“Text demands to be read, and perhaps the withdrawal of text, the frustration of the ability to decipher it, reflects a certain pessimism on my part about the ability and desire to communicate.”
D eeply enigmatic and shrouded in dense layers of emblematic symbolism, Glenn Ligon’s Stranger #4 is a treatise on the long and arduous endeavor of the African American man in the pursuit of voice and individual agency. With his first expressive endeavors premiering during the 1990s, Ligon transfigures the approach of the black artist by championing a new-wave tone of radical philosophical and emotive inquiry. Sourcing from a personal lexicon of influence, Ligon strives to utilise his oeuvre as a vehicle for the re-engagement of critical racial theory within the Western systems of oppression.
This pursuit settled upon the rhetoric and prose of historic erudite proponents of black thought who pushed the boundaries of systemic confrontation, which Ligon employs to prompt discussion on the perpetuation of their long-since ratified observations on racial visibility. This has taken form in the raw and abrasive paintings that dismantle the silence surrounding discrimination, and simultaneously serve as an elegiac soliloquy of Ligon’s experience as an African-American man experiencing the moored circumscriptions of an indignant society.
Stranger #4 is an exemplar of Ligon’s relinquishment of the master’s tools. Here, Ligon revisits his frequently recurrent motif of text-based paintings to lend the musings of celebrated poet James Baldwin in his seminal disquisition, “Stranger In the Village”, a multidimensional vigour. Painstakingly stamped across nearly every inch of the canvas is a swath of text lifted from the essay, detailing Baldwin’s account of visiting a remote Swiss village where he describes the eye-opening experience of being coloured in a white society barren of blackness, and how it only further typified the paradoxy of existing as an unacknowledged anomaly in the West. The particular segment Ligon utilises is a recollection of the villagers’ tradition of “saving” African natives through tithings put towards their purchase, upon which they are subsequently converted to Christianity by missionaries.
This narrative is a paradigm for the ineffability Ligon intends to convey in his layered composition; exploitative of the tactility achievable with laborious and charged method, Ligon coalesces layer after layer of typeface to visually and figuratively abstract the concept of semantics within the context of black speech. This intention reflects the futility of attempting to succinctly convey these experiences, rife with history and a spectrum of emotional complexity, to a society relinquished of definitive reparation. The obscuration of text, smudged with layers of oil, coal dust, charcoal, and detritus, is emblematic of the poignant stupor that is distinctive of a disillusioned and fatigued people, whose words have lost legibility and clarity within the vein of their repetition ad nauseam.
On his choice of Baldwin’s text, Ligon attests: “The gravity and weight and panoramic nature of that work inspired me. The addition of the coal dust seemed to me to do that because it literally bulked up the text.”
Glenn Ligon's radical artistry is demonstrative of the resurgence of a coalition of a coloured avant-garde, inclusive of constituents such as Lorna Simpson and Marlon Riggs, who are rightfully educated on the prerogative of their respective diaspora- and utilise it to agitate the discourse on societal despotism in an effort to elevate the masses to their plateau of awareness. By integrating the postulations of his predecessors into the synthesis of new thought, Ligon achieves a remarkable syntax that has exalted his work above single-noted distinguishment, refracting a brilliant spectrum of pathos that has captivated the art canon at large since his initial rise to prominence. As visceral sentiment amalgamates with form, Stranger #4 hauntingly encapsulates the unabashed lament of a previously unheard nation, clarified by its very own self-envelopment; a cathartic declamation from, like Ralph Emerson famously coined, an “Invisible Man.”
