Artist Talk: Glenn Ligon

artists chalk of the season the manila's artist talks is an ongoing series in which we invite artists to speak at the Museum whose works are part of our permanent collection the series continues next month on February 21st with Brice Marden on the occasion of his upcoming exhibition at the Menil drawing Institute and this spring we also welcome Allison Jenna Hamilton Kate Shepherd Elora and calls Adia and Joseph Kossuth as with all of our public programs these talks are free and open to everyone so I hope you will all come back and join us we would like to thank the Anchorage foundation of Texas for their generous support of our public programs this year and also to Francine Ely for making our artist Talk series possible this season for more information about our upcoming programs I would encourage everyone to pick up a copy of our brochure available at our front desks or you can always visit our website many lorg before we begin please silence your cellphone's if you have not already done so we do expect to have time for a short Q&A before the program ends at 7:00 but please hold any questions you may have for Glen until after his presentation if you do have questions at that time please raise your hand and we will come around with a microphone as we are recording the program thank you all again for being here and now I would like to welcome our senior curator Michelle white to introduce Glen hi good evening it's with such great pleasure to welcome Glenn Ligon here tonight thank you so much for being here I want to spend more time with you it's only been two hours bronx-born Glenn Ligon is a new york-based artist he received a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley and University and attended the studio Museum at the Whitney Museum his exhibition history beginning in the early 1990s is beyond extensive he has been in multiple Venice Biennale and documentas he's had solo exhibitions at the Studio Museum Harlem the Walker Art Center the Koons foreign eunuch and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston among so many others in fact he has exhibition up right now at the rat hole gallery in Tokyo of new ceramics specifically Moon jars that are absolutely stunning his work is also found in the most important public and private collections in the world Glenn is also a new artist for us here at the mineral collection with two recent acquisitions and I'll draw your attention to the East corridor where we have our new neon piece Orpheus and Euridice from 2013 installed so I do hope you can go down and see it at the end of the evening in 2011 with his major mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art he has truly been catapulted into the stratosphere of artists defining the 21st century after seeing a show Christopher Knight wrote in the Los Angeles time that his work is essential he said ligands iconoclasm is never cavalier always acute and historically grounded that's what distinguishes a gifted artist from an ordinary vandal and it makes this retrospective required viewing his practice has been distinguished by his use of text in some work stenciled letters built with viscous paint oil stick sometimes coal dust and others the cursive is formed by flashing or painted neon and throughout he's always pulling from a myriad of source Zora Neale Hurston Gertrude Stein Charles Dickens the Declaration of Independence and protest posters held by sanitation workers in the civil rights era stating I am a man so by pulling from sampling and working with these texts and forms of language often with a nod to Jasper Johns or site wombly he's very much bringing to the floor provocative and challenging questions questions about race and history and what it means to be an American and what defines America so please help me welcome Glenn Ligon tonight thank you Thank You Michelle for that very generous introduction and it's a pleasure to be here haven't been in Houston in a while but it's a particular pleasure to have work up in the museum in the context of so many amazing things and a pleasure to talk to you tonight I have too much work to talk about I mean I'm not gonna talk about it all tonight because I have too much work to talk about so I've sort of selected out maybe paintings and neons as a kind of two bodies of work that I'm gonna concentrate on this is and I'm sorry I forget what my works about so I have it on my phone or rather my brain I have it on my brain which is my phone so I have some notes and if there are things that are unclear we can talk about it in the Q&A after so this painting is sort of I was joking with a curator who did my Whitney showed that this is like official Glenn but he said no no no no there's pre glance so let me show you some of the pre Glenn that's pre Glenn so 1982 Wesleyan University thesis show that was from a slide so I was really interested in abstraction particularly Abstract Expressionism the people I were looking at were decoding and Klein and folks like that that was a phase that didn't last too long but but my interest in painting has lasted and I think the issue was that as a you know third or fourth generation Abstract Expressionists that I imagined myself to be at that time I found that the things that I was interested in the kinds of texts that I was reading the theorists that I was talking to the courses I was taking in context of University weren't in the work there was no way to get that into the work and so at a certain point I realized I had to change the work so here is real pre Glen and this was a big fight when I did my exhibition at the Whitney because I didn't want to include this work but the curator said well the story is always that your work starts with you know I feel most colored but there's all this work before that that you never show and so sometimes curators are right I had to give it to him and it was a beautiful room of these early drawings that were from 85 the painting that I showed the beginning and was from 89 and that's sort of like