A Tale of Two Exhibitions: The 2019 Whitney Biennial

Earlier this summer, I had the immense pleasure of viewing the 2019 Whitney Biennial, which is still running, for a few more weeks (until September 22, 2019), at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It was not only a better show than the 2017 installment, I thought, but in essence two different exhibits in one, I ultimately argued, in a review now out for Art in America. The second of the two exhibits became possible, however, only after the Whitney resolved a festering crisis that had underpinned the exhibit--and the institution itself as a whole. In fact, the revolt that occurred, creating the new exhibition, necessitated that I rewrite the laudatory first review I'd drafted.

The qualitative differences between the two exhibits, whether visually evident or not, resonate throughout the work on display, throughout the museum's spaces itself, as a shift in ethos and an aura, however temporary. I won't replay my entire essay, which underwent a great deal of editorial distilling (so many thanks to Will Ratik and his editorial team at Art in America), so here is the link to the full essay, "The Whitney Biennial: A Tale of Two Exhibitions," and a paragraph from it, in which I argue for further action by the exhibits artists and, I would assert, artists working in all media, including literature.

I believe we are at the moment when the artists should be encouraged to actively trouble the “circuits of valorization,” as prior generations of artists have done. I say trouble rather than disrupt, since the latter term has taken on particular connotations in the language of neoliberal capitalism, particularly in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. But what might the effects be of such a troubling on the lives and careers of today’s artists, especially those who, like many of this year’s biennial participants, come from groups, intersectionally understood, that have been traditionally excluded from participation in exhibitions such as this, as well as from elite art schools and institutions, and from the global gallery, art fair, and auction networks? What would more extensive rethinking, dismantling, and transformation of those circuits look like? How much energy and effort can and ought they expend in understanding and critiquing the ecosystem in which they are working? From an ethical standpoint, can they forgo such an undertaking, whatever the cost?

If you can, please see the exhibit before it goes, and do leave your thoughts on the Biennial and my review in the comments section if you'd like.

Poem: Anne Carson

Anne Carson

If you were to list the iconic works of American visual art, Edward Hopper's (1882-1967) "Nighthawks," with its unforgettable glimpse into the clear panes of a brightly lit all-night West Village diner, would most certainly have to be included. "Nighthawks" (1942) is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, which describes its history and backstory like this:

Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet,” but the image—with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative—has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. Hopper’s understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. (The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist’s wife, Jo.) Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”

Jeremiah Moss, who started the Jeremiah's Vanishing New York blog, chronicling hyper-gentrification's dramatic transformation of New York City over the last two decades, and who last year published a companion volume, Vanishing New York: Now a Great City Lost Its Soul, devoted several posts back in summer 2010 and again in 2013 to figuring out which buildings in Manhattan might have served as a model for "Nighthawks." He concluded that there was no diner, and that Hopper had drawn more upon his imagination than anything else.

I have to say, though, that although there may have been on strict model at the spot or spots Hopper stated, or where Moss conjectured the diner might have stood, I can attest to having walked past similar spots, late at night in the late 1980s and especially in the late 1990s, on my way back from NYU, and unconsciously picturing an analogue to Hopper's scene. It captures a fundamental truth, transformed into a memorable image (would we call it a meme today?), about US urban life, especially during the mid-20th century, the isolation amidst connection, in a commercial space, outside the constraints of conventional normative time.

In the painting the figures are all white and could be viewed as a quasi-community or family, though all appear to be operating in semi-separate spheres of existence; but they aren't a heteronormative nuclear family, they aren't sitting down to dinner with kids, and three of them, at least at first glance, are not at work. Or are they? (The man behind the counter is.) There is a timelessness (outside of daily time) to the painting's image, a feeling almost outside of time, and, speaking of feeling, a tone of loneliness, perhaps even sadness, hovering over everything. And yet the diner's bright lights suggest a harbor amid the surrounding darkness.

Poet, European Classics scholar, artist, and performer Anne Carson might not be the first person who comes mind to be writing a poem about "Nighthawks," since he focus so often are stories drawn from the European Classical storehouse, but she included the one below in her collection Men in the Off Hours, whose title seems also to gesture towards Hopper's painting. There is a sense of "off hours" being depicted, not just in the painting but in the poem. Carson's poem is operating on multiple levels, with paralleling throughout, from the stanzas' ladderlike appearance to the mirroring of the end words, or teleutons, with rhyming when the words are not exact. "Shadows" and "widows" connect figuratively as well.

