Glenn Ligon

Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2006

Miami, The Sender Collection, Home Alone, November - December 2011

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling along the edges and corners. Traces of oilstick can be found sporadically along the edges and sides of the canvas, which is inherent to the working method of the artist. Under ultraviolet inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Framed.
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In 1961 John Howard Griffin published Black Like Me, a groundbreaking text about the injustices of civil liberties in the United States through a radical personal account. In the fall of 1959, Griffin, deeply empathetic and troubled by the racial situation in his native South, came up with a daring experiment to experience, and subsequently document, discrimination based on skin color. He went to a dermatologist in New Orleans with what can only be called an astonishing request: He wanted "to become a Negro."  When the process was complete, Griffin was stunned: "The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship…I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin's past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness…I had tampered with the mystery of existence and I had lost the sense of my own being. This is what devastated me. The Griffin that I was had become invisible." (Jonathan Yardley, "John Howard Griffin Took Race all the Way to the Finish," Washington Post, Saturday, March 17, 2007, n.p.).

Literary appropriations are central in Glenn Ligon's work, having borrowed allusions from Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Pryor and of course John Howard Griffin. In the present work, Black Like Me #3, Ligon appropriates and isolates Griffin's profound observation, and then subsequently repeats the text throughout: I HAD EXPECTED TO SEE MYSELF DISGUISED BUT THIS WAS SOMETHING ELSE. Stenciled in stark black capital letters across the top of the canvas, the text repeats line after line until the words at the bottom dissolve into shadowy blackness.

Fundamentally, the use of both form and language establish Ligon's paintings as something all-encompassing. According to Darby English, "Ligon alters these conceptions by rendering the work's meaning structure open by means both appropriative (e.g. repurposing texts and forms) and mechanical (e.g. painting through a stencil, typing), which locate him somewhere between the source and its manifestation, between representer and represented." (Darby English, "Glenn Ligon: Committed to Difficulty," in Exh. Cat., Toronto, The Power Plant (and traveling), Glenn Ligon Some Changes, 2005, p. 38).  The build-up of paint and oil stick on the canvas surface, which gradually becomes darker as the text proceeds from top to bottom and the struggle to decipher the text emerges as an integral part of its meaning: the struggle to understand Griffin's identity. Literally and metaphorically, the words, "I Had Expected To See Myself Disguised But This Was Something Else" progress into a void of black.