the first use of text was around 88 89 so this is from 85 a trying to Mar Mary together a sort of expand handling sort of expression is what I thought of expressionist paint handling with text in this case text from gay porn magazines I like these drawings I didn't want to show them that I liked them but they were an interesting way to think about the transition between this this painterly practice and the and the text space work so this is this is like official Glenn actually this is like official gun in 1988 or 89 right after it was making those earlier drawings with like sort of paint handling I became interested in bringing in things that I was researching into the work and one of the things I was researching were things like this this was the sanitation workers strike in Memphis in 68 it's the strike that Martin Luther King came to support when he was assassinated and even before I'd saw images like this and knew what this protest was about black sanitation workers striking for equal pay doing approach house carrying these signs I saw the sign actually as a framed image in a congressman's office in Harlem Charles Rangel and I knew nothing about the history of that sign but it struck me as an image and it sort of stayed in my head and I may have seen that image when I was in high school actually you know you do these field trips and you know meet your meet your Congressman and he was the congressman and I don't remember anything we talked about just he smoked cigars that's all I kind of remember and I like cigars but he had one of these posters in his office and the image kind of burned into my brain and I wasn't even an artist then my mother said the only artist she could ever heard of were dead and so there wasn't a lot of joy at the announcement that I was going to become an artist and she meant Picasso enmities who were in fact dead when she said this so that was true but I had to convince her there were some living artists and some of them had careers and they weren't living at home so so anyway back to this painting it was based on those signs it was made and made with oil paint and enamel which don't really mix and so the painting was cracking and disintegrating from the beginning but that process of its cracking and disintegrating seemed to me about in retrospect kind of our ideas about history how our ideas about particular historical moments change over time becomes something else what does that sign me now what did that sign mean to me in 1988-89 when I made that painting what did that sign me to be carried by these sanitation workers in 68 so sort of trying to deal with in in the sort of you know change of this painting over time the issues of our views on history or masculinity or its civil rights movement or blackness so now we're in official Glen as well paintings using letter stencils and oil sticks so if you look at something like this is a detail from Jasper Johns this is when the phone goes on to power save remote alphabets 1960 - 62 so it's a detail so of course I was looking at people who are using text in their paintings and I was committed to painting so I needed to find sort of role models people who are using it but of course you know alphabets is very different than than a painting like this and so is trying to deal with a different kind of content but also thinking about painting as a way of working so this is a sentence from a essay by Zora Neale Hurston's called how it feels to be colored me was first published in 1928 Hurston a very famous writer of the Harlem Renaissance books went out of print in the sixties buried in an unmarked grave rediscovered in the 80s by writers like Alice Walker so I was also I guess you know I'm thinking about it now I'm interested in things that go in and out of view that sort of are in front of you but somehow disappear and I think the fact that I knew that her work had sort of disappeared from the culture had come back influenced in some ways the making of these paintings so taking one sentence from her essay how it feels to be colored me stenciling on canvas repeating it so the the way the text starts to disintegrate at the bottom is because I'm using oil paint through letters stencils and it's messy and the oil paint picks up on the back of the stencils and smudges the letters as I'm making it so the act of writing the act of repetition causes this sort of gradual disintegration and disappearance of the text of course I was also when I was looking at Jones's work I was thinking about Twombly too and thinking about gesture and the scale of his works this is untitled New York City from 1968 but I was also through program like the Whitney program which I went to an ad for it's a program in New York that's associated with the Whitney Museum and it's very you know one of those art programs where the reading lists if you ever get through it maybe you have some time to do your work you know but it was really about the reading list and the discussion but it was useful for me because it introduced me to other kinds of ways of using text so Barbara Kruger here from 1980 and earlier work Joseph Kossuth nothing from 1967 so thinking about the possibilities of text which is a very different kind of trajectory than John's or table but I was a painter so I was sort of struggling during with the program of how to how to paint really how to keep painting but I also realized that the context for text in my work came from many different places so this is an image of by the photographer Martha Cooper from 1982 it's lady pink on the train and you can see pink has scrawled down the side there and she's got a spray can so I lived in the South Bronx and so this is what the trains looked like when I was in you know in 1982 when I was going downtown to look at those site Wembley's this is what the trains look like about time and I remember someone asking me you know this sort of funny questions where people ask you and they don't really know what they're saying or maybe they do know what they're saying like oh you grew