruba iconography, presenting visual depictions of cultural connection and difference that still feel original, despite the passage of nearly two and half decades and numerous photographers who have taken up his threads.  Many present rites that might allow the subject, and the viewer, to transcend the temporal and physical realm; others suggest menace, danger, a choice--as in a bite of a toxic fruit--that might have dire consequences. As the Walther Collection's press release states, they merge Fani-Kayode's "fascination with Yoruba 'techniques of ecstasy' and homoerotic self-expression through symbolic gestures, religion, sexuality, and elaborate decoration."  Other motifs that occur in these portraits include exile, death and blackness.

As he was making these images, Fani-Kayode was dealing with HIV/AIDS, and his personal struggle, which mirrored his outspoken public activism regarding the HIV/AIDS pandemic, informs all of these portraits.  The bodies here, Fani-Kayode's and others', black, male, queer, even while visually bestilled, often appear to be in motion, transition, in flight, but not away from the horrors of this disease, then at the apogee of its destruction, but toward and against it, in resistance to it, as well as toward zones of possibility, of healing and restoration, of connection of body and spirit, and differing cultural traditions. Rather than depictions of alienation or suffering (which too are here), the images are sites of potentiality, and Fani-Kayode's compositional choices, his use of vibrant color, and his pairing of obvious and more hidden symbols combine to charge each portrait on display.

Yet central to this potentiality and resistance is eros.  The eroticized, painted and adorned, partially masked or hidden, anointed and transformed black body, his and other bodies, lose none of their beauty or appeal despite the specter of HIV/AIDS not just hovering over them, but within them. Whereas Mapplethorpe, in hiding a face or focusing on a penis, sometimes slid into objectification, the effect in Fani-Kayode's portraits is synecdochic, and metonymic. The feet or hands or head of hair stand in for the whole body, in the fight of its life and facing down death, the whole body pointing to and standing alongside all the other black male and queer bodies that HIV/AIDS would carry away from this human realm. The spiritual nature of Fani-Kayode's portraiture then is especially important, because it suggests he was in touch with other worlds, that his subjects might, even if leaving this world, would be prepared for other ones.

One final note: the gallery had several books for sale, including one featuring the work of Fani-Kayode and his late partner Alex Hirst, and while flipping through it I came across a number of Fani-Kayode's portraits featuring writers and artists I knew many years ago, among them the writer and scholar Guy-Mark Foster; one of the images I stopped on was titled "The Kiss" (or perhaps it was "Kiss"), featuring two beautiful young black men embracing, one cradling the other, about to kiss. I noted to the young gallery attendant that the two people in the photo were Essex Hemphill and Isaac Julien, two figures who played key roles in the emergence of Black Diasporic queer art. (He asked who Hemphill was, but certainly knew Julian.) For me, the image, like the others in the show, threaded the needle in terms of demonstrating that Fani-Kayode was and is another such figure. It also underlines his centrality to an era now gone, but captured in the literature and films and images that thankfully endure.

Ai Wei-Wei's New York, 1983-1993 @ Asia Society

Some people have an eye for their times. I don't mean they just see it for what it is, or more clearly than others, or more fully than those around them. They see more deeply into it, almost penetratingly so, and if we're fortunate, they may capture this vision in some form in which they can share it with others. The artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未), perhaps best known today as one China's leading persecuted dissidents and, before the Chinese government's recent harassment of him, as one of the visionaries (along with the Swiss architectural team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of  Herzog and de Meuron) behind the remarkable 2008 National Stadium, the "Bird's Nest" which was the main Olympic stadium venue in Beijing, is one of those people. Ai has left his mark in a variety of areas in the visual and plastic arts and architecture, ranging from the extraordinary stadium to the Beijing Village East experimental art collective he founded in 1993, to his China Art Archives & Warehouse (CAAW), an experimental archive and gallery, whose building he designed.

While active in making art of all kinds, from site installations to interior design to books, Ai has also followed the path of his father, the poet Ai Qing, who with Ai's mother, Gao Ying, was sent by Mao Tse-Tung's government to a labor camp in 1958 for allegedly being a "rightist" in the Communist Party; in addition to speaking out against the Chinese government's suppression of human rights and cultural and political freedom, he has specifically criticized certain government actions or nonactions, such as the corruption endemic in the Sichuan local government in the years preceding the horrific 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which thousands of children were killed because of shoddy schoolbuildings. His outspokenness has led to repeated detentions, including this year, when on April 3 he was arrested on charges of "economic crimes", which provoked an international outcry, with his release coming finally on June 22, just before China's Prime Minister, Wen Jiaobao, was set to visit Europe.