Carson has created a story about at least two of the figures, the flame-haired woman and the man sitting beside her, and the brief poem shares this narrative. One could imagine others, but Carson emphasizes it with her repetition of the lines, suggesting a passion that has taken the participants out of time--"off hours"--providing a foundation for this reading this by breaking through the poem's chief voice with the disorienting quote from St. Augustine's Confessions. "Time...were not" as the lovers have run away and figured out what their relationship meant, yet the distances have found them--this (homeo)stasis preserved, for all time now, in Hopper's painting and in Carson's poem.

"NIGHTHAWKS," 1942

by Anne Carson

I wanted to run away with you tonight

but you are a difficult woman
the rules of you—
Past and future circle round us
       now we know more now less
            in the institute of shadows.

            On the street black as widows
       with nothing to confess
our distances found us
the rules of you—
so difficult a woman
I wanted to run away with you tonight.

Yet I say boldly that I know that if nothing passed
                              away, time past were not.
And if nothing were coming, time future were not.
And if nothing were, time present were not.
                         (Augustine, Confessions XI)

Anne Carson, from Men in the Off Hours, New York: Vintage Contemporary Poetry, 2001. All rights reserved.

Hopper's painting:

Edward Hopper, "Nighthawks," 1942, oil on canvas 84.1 x 152.4 cm (33 1/8 x 60 in.) signed l.r. "Edward Hopper" Friends of American Art Collection, 1942.51, Art Institute of Chicago

4 Shows at the Whitney: Everson, Arcangel, Cha & the Founding Collection

Soon, the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of the icons of the Upper East Side's Museum Mile district, will abandon its striking Marcel Breuer-and-Hamilton Smith-designed home on 75th Street and Madison Avenue, and head downtown, closer to its original home, which still exists and is now the New York Studio School of Art, on 8th Street and 5th Avenue, for a new space near the High Line Park and New York's main fine art neighborhood these days, Chelsea.  I am agnostic on whether the move is a good idea, but it's in the works, and the museum's trustees and patrons support it and have raised the money (or most of it needed) to move, so it goes. I personally will miss going uptown to the Whitney, though. I have seen many great exhibits there, including several controversial Biennials, yet even when it's packed I've never found it to be the tourist trap the always remarkable Met sometimes can be (cf. my post on the McQueen show), it has never attempted to be as exhaustive (and exhausting) in terms of canonical modern art as MoMa (so when I go I don't worry that I'm missing 2-3 exhibits I would like to see but don't have the time to), and yet the focus is on the artwork, instead of the overwhelming architecture of the building itself, a problem the Guggenheim sometimes presents.  As I love looking at art, the Whitney often summons me forth. Five floors: a morning or afternoon usually will do. So I visited four shows recently: More than That: Films by Kevin Jerome Everson (April 28-September 18, 2011); Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (May 26-September 11, 2011); Xavier Cha: Body Drama (June 30-October 9, 2011); and, for a hot minute, Breaking Ground: The Whitney's Founding Collection (April 28-September 18, 2011). I could easily write four long reviews, so I'll be succinct about the shows, focusing on the first two, which engaged me the most.

Still from Everson's film "Act One: Betty"

Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965-), a professor at The University of Virginia, works in a range of forms, from filmmaking to sculpture and photography, and his assured grasp of the pictorial and how film can play with the plasticity of imagery and the pictorial space come through in the collection of short films, many (most?) of them 16mm transferred to video, playing in the exhibit. All appear have implicit narratives, but they compel you more to look and think than follow as you would traditional shorts, yet their experimental brevity and disjunction is different from that of experimental filmmaking as I tend to think of it. All of the films here focus on African-American lives. They give glimpses, all seemingly drawn straight from life, of a coherent world, drawn from Everson's imagination and from appropriated footage that he expertly edits, that on closer examination might not be the sum of its parts. Sitting through the films, I enjoyed the realities they created even as I realized how fictional(ized) they were.  Often but brief reels of seductive visual poetry--and in one case, "Blind Huber" (2005), Everson literalizes the poetic by including a snippet of a poem on beekeeping by poet Nick Flynn, which the poet reads aloud--Everson's mini-takes are often sly and effective commentaries on reality he and others (I included) not only live it, but feel it.  Moreover, Everson manages to balance impressive artfulness (from his skillful management of composition, light and darkness, pictorial depth) and the prosaic, without the artistic pretense that screams: "This is an art film, in a museum/gallery, and thus it's important." The films exude their playfulness and seriousness in equal turns.