up in the South Bronx and this has been a cultural desert I thought well besides the fact that hip-hop that has like came to the South Bronx in this circled the globe there was also graffiti which also came from the South Bronx and has circled the globe so this was an important context for me I don't think I understood it the the idea that text was art you know through graffiti but I think one of the ways I came to that idea was by being literally surrounded on a daily basis with the sort of inventiveness and the idea of tagging and the murals that were on the subway cars more graffiti this case it's still from downtown 81 a film that stars jean-michel Basquiat it's a sort of semi fictional film but it it follows him around the city meeting his friends basically and that's a graffiti that he had scrawled on the building I think that's on 6th Avenue in New York and this is a painting by him from 1982 and what was interesting about this painting with all of his work in particular is that he's to me he seemed to be always interested in the fusion of abstraction and figuration and abstraction figuration and text so there is no sort of identifiable letters in this painting really but he points to text in an abstract way and that was sort of fascinating to me also he's just a terrific drafts person so he was always an inspiration not that I can draw another basket painting Pegasus from 87 again merging abstraction and figuration and then Warhol shadows which i think is kind of the first big art installation this is a Heiner Friedrich gallery in New York and Soho 87 so I saw then I was still in high school it's kind of the big first painting show that I saw in a kind of Museum like space where I said I don't know what the hell these paintings are about but somehow I know they're important to me and it took many years to figure out what that might be and I think it has to do something with again line between abstraction and figuration or line between legibility and allege ability these are the shadow paintings so what's a shadow you know what's a painting of a shadow so that kind of ambiguity in Warhol but also repetition in Warhol was one of the things that was interesting to me so 1990 so the painting after that's first painting I showed you I had a studio in New York in a program at the ps1 sort of gifs ones now part of MoMA but at the time they were separate entities they had the studio space in lower Manhattan and the studios were great but they were full of junk and one of the things that they were full of were these old hollow-core doors and I was moving this hollow core door around my studio for about two or three months because I was too lazy to take it literally the building was a block along and to throw things out you had to take it all the way to the other end of the building so I just move it rather than carried down to the end of this block long hallway and I realized that doors are scale for the human body there there human-sized you know and the text I was using had these words in them like I you know I feel most colored so if well this is a perfect marriage of form and content so and it allowed me to stencil you know sort of repetitiously down the surface and it allowed that hint of transformation of the text you saw in the study to really come out in terms of repeating over and over again the sentence stenciling it as I stencil it the the oil paint gets picked up on the back of the stencil it smears the letter and that text turns to abstraction but you know what that text says at the bottom because you can read it at the top so it's about this sort of transformation of language through repetition but also its persistence I guess there's another painting in the series also from Zora Neale Hurston's essay I sent myself a different problem with the stranger paintings which started to the mid 90s which is how do you deal with a paragraph which seems like a kind of dumb way to think about making paintings but I but I guess I I had been reading James Baldwin's si strange in the village since college and it would read it every six months or so and so was invested in the text and Baldwin's essay was written in the mid 50s let me get you the exact date I think it was first published and maybe fifty three and Harper's Magazine something like that anyway Baldwin is in Switzerland he's staying in the chalet of his lovers family there he has brought his typewriter and eles lp's his Bessie Smith albums and he's trying to write a novel and he says for many of the villagers in this little Swiss mountain village he is the first black person they've ever seen and so he writes this essay that deals with the fact of being a stranger what it means in to be literally a stranger somewhere what it means to be black in this context he also writes about his relationship to European history colonialism Europe's colonial project and Africa his relationship to the civil rights movement he's sort of in a self-imposed exile in France to having to escape from the United States easing the bite of American racism by going abroad but finding it there in some ways as well as finding a certain kind of space to make his work the essay is sort of majestic it covers a lot of ground and so I decided to try to deal with the essay more as a whole than as individual sentences stenciling a whole paragraph of the essay onto these big canvases but when I was working on these paintings I realized they couldn't be the same as the door paintings that I was working on with the Zora Neale Hurston text you know Baldwin was trained he was sort of a boy preacher he spoke in if you read his essays and novels he speaks in kind of parable but well he speaks in page long sentences basic he writes in page long sentences he speaks in page long sentences there's a majesty and a kind of gravity and density to the way he talks and I felt that the paintings needed to reflect that somehow and so when I was thinking about this serious and working on it I was also doing some prints with a silk screen ER and I was