Ai's ability to see through to the heart of things, even in a potentially alienating environment, is clear in his photos from his 1983-1993 stay in in New York, which are on display at the Asia Society.  The show, "Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983-1993," opened shortly after his release, on June 29, and runs until August 14, 2011. I highly recommend it. Featuring 227 photographs (out of an estimated 10,000 he took), by Ai, printed by inkjet on Fantac Innova Ultra Smooth Gloss, it manages to sketch two worlds which intersected through Ai's eyes: one was the world of Chinese immigrants, many of them dissidents intellectuals and artists in exile, many of them young, a few now world-famous (like Tan Dun), and the other was New York and the US of that era, wracked then as now by economic crises and a heaving class divide, but also marked by racial strife, the AIDS pandemic, the dying glimmers of the punk and indie music scenes, and so much more. Ai, with little money but skills and hustle, managed to capture an incredible amount of what was going on, in vivid images that sometimes appeared ready to break open into mini films, or they at least suggest or depict enough narrative that a short seems hidden in them.

(iPad) Drawing of young Tan Dun, based on photo by Ai Weiwei

I took quite a few notes on what Ai, who studied for a while at Parsons and lived in Brooklyn, the East Village and the Lower East Side, managed to snap, though the Asia Society provides an exhaustive list but no commentary, except of the audio sort. In addition to lots of snapshots of attractive, languid young friends and colleagues and their children, people like Dun, Zhou Lin, Chen Kaige, Hu Yongyan, Bei Dao, and Hsieh Tehching, many of whom like the gradually thickening and visibly exhausted but intellectually energized Ai were barely hanging on, busking or painting portraits or gambling to keep food on the table and art supplies at hand, he also snapped The Pyramid Club, Allen Ginsberg visiting his E. 3rd St. apartment, Andy Warhol, grafittied subway car interiors and exteriors and stations (the last of which have made a return, despite the cameras), abandoned buildings on the Lower East Side (many of which are now luxury condos), the homeless, a young African American man, planted in front of a subway station, with a sign announcing that he had AIDs and urging passersby "PLAES HELP"; one of his own early shows, the "Safe Sex Solo Show" in 1988, which would have been even harsher in its irony that many might imagine today; scenes of police brutality; the Tompkins Square Park Riots, a popular uprising against the forces of gentrification that has been almost completely erased from popular memory today; protests in pre-reconfigured Washington Square Park, as well as photos of heavily armed police patrols passing through it; police finding a gun in a grassy lot at Bowery and Delancey Sts.

Others feature a young Al Sharpton, both emerging from a town car and leading the Tawanna Brawley protest in 1988; an early Wigstock; ACT-UP protests in 1989; and a punk concert in 1990, which features banners describing the NYPD as the "Army of the Rich" and "Class War Thugs," while another states that "Community defense is not a crime." Talk about ironies! One of the most telling photos shows a young man in 1990 wearing a t-shirt that says "I'M NOT GOING! DON'T FIGHT FOR THE OIL BO$$ES," which was as appropriate then as it would become in 2002-3, or in 2008, or for any young people considering a military whose commander-in-chief would be willing to send them into an unnecessary, unexplained and unconstitutional war in Libya or Yemen or wherever big oil considerations led him.  In fact one of the shocks of this exhibit, like others I've come across indexing that earlier era, which I vividly remember and lived through, was how much of the worst of it remains, even as other aspects, like a seriously run-down and dangerous New York, no longer exist, except in the popular memory and consciousness. In fact one of the photos details the murder of a compatriot portrait artist, Lin Lin, lost to the easy street violence of that era, when New York did not just feel out of control, but was. By the time Ai departs for China, physically heftier and with a decade of American life under his belt, both the city and the country were on an economic upswing, and one of the final photos, astonishingly enough, shows then-candidate Bill Clinton in one of his final 1992 campaign stops in New York, on the Lower East Side.