Still from Everson's film "American Motor Company"

While I enjoyed all of them, three films really stand out: in "American Motor Company," Everson depicts two workers methodically posting a billboard that is at first unclear and unremarkable but which, when finished, reveals a black man posing in front of the fake town of Volkswagen, Ohio. That's it. Yet the film captures so much: the invisibility and precarity, and the physical efforts required, of blue-collar labor (especially today), the global consumerist fantasy, capitalism's contemporary spectacle, and the steady corporatization of every aspect of our lives, down to municipal government themselves. Only this one has a black face fronting it. "According To" is an especially powerful example of how Everson sometimes puts archival and found footage to novel and evocative ends. In this short piece, he links three different tracks: one is footage of an elderly African-American man, living in the rural South, who recounts his experiences working as a paperboy; the second features footage of a body being dredged from a lake, intercut with clips of notable black people, ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. to Floyd Patterson, and what appear to be civil rights protests; the third features crisp audio local news reports, including some that appear to refer to the drowning. Everson skillfully torques each element, so that the elderly man begins to qualify his accounts, suggesting that he wasn't always paid and that his memory might be faulty. The news reports also shift, also changing the story of the drowned man and our feelings about the nature of his death, and adding other crimes, including one in which an "elderly Negro woman" died in a fire that appears to be a hate crime, and a black man readily admits to having killed a white man. The images shift into sync with this changed narration, showing what appears to be a black body on a gurney; is it the drowned man, who may have been murdered, and how objective can any news be within the context of our particular national, racial, ethnic, and gendered histories? The third film, "Ninety-three" features the same actor in "According To," attempting to blow out the eponymous birthday candles, which, as we come to see, are the trick kind. In the interplay between the slow camera speed, the elderly man's expressive face and the flames lighting it, Everson has captured a world, his world, mine, ours, and by extension, reveals truths more broadly about humanity, as effectively as a poem. Multiple ones.

Arcangel's "Various Self-Playing Bowling Games (aka Beat the Champ)"

Cory Arcangel (b. 1978-) is a computer whiz with a great sense of humor, and skills.  His smarts, technical expertise and wit are on ample display throughout this exhibit, which examines the interplay between off-the-shelf technologies and the artist's (and one could add, the hacker's) creative interventions, thus revising our thoughts about the latter in light of evolving legal and aesthetic notions of hardware and software. Throughout "Pro Tools," Arcangel presents now-outmoded technological tools that still offer ways of thinking through our relationship with the electronic and digital, virtual worlds in which we all now exist. What once was the height of sophistication--getting sculptures to move via computer algorithms; pen plotting machines; interactive video games--become almost passé, not just scientifically but in terms of their status as commodities. Arcangel, however, is interested in returning to them and seeing what he can learn from them and what they can still teach us today. Often as I walked through the exhibit I could feel a philosophical and conceptual impulse underlining these pieces; what would it be like to? or what would happen if I? simplistic as such questions sounded, might be among his basic starting points. What connects such starting points is a throughline exploring the effects of technological tools and their relationship to art historical and popular cultural discourses. In "Various Self-Playing Bowling Games (aka Beat the Champ)" (2011), Arcangel presents a wall of multi-channel, large-scale projections of video bowling games from the late 1970s to the 2000s, and in each he reprogrammed them to bowl the ball into the gutter. (He also does something similar with a miniature golf putting game, "Master" (2011), in another room.)  His hacks here undercut our sense of the "interactive," suggesting technology that has gotten out of hand, literally; we watch, are enthralled by the colors, maddened by the noise, but we have no control over the games whatsoever.  I immediately thought, what a metaphor for capitalism as most of us, the non-plutocrats, that is, experience it.

Arcangel's "Palms"

Another set of pieces that I was drawn to were Hello World (2011) and Palms (2011), simple line drawings that Arcangel produced using now superannuated pen and pencil-plotting machines from the 1980s and 1990s. I can recall how expensive and rarefied such equipment was back then, having worked in the late 1980s and early 1990s in an MIT laboratory in which large-scale plotting and printing was sometimes necessary, but as Arcangel tells us, such equipment can be purchased for a song on eBay, which is what he did, and with a bit of configuring, can be put to work playing with the idea of reproduction and mimesis more specifically. What is a copy, and how carefully can our eyes tell the difference? In Palms, Arcangel creates a series of images of palm trees that confuse the boundary between machine and artist-created drawings, challenging the viewer to discern which was produced by the pencil plotting device and which was produced by the artist himself.  In Hello World, he wrote a computer program to create line 2-dimensional drawings connecting random points between 0 and 100.  (One drawing was a blank page, as the program picked the number zero, mirroring works from the early conceptual period of the 1960s, as well as earlier white and blank canvases from the 20th century Euro-American art-historical canon.) In and through such works, as well as the kinetic sculptures (see the video I took below), Arcangel is also reinserting into the art-historical narrative mid-1960s computer art, long written out of the contested accounts of the development of contemporary art history, theory and practice.