talking to him them about you know this problem of materiality and how I wasn't quite satisfied with the way these paintings look just as oil stick paintings and he said well why don't you add something to them make them denser and like like what and it's like well you know like Warhol did those Diamond Dust prints and I thought hmm copyright infringement you know - identified with Warhol this carborundum this gray carborundum that's fair - identified with Warhol and then the printer said well there's this stuff called Magnum that we've used here in printing and what Smackdown sees a coal dust and I thought that's it sight unseen coal dust is literally a waste product from coal processing it's used for sandblasting and Road fill I love the idea that this shiny black gravel like material not only materialized the text itself but also obscured it because once you add it coal dust to the top of these paintings while they were wet they became very dense but harder to read and so that tension between its visibility its legibility and it's illegible T or something I'm always interested in but also you know Baldwin in sort of a famous interview sort of talks about you know some it wasn't Dick Cavett but someone like that says you know well you're poor and you're black and you're gay you must have thought how disadvantaged can you get in Baldwin you know very like European Queen says even though he's American says no I thought I'd hit the jackpot you know and he's really thinking about the place of the dis esteemed in American society particular but the place of the underdog the place of the outsider is a privileged place to actually look at the society in work in which you're in it's it's the place where you see the the the teeth bared of the society that you're in and Baldwin uses that place to talk about all these kinds of issues around ultimately American democracy this this essay is so much about European history and his position but he's really talking about America too and his conclusion that he might be an outsider in the context of the Swiss village but he says it's impossible for me to be an outsider in America because he's been an American since the beginning you know this country doesn't exist without black presence and so he sort of turns that idea of outsider in us on its head so this is a close-up of one of the paintings that has a sort of coal dust added to it and then same series black background with oil stick and called us so very dense very weighty I'm gonna close up of the surface of those paintings I I remember doing a lecture somewhere where there was like a plant in the audience it's a little kid he wasn't like five or six years old and he was like well I'm not sure I mean how you is what are we supposed to take your word for it that there's like letters in those paintings which is actually obviously really how old am but it was an interesting question but so the way I answered him was I was looking more like a paintings like this you know you're like this and he was skeptical so I said well you know think about when you learned to write in school you're gonna get paper with these lines on it you're gonna write from left to right then you go down the line and you're right from left to right so the structure of text is there even if you can't read it so he didn't quite buy that answer but I realized in a way what he was talking about was this kind of method that I set up in the paintings like the paintings always kind of followed the rules of how you present text even if that text disappears you still see lines margins you know progression from top to bottom left to right and so I started thinking about what if one uses stencils not as a way to make letter forms that are legible I've become legible why not start with the letter forms themselves and get rid of two things one a text that they're ground in and also this left-right margined legibility that's been so much a sort of part of the work so these are paintings that are fairly recent I started them in maybe two years ago in eighteen they're called debris field and they are made by taking stencils themselves drawing making drawings through letter stencils onto paper with ink and letting the ink bleed through the stencil in such a way that you get shapes so I'm using the stencils again as I've always used them but I'm just letting the ink bleed out to create these kinds of shapes and then to take those drawings and make silk screens out of them and silkscreen them together on these canvases so this was a show in Thomas Dane Gallery in Milan was the first sorry in Naples and it's kind of the first excursion of that work so you can this is a study from that I also because I sort of was editing to their parts of this painting that I didn't like so I just simply blacked it out and sort of circled the stuff that I liked and blacked out this other stuff and again I'm looking at folks like Twombly but I'm also looking at someone like JB Murray this is a piece from the dates funny like 1978 88 but writing without content you know so the lines are there the structure is there it's almost like an American flag but there's no content to the marks that are being made so so that's akin to some things that Trombley was thinking of just coming from a very different kind of place but also looking at Henri Michaux this is from 1960s ink drawings particularly I was looking at his mescaline drawings that were supposedly made while he was under the influence of mescaline and other things but really fascinated by the a black and white but also by the fact that they seemed to have a kind of content in them is it a crowd is it writing but nothing specific and that kind of that kind of ambiguity between abstraction and figuration or text again as something was interested in I started doing debris field paintings for red backgrounds to this show last year in LA looking at sort of basically taking the silkscreen images with these sort of marks on them and flipping them rotating them stenciling on top of them with