We know how that narrative unfolded, and Ai's photos give us glimmers of what was and what would be; Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol are gone, as are some of the Chinese exiles he photographs, but the planes returning from the Persian Gulf and Operation Desert Storm in 1991 represent metonymies of the wars that still continue, of the state of endless war we've been in now for decades, in the Middle East, in Latin America, in Africa, in South Asia, all over the globe.  The photos also metonymize the immigration that would increase immeasurably during and after the period in which they were taken; we live in a substantially different and still changing country because of this, and because the ghostly traces of neoliberalism that papered over the world Ai presents here, the "cure" that gave us a troubled but real economic boom just after Ai left and a troubled but false one a decade later, a destructive explosion from which those now holding the US and other nations in a chokehold are benefitting from greatly. Ai faces his own challenges, as do his peers, as do we all, but he has done us an extraordinary favor by sharing his vision of New York and the US at a crucial earlier period. It takes us back while also piercing deep into our present moment. See it before it's gone.

From the Asia Society's website:
Ai Weiwei on political awareness

Glenn Ligon @ the Whitney Museum

Mirror, (2002), Coal
dust, print ink,
glue, gesso,
and graphite
on canvas
82 5/8x55 1/8 in.
Collection of Mellody
© Glenn Ligon

Last Friday, I traipsed over to the Whitney Museum to view Glenn Ligon: America, the first mid-career retrospective of Ligon (1960-), an artist who is perhaps best known for his wall-sized, oil and coal dust text paintings from the 1990s through today. (I must note immediately that his beautiful painting "Black Like Me #3 (Study)," from 1992, graces my first book, Annotations.)  The Whitney rightly devotes a floor to Ligon's oeuvre, which consists not only of the paintings but of drawings, prints, photography, and multimedia installations, including sculptures, which together suggest a coherent approach, across forms, that define the possibilities, and perhaps strike the limits, of what identitarian art might do. I use the term "identitarian" with advisement, since I think that Ligon's work exceeds being so easily categorized, but seeing this art, all of it of considerable technical mastery and distinction, a good deal of it even more beautiful when viewed up close (especially the oil text paintings!), brought me back to the core of what the earliest of these works suggest: Ligon's investigations into questions of identity, racial, sexual, social, political, cultural--his own and those of people around him, in America and outside our shores.

What the works also evoked for me, almost in the sense of setting forth a world, of calling into existence the moment of their creation and first appearance, the fraught period of the 1980s and 1990s, when identity-based art surged to the forefront of public consciousness and discussion, just as other genres, such neo-Expressionism and the second waves of minimalism, conceptual and performance art were waning, and I could feel myself reliving some of the debates I witnessed, that I participated in; I could feel the polemics in favor of (which I passionately was and still am) and against this work, which was and, I would argue continues to be important, especially given how crucial it is in reminding of the broader political, economic and social turmoils of that period. The era of the Reagan, Bush I and early Clinton presidencies has been reduced to a caricature these days (Saint Reagan! The greatest president ever! blah blah blah; George H. W. Bush has virtually disappeared; the relentless attacks against Clinton and his centrist policies, even before he was elected, now almost completely forgotten in the public discourse even as they mirror what Michael Dukakis, and later Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama have endured), but the brutality and ugliness of that period, the period of the AIDS pandemic's emergence, of the anti-affirmative action and anti-abortion fanaticism, of white racial retrenchment and the rise of the militia movement, of the anti-Japanese and anti-immigrant testeria, of supply-side economic's intellectual triumph and practical failure, of the lust for warmongering and the buildup of the military-industrial and security states, of the ramped-up deindustrialization of the country, of the rise of the crack epidemic, of the cultural wars in and outside the academy, etc., all of these forming the foundations for our current moment and yet phantasmal in our mass media, also all form the backdrops to Ligon's art.

Untitled (I Am a
Man (1960)
Oil and enamel
on canvas,
40x25 in.
Collection of
the artist.
© Glenn Ligon