Strauss on "'Like' Culture" + Twombly RIP + Geosynchrony: Beck in Bryant Park

About a year and a half ago, I thought of saying goodbye to this blog. It wasn't the first time, though. I'd considered doing this even further back, perhaps after the first year and a half of blogging, which would have been around late 2006. At that time I was still receiving a trickle of comments and the occasional hate post (based, if I recall correctly, on my epithet for George W. Bush, the "warrantless wiretapper"), as well as a small bombardment of spam, but I'd begun to feel like I not only was running out of things to say, but that I was unable because of work and life demands to remain timely, that I was mainly writing them for myself and that perhaps that wasn't enough to keep my commitment to this site. This issues very well could still be the case, but I do know that people read or at least skim this blog from time to time, be it friends old and new, students and colleagues, people referenced on the site, or even, as I learned, perhaps in 2009, people writing dissertations who have cited J's Theater in their arguments, and even, I'm told, at their defenses. (I kid you readers not, and my scholarly colleague who politely told me of one such case was not amused!)  And though comments are rare, I have come to terms with the fact that I enjoy posting here, when I can, and that sometimes the posts resonate beyond this seeming echo chamber in which I cast them.

I say this as a prelude to commenting on Neil Strauss's recent Wall Street Journal article "The Insidious Evils of 'Like' Culture," which ravels one strand from Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (a book he doesn't mention) and similar works (M. Jodi Dean, Nicholas Carr, etc.) and builds an argument around it. The argument: the "like" feature, so prominent on Facebook and increasingly all over the web, is molding what we write and who we are online--and perhaps who we are and become. In order to curry "likes" and provoke "RTs" (retweets), we're performing and conforming, rather than just being ourselves.  (You can block it, of course, but that's not Strauss's point....)

I would not be the first one to point out that in virtual space as in any other who we are is always a performance, that we already are shaping ourselves in various ways wherever we are, based on various contexts, that there is no pure or ideal self that is not at some point affected by the performative and all it entails. In fact this lies at the heart of any number of contemporary fields of critical and scholarly inquiry. That isn't to say that I'm completely disagreeing with Strauss, for I do believe that--and he doesn't mention the economics of the net and web, but Lanier and many others do--he's right on a certain level, and I find the "like" aspect of Facebook one of the most maddening, but I also feel that he doesn't address the facdt that there're benefits if you can conform and commodify yourself in certain ways. Wittier, shorter posts go over better than drier, longer ones, but single-issue blogs and Twitter feeds and Facebook pages probably attract more adherents than eclectic ones. The more personal you are, the more people will be interested, especially if there's a nice serving of (melo)drama tossed into the mix.  Sex goes over better than its absense. If you're criticizing an unpopular president (Bush) vs. one whose still fairly popular and whom people expect you to extol (Barack Obama)....

For Strauss it's both a social and psychological issue. People want and need community, they want and need affirmation and attention...and above all approval, so they--we--are increasingly tailoring ourselves to provoke and be able to cull those "likes," instead of writing or tweeting whatever we--or Strauss and others--think to be "our true selves." Again, I'm not so sure about this "true selves" bit, though. But I get his point. C and I were even joking about this "like" mania a while ago, even using the term as a form of punctuation on the phone, to uproarious laughter. (It's been replaced with, among other things, "Yeezy taught me," but that's another matter.)  Strauss mentions Google's new entry for its ++ service, those +1s that I, as someone publishing the blog via Google, now see at the bottom of these posts.  As I wrote in my review of Lanier's book, he urges people to create in ways that cannot be subsumed within or reduced to forms meriting a simple (and simplistic) "like," which Strauss echoes, saying:

So let's rise up against the tyranny of the "like" button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same. Write about what's important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you're reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think. And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don't waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.

He even goes so far as to urge no comments on his post and certainly no "likes," though his employer, tracking page traffic, surely wants some. So I've violated his challenge, and will say that I "liked" his article. But believe me, I didn't click that button on his page nor comment.