stencils that I made of those abstract marks which is kind of a funny idea but I think quite interesting that's a close-up of it so there's layers of density of you know that the marks themselves some are quite light that you can see here just silkscreen and then some are stenciled on top through a letter stencil so this sort of play back and forth between the densities of the text and I was looking at when I was making those paintings things like this or thinking about yeah I don't know actually I was thinking about this for a long time but Warhol's work these this in particular but didn't want to be Warhol again so this is orange car crash 14 times from 1963 which I remembered as red but I think it's more red than orange but you know there we go looking at my own work this red hands paintings from 1996 that uses images from the Million Man March which was a march that Minister Louis Farrakhan organized in the mall in Washington DC as around the sort of visibility of black men in the United States and so using a newspaper image of that March to make images like this also looking at this which was on the bookshelf in my mom's house when I was going up the fall of America which was from 73 I don't know if I ever read it but the cover is amazing amazing so that were some of the influences around these paintings but I've also been doing neon since I think 80 96 maybe the first ones are making actually later than that anyway I've been doing neons and in some ways they were thinking about work like this Jasper Johns three flags 58 you know John's in a notebook wrote take an object do something to it do something else to it repeat so is thinking about like using this symbol like the American flag but doing things to it making work out of that symbol and transforming it by the making of these various kinds of artists and he he returns to you Flags targets numbers over and over again in his practice but I was also thinking about things like this David Hammons African American flag from 1990 and this is flying outside the old Studio Museum in Harlem building there's a new one being built now so it's not outside anymore but this was hanging on 125th Street for many many years and Hammond's quote about symbols is outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol and so he is taking the the American flag and just shifting the colors so that they reflect the colors of Marcus Garvey's to back-to-africa movement red black and green here's another version of the flag I think this actually came from flags that were hanging on the museum they would get torn up by the win and David would take them back and sometimes make them into other work so this work was called oh say can you see from 2017 so thinking about this idea of taking us an image like that or a word and then transforming it and also looking at something like this now men American violence from 81-82 which is dangerously close to a swastika but doesn't quite get there so the first one was the word America painted black on the front on white neon tubes so that the light comes from the back so again I guess it's it's things that are sort of present and absence eclipsed you know in some ways because of the black painting on the front but also present because the light emanates against the wall this one is from around the same time mm maybe 2008 painted black on the back and the front so that when it is installed and D installed over time the paint starts to chip off and these little points remember a thousand points a little points of light could have come out of it as it it travels through exhibition spaces another neon that was based on thinking about Caspar David Friedrich paintings my German is terrible configure is the neon that I made and this is an example of this type of painting where there is someone in the landscape or beach scene or something whose back is to you back figure looking at this landscape and so I made this neon and I I had been thinking about that at that painting for a long time and trying to think about how to make work around it but not really figuring out anything and then you you know because I'm a kind of terrible at things like Photoshop and so this is playing with an image of those earlier neon in Photoshop and I somehow flipped it somehow horizontally and and I huh ooh what's what's up with this image what's wrong with it like why is the a not backwards but the YZ backwards and then I realize a bilateral symmetry of course that if you turn an a that's shaped like that around it still reads as an a but if you turn the e around or the are around they seem to be backwards so basically I made that first Nina I showed you at the black on the front of America I just turned those letters around to the wall so that the neon that would be against the wall is now facing out double America from 2014 it has I think this is the one that has an annoying animation blinks off and on it kind of dries you out of the room and latest one from 2018 this is another she's not event and so to end up just continuing with the neons this is one called one black day it is the day of the second election that brought Barack Obama into office the neon was only on that day so lit for one day and then off and and it was made before the election happens so someone said you know what if he loses sounds like well it's a black day either way this is another one I think it is untitled but it is the last day of Obama's presidency or the first day of the other and it was in this public space in the window of Steve museum in Harlan it was an important suit been up for a couple of weeks before it was turned on and then it was turned on for this day and then it went off so it's just marking this sort of historic moment but it was important to me to mark it in this space again underneath you know david hammons flag in the context of 125th Street with lots of people walking by because I remember in the first inauguration being in Harlem and the energy around the possibility for this country was so great at that moment and