Walking through each room, I felt something akin to the beating wings of Benjamin's angelus novus, but a black, queer, cosmopolitan, left-leaning, and indefatigable one, against my cheek: the now-time (Jetztzeit) of that earlier era, the era of my 20s, the period of Slackers, of Public Enemy, of Eleanor Bumpers and Tawana Brawley, of Do the Right Thing, of ACT-UP and Queer Nation, of the last glimmers of Gay Liberation, of Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs, of Audre Lorde still alive speaking out against Jesse Helms, etc., was there with me even as I was firmly in our present moment, with its host of grave concerns.  What I also began to feel, as I reached Ligon's pieces invoking the runaway slave posters, was that a great deal of this art was perhaps, in some ways, too much of its time; universal yes, and yet perhaps too anchored in that earlier moment whose issues are still with us, but in different ways. The retrospective, to put it another way, felt insistently historical, indexing not only Ligon's history, but the country's, the society's, my own. It felt--dated perhaps is too strong a word, but while the formal power of the work struck me as transcendant, especially the oil text pieces, a good deal of the other aspects of the work felt as if it reflected a moment that had passed, but also, as if it were in some ways trapped, as if in amber, in that moment.  In a sense, this underpins some of the past criticism of this work, and of similar art of this or earlier periods, which I must admit upsets me, in part because I worry that in viewing the art in this life I may be undercutting Ligon's achievement, that I am falling into the trap of arguing that art probing identity, particularly the identifications and intersectionalities so central to Ligon's work, cannot transcend its moment, cannot resonate beyond the particular contexts in which it was created; but another way of looking at it might be to say that some of Ligon's work does and will continue to do this, but some of it does and will not. Perhaps, as an artist I greatly respect suggested to me a few weeks later when we discussed the exhibit, what might benefit some of these pieces down the road would be for them to be exhibited with other works of this era, thus providing an even richer immersion in a conversation whose urgency we forget at our peril.

Notes on the Margins
of the Black Book
(1991-93), (detail)
91 offset prints
11 1/2x11 1/2 in.
(framed) 78 text
pages, 5 1/4x7 1/4
each (framed)
Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum;
gift of the
Bohen Foundation
© Glenn Ligon

I do want to call attention to one part of the exhibit that particularly took me back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, and somewhat shook me up.  That was Ligon's Notes on the Margins of the Black Book (1991-1993), his response to Robert Mapplethorpe's highly controversial 1988 volume The Black Book, which preceded Mapplethorpe's even more charged 1989 exhibit Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment. Ligon's exhibit essayed and assayed the responses, from a range of viewers, some famous scholars and critics like Stuart Hall to figures depicted in the portraits themselves to Mapplethorpe himself, figuratively and physically breaking down the book, image by image, page by page, to critique and open up ways of seeing, reading, understanding, and interpreting--which is to say, experiencing--Mapplethorpe's, and by extension, this society's, views of black men, the black male body, the black body, blackness itself. Ligon's interpretive practice here was and remains quite remarkable; it suggested in its richness some of the subsequent revisionings of Mapplethorpe's work by Kobena Mercer and others, while also demonstrating another powerful, effective and moving method of critique. (It would do us all a bit of good never to forget that art, and not just academic criticism, has this capacity, and when it does so effectively it can reach a great deal more people.) I recalled my own reading of The Black Book, my own youthful critiques and conflicts, at the power being accorded Mapplethorpe, at what I read as objectification, at my own insistent attraction to the images, at my desire for someone black, someone of color, to attempt something of this sort and the frustration I knew I would feel as it went ignored by the wider culture in ways that Mapplethorpe's art never would, and so on. Ligon in fact captures all these feelings and many more--some were his own, reflected in the range of commentary, the juxtapositions of image and text, the sheer panorama of visuality that both magnetized--and magnetizes still--as it overwhelms.  This was one aspect of the exhibit that reminded me of why Ligon is such an important artist, and why I hope he continues to make art, especially work that engages the themes and tropes of our times.

One thing I found surprising was that the exhibit did not include--or perhaps I missed them!--Ligon's playful photographic and digital projects from the mid-to-late 1990s, such as Feast of Scraps (1994-98), in which he juxtaposed family photographs with vintage gay pornography, many of the images featuring black men. One outgrowth or extension of this work appeared in his online Dia Center for the Arts project "Annotations" (no reference whatsoever to my book), which is available here (click on "Annotations"). This work struck me as opening out into really interesting possibilities in terms of the emerging queer studies and discourses on and around family, geneologies, filiations and affiliations, and so on, and its use of digital media also marked what I took to be new directions on Ligon's work. But as I said, I did not see this in the Whitney show, and perhaps missed it. If not, I hope that in a future show and in his work to come Ligon resumes it, especially because it was in conversation with some of the exciting work that Thomas Allen Harris has been undertaking around black families and geneologies but also prefigured the mainstream gay shift towards discussions of marriage, family, homonormativities (which Ligon was queering in very interesting ways), and LGBT relationships in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  All in all, I highly recommend seeing the exhibit, and look forward to seeing another retrospective of his work several decades down the road.

Outside the Whitney Museum, Glenn Ligon's exhibit, signaled by the neon Negro Sunshine in the window.