(((

Cy Twombly (1928-2011) is no longer with us, I learned this evening from the New York Times. He had been suffering from cancer for the last several years, and passed away in Rome, where he has lived for most of each year since 1957. He is a major figure in the narrative of 20th century American and global art, but not without lingering controversy.  His paintings grabbed me from the first time I saw them, their seeming artlessness suggesting the very inverse, depths that it would take many hours of looking to parse, their almost throwaway charm marking another kind of beauty, or possibility of the beautiful, particularly in the moment and aftermath of sensory engagement.  I wrote in response to a friend's email about his death, referring to without mentioning the specific passages in the obituary:

Quite a loss. I like his attitude about his work, too. Also that he he was able to live long enough to see it come back into fashion and then to be recognized as central to the narrative of the art of his and our time. Of course it helps to have some wherewithal and connections, to be able to make your work, and to have critical champions, peers and those who don't know you from Eve. And to be able to plug into existing belief systems that people cherish, so that you don't have to continually explain what you're doing, unless you have champions who're willing to keep up with you all the way through. So many don't. But the work speaks for itself. The later pieces are gorgeous, so full of life, so redolent of what art can do in speaking to and creating life and reality, while also aware of Thanatos.  I also of course like that he was queer, as primly and Victorianly as the NY Times stated it. Lastly, it's kind of resonant for me that I just snapped photos of his sculptures when my friend Jerry W and I went to MoMa last week, primarily to see the Francis Alÿs show. That was so slick; Twombly felt like a gift from another world. RIP.

Here are those photos of his sculptures; I was permitted to photograph them but not Alÿs's work (not that that stopped me):

Legend for the Twombly sculptures

In foreground, "Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python)," New York, 1954

Foreground, "Untitled," Lexington, Virginia, 2005

Left to right: "Untitled," Rome, 1984-85; "Untitled," Rome, 1976; and "Untitled," New York, 1955.

In foreground, "By the Ionian Sea," Naples, 1988.

(((

A concept that enthralls that I haven't read a lot about but I'm sure someone is exploring or has already exhaustively looked at is geosynchrony*, which is the name I give (geo = space, place + syn = together + chronos = time) to being in the same place and space and time as someone else, sometimes over long periods, but seeing the same people all the time, perhaps never coming into contact with them or only doing so once or twice. In Care Crosses the River (translated by Paul Fleming; Stanford University Press, 2010), I believe, Hans Blumenberg recounts one of my favorite stories evoking this concept, noting that although Marcel Proust and James Joyce lived in Paris at the same time for a number of years, they reportedly only once encountered each other directly, when in May 1922 they shared a cab, with Sydney and Violet Schiff, after a dinner to honor a Stravinsky-Diaghilev Ballet Russe performance. (Can you imagine Proust and Joyce together in a cab?)  Blumenberg recounts, much like the one I link to above, what occurred, which is to say, Proust, who had not arrived to the dinner until 2 or 3 chattered on, while an inebriated and smoking Joyce was silent, and the cab ride was over before you could say either À la recherche du temps perdu or Finnegans Wake.

I was thinking of this on a much more banal level, though, as I was reviewing some recent photos: one, from last week, was taken on June 29, 2011, in Bryant Park, as I was leaving the New York Public Library and people waiting to see that evenings film were clustering around the lawn to stake out their spots and set up their blankets and personal effects.  Now it turns out that on that evening, if I am reading the news reports correctly, a certain Glenn Beck attended the movie screening and encountered some resistance to his presence there. A young woman, Lindsay Piscitell, accidentally, in her account, knocked over a glass of white wine onto his blanket and apologized profusely, before and after a few people in the crowd expressed their disapproval of him, that was it. In his typical bombastic TV account, he was razzled repeatedly by "hateful people", and the young woman, whom he excoriated as "lost" and "arrogant," spilled wine on his wife. Who knows what really happened, though I'm inclined to take the young woman's account more seriously than Mr. Testeria, but, that said, I was thinking, somewhere, maybe, in that gaggle I photoed edging the grass stands the Beck, his wife and their bodyguard, and had I chosen for the first time ever to stay in the park and catch one of these free films, I very well might have been witness to this event as unfolded, as I can spot people around corners and through doors (even if I cannot remember names to save my life anymore), and could have recounted to any and all who would listen, echoing Ted Hughes' simple Birthday Letters statement, "I was there, I saw it." I do think I would have had enough maturity not even to need to suppress a banal heckle--or gentle chiding--at the very sight (and site) of this man, though, especially given his advocacy of so much that's wrong with this society, and his hatred of the very concept of the commons and public spaces like Bryant Park, which he, his wife and his bodyguard were able to enjoy like anyone else who'd gotten there on time and found a spot, as opposed to the privatized, corporatized spaces he shills for on his programs. But I would certainly have taken his photograph, and posted it here.

The countdown to seating in Bryant Park on movie night, 6.29.11

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.