I hope we get that energy back on Kawara date painting today's series that just happens to be my birthday looking at those date neons they certainly come out of this encore was making paintings that record the date that the painting was made on and then he would make a box and line the box with newspaper from that same day so was about this kind of like you know the calendar and infinity you know dates that stretch on in the future infinitely but also the specificity of that moment what was happening in the city that he was making a painting in what was happening in the world at that moment so it's a sort of markers of infinity but also markers of specific moment and that was thinking about him was very sort of influential in terms of that date neons but also thinking about something like synecdoche a piece by an old friend Byron Kim 400 panels or so it's an ongoing project where he would ask people to sit for him and he would little patches of their skin like you know in front of their what's this called this back in my hand yeah something like the back of sari has a solution it must have been those G and T's before the talk yes a neck decay so him painting little pieces of people skin from life and making this sort of modernist grid but this modernist grid made out of individual observations like encounters with specific people and the title of the piece contains all the names of all the sitters and it's an ongoing project for him so really thinking about that particularly you know because it's painting but also thinking about how he's marking time and marking encounters so the last neon in the series is again only gonna be on on that date it's called synecdoche for byron kim so it's it's it's a sort of homage to byron but it's also thinking about you know synecdoche is a word that means part representing the whole and thinking about the election and how that is a part representing the whole depending on you know do you vote do not put what we get when you do or do not put and thinking about citizenship you know a friend of mine says when he's asked what does he think it means to be an artist he says I'm not an artist I'm a citizen and I think that's a really great way to think about our responsibility you know that art being an artist it's not something over here being an artist as being a citizen and use the work in order to think more about citizenship and belonging and what this country means so I think with that I think we'll end on the neon with just down the hall but you can see it down the hall so maybe it's time for some questions if there are any I think there's a microphone just raise your hand okay I've got one Becky hi good evening so I have one question over the time like at the beginning with your writing its fading your way like the the painting is mixing with the stencil and then progressively you move to the we we're very like you can read clearly so how can you do the parallel with like just your position within the society backed by the fact that the writing was fading away for a while and then it became very clear and especially with the world America and with dates so how can you tell this I guess it I guess it's only clear if you think the word America means something specific means something fixed means something you know that we all agree on and clearly we don't all agree on what that means but I think also this sort of tension between a legibility of legibility is ongoing I mean I'm still making painting or that deals with this question and I would say that the debris field paintings because they have don't start with a text or an extension for me of this question of legibility or even maybe the possibility of language maybe that's a better way to say that the words that we have don't really or the language that we have in some ways is inadequate to the situation we find ourselves in and so those paintings for me are about thinking about well what's the aftermath what if what if we start over where do we start you know how do we think through text or meaning in a new way how do we think through the inadequacies of language so that's one of the things I'm thinking with the paintings but all these investigations are sort of going on at the same time but I guess I would again I would argue that like for example the word America is very clear but it's not a word that we all agree that what it means and so it's not very clear in some sense and also I remember standing with someone who shall be unnamed but arts professional who was looking at one of the American neons and said oh can you read the word where if the neon isn't on and I thought about that for a minute and I said yes it still says America where the lights on or not so I thought text is mysterious another thank you for the question another there's hi hi I think there's something really kind of poignant about the way the cords hanging down from mania and sort of sad and moving I was wondering if you could talk about that oh it's just that it's too much trouble to bury them in the wall but I like you know kind of Trufant advertising I like that you kind of see what you're getting it's not mysterious so the cords were also I also I think I don't really think i understand sculpture I don't really make sculpture I don't think I really get it you know I know what it looks like when I see it you know but I don't really get it so this is my attempt in some ways to make something three-dimensional even though it's on a wall to make it sculptural and so I think the Transformers and the cords being visible like that was in a way making it more physical you know making the thing have more presence in some ways but also a kind of you know truth in advertising like what you see the whole thing but also you know now moons transformers and wires they're all visible and stuff like that so it just seemed like easy you know also sometimes you know as an art you have to pick your battles you know so I remember the first time I showed in neon and it was gonna be really expensive to hide the cords in the wall and I said you know just put the thing on the floor whatever but then I liked it you know so it became and I sort of thought it through conceptually and I thought oh it works with the piece so that became a kind of signature of them over here thank you so much for your talk I was a wonderful I have a question about when you first became aware of James Baldwin's writings do you remember how old you were right I think I became aware of him in college I had a professor Robert O'Malley who was a scholar of african-american literature particularly a Harlem Renaissance so he was my introduction to Zora Neale Hurston certainly but we dealt with wolde winsome I somewhat in the classes I took with him so I was aware of that essay and just kept returning to him that essay in particular but his writing in general more the essays than the novels has a kind of touchstone so when I made this transition from abstraction to text space work Baldwin followed me in that investigation and I realized that that essay stranger in the village particularly was such a rich vein to mine and so it made sense to try to figure out how to use it yeah but he was always important and it's interesting I was talking about you know saw her stone sort of going in and out of visibility her books going out of print and her being rediscovered Baldwin - you know Baldwin at a certain point you know arguably one of the most famous writers in America and then sort of like you know vilified for a sexuality mmm called Oh old fashioned out of touch because he's been in Europe you know but now you know Baldwin's quoted everywhere he's everywhere you know so this sort of cycles of you know in-and-out Ness is something I'm interested in to around his work in particular but a lot of work of writers there was the question there yep in 2001 and you and Tom a golden we're talking about post black art and I wanted to kind of see if that idea having had a lot of scholarship since then about clearing black art and all of those ideas still sticks with you if it's a part of your practice and how are you kind of viewing the art world in that lens yeah that's interesting because I think as a term it was always meant to be elastic you know and it described I think is sort of very misinterpreted in a way because it's elastic you know it's slippery and it was not about describing a kind of end of lockness you know as its kind of is misinterpreted you know as in like Barack Obama I should in the air a post-racial politics and hims like Hello know you know so it wasn't ever that it was about how a certain generation of artists mark Bradford Julie Merritt - you name them dealt with questions of blackness through a kind of partially through kind of abstraction but also through specificity of material that pointed to blackness but wasn't didn't have the political program or the educational program or the essentialist program or whatever that earlier generations were engaged with but I would also say that you know once some things out in the world it takes on its own life you know and so I make no claims to it as a term so I think it's up to you artists now to youth if they find that useful to use it and if they don't find it useful to reject it you know and I think sometimes terms can shut down certain kinds of debates and I think it's more important that a term gets used like that to open up kind of debate thank you for that's a hard question to talk about and I leave it to Thelma mostly to talk about it because she is the scholar and curator because in some ways I presented it as like humorously it's like oh this show if your post black children in it you know but that term resonated somehow yeah maybe one last question I think hello I was wondering there seems to be sort of a balance you have between precision and obscurity so you have the precision of something like a text and a sort of decays and obscures and like this gentleman here was talking about sort of this sort of Plast this sort of very elastic sort of post post post black idea the where it's it is a de set sort of you're a citizen this is who you are this is your black identity but there's more sort of it and big witty there because it's more amorphous and I'm wondering how you intertwine the ideas of something more precise like a text and something more obscure and how that might might fit into identity at all or your work as well work in those things isn't that identity I'm sort of like things that are known and things are not known things that I remembered you know Toni Morrison talks a lot about this in various essays about the critique that when her books first came out that there were no white people in them and she would say you know well you know they're there because it's the United States but also [Music] sort of the idea that blackness as a subject matter was automatically by definition constrained a limitation which meant to her that people imagined blackness was something that was already known well you just dip in and there's the water and you know what the water already tastes like and her argument is that it's not already known it's created we think it through you know part of her novels you know are about that creation so that's the thing I'm interested in and also I think identity is not you know it's a kind of an awful word as it doesn't it's used in bad ways but I don't you know I think it's much more slippery than we imagined it to be I think it's much more immutable I think it's much more interesting than we imagined it to be when we talk about questions of identity I don't think people of color are the only ones with identity you would never know it given the discourse in this country but so I think we have to think more in more complicated ways about the word and how it's used and who it's applied to well thank you Thanks [Applause]

Channel: The Menil Collection

Views: 2,153

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: DYDtad-dRcw

Length: 57min 2sec (3422 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020