0:00:08.291,0:00:09.775 [horn honking] 0:00:11.000,0:00:14.182 [LIGON] I'm an artist because the National Endowment for the Arts 0:00:14.182,0:00:16.534 used to give grants to individual artists. 0:00:16.534,0:00:20.907 So I got a grant for drawing in 1989. 0:00:22.145,0:00:25.704 That grant allowed me to make a decision, 0:00:25.704,0:00:31.721 which was, I could keep working the job that I was working, [br]40, 50 hours a week, 0:00:32.650,0:00:36.735 or I could use that grant money to take some time off 0:00:36.735,0:00:41.734 and really dive into this thing called being an artist. 0:00:42.585,0:00:45.957 And so that grant was pivotal, actually. 0:00:46.334,0:00:47.549 - Invites, please. 0:00:50.180,0:00:52.876 - I'm so sorry about this party. Like... 0:00:52.876,0:00:53.711 - It's fine. [br]- Okay. [laughs] 0:00:53.711,0:00:56.171 - It's all good.[br]- It's all good. 0:00:56.171,0:00:58.567 - Everybody wants to come to this party all of a sudden. 0:00:58.567,0:00:59.502 - We're gonna, like... 0:00:59.502,0:01:06.320 LIGON: One of the things about having a [br]retrospective at the Whitney is that I feel 0:01:06.320,0:01:10.341 like I am coming to a place that I know very well, 0:01:10.341,0:01:14.899 because the Whitney has the largest collection of my work in the country. 0:01:14.899,0:01:20.609 I started showing at [br]the Whitney in 1991, in the biennial. 0:01:20.609,0:01:23.969 I know all the guards and I know all the curators. 0:01:24.588,0:01:28.835 And so it’s a very easy place to navigate. 0:01:28.835,0:01:32.057 - Today I was, like, awful. [br]- That's all right, but you haven't changed your cell number? 0:01:32.057,0:01:33.480 - No, no, it's the same. [br]- All right, all right. 0:01:33.480,0:01:37.000 Any opening of an exhibition is a bit like, 0:01:37.000,0:01:42.553 “This Is Your Life.” So there were [br]people that I haven’t seen in 30 years. 0:01:42.707,0:01:44.720 - I'm so proud of you, i don't know what to say. 0:01:44.720,0:01:47.803 Lots of family and lots of artist friends. 0:01:47.803,0:01:49.799 - I mean, the line is outside... 0:01:49.799,0:01:50.999 - We only just glance from room to room. 0:01:50.999,0:01:53.301 - I know, we have to have a picture, a picture time. 0:01:53.935,0:01:55.319 - Picture time. 0:01:56.051,0:01:56.976 [ laughs ] 0:01:56.976,0:02:01.675 LIGON: I won’t say it was fun to be there [br]because I don’t like that level of scrutiny 0:02:01.675,0:02:07.994 and attention. But I think it was interesting [br]to be around so many people who wished me well. 0:02:14.958,0:02:16.920 LIGON: The surprise of, of retrospective is 0:02:16.920,0:02:25.200 that there’s more consistency than I [br]had thought in how the work appears. 0:02:25.200,0:02:29.040 There are several threads that tie [br]together the show. One is an interest 0:02:29.040,0:02:33.277 throughout the work in issues [br]of legibility and illegibility. 0:02:36.000,0:02:40.640 I’ve used language in various [br]kinds of ways throughout my career. 0:02:42.239,0:02:46.840 Another is concern with American history. 0:02:46.840,0:02:53.600 Another thing is the return to color. And [br]it is at the very beginning of my career, 0:02:53.600,0:02:59.347 the earliest works in the show, but [br]it returns towards the end as well. 0:03:01.880,0:03:07.222 I didn’t really do drawings when I was a [br]kid. I, I made copies of things. 0:03:07.222,0:03:13.880 So I would, I had a good business when I was a kid, [br]doing drawings of cartoon characters from 0:03:13.880,0:03:18.703 the newspaper. And I would cut them out [br]and sell them to my friends in school. 0:03:19.760,0:03:24.773 And when I was in high school I knew [br]that I wanted to be an artist. 0:03:25.289,0:03:31.720 And my mother had sent me to after-school [br]classes at the Metropolitan Museum. 0:03:31.720,0:03:38.200 And I think my mother sent me to art classes [br]because she thought that’s what a well-rounded 0:03:38.200,0:03:42.103 citizen should have education in. 0:03:42.103,0:03:44.372 Sort of arts in a general sense. 0:03:47.441,0:03:54.684 But there was no one in my family who had been an artist and [br]so there wasn’t really any role model for it. 0:03:55.819,0:04:01.321 But I think the idea that I actually [br]was going to be an artist horrified her, 0:04:01.480,0:04:06.313 because artists don’t make any [br]money. And what did she say? 0:04:06.313,0:04:10.388 The only artists I’ve ever heard of [br]are dead. And she meant Picasso. 0:04:11.600,0:04:19.760 I think the artist that I was interested in [br]when I first started working were de Kooning, 0:04:19.760,0:04:26.556 Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock. That whole [br]generation of abstract expressionists. 0:04:31.000,0:04:38.310 At a certain moment I decided that being an [br]abstract expressionist wasn’t quite going to do it. 0:04:38.310,0:04:49.160 And that produced a kind of crisis in [br]the studio. And what I decided to do was to 0:04:49.160,0:04:55.662 incorporate the things that I was thinking about, [br]the things I was reading into the work directly. 0:04:56.720,0:05:00.680 And the models for that were [br]people like Jasper Johns or, 0:05:00.680,0:05:06.633 Rauschenberg. People who [br]had used text in their work. 0:05:08.000,0:05:14.840 When I first started doing that, I decided [br]that I was just going to use my handwriting. 0:05:14.840,0:05:20.031 And then after a while I decided, I’m [br]not interested in telling my own stories. 0:05:20.960,0:05:25.240 I’m interested in what other people have to say. 0:05:25.240,0:05:31.240 There’s nothing wrong with self-expression, [br]it just has its limits. And I think that the 0:05:31.240,0:05:38.200 things that I was interested in were already in [br]the world and so they didn’t need me to create 0:05:38.200,0:05:48.775 them again in that way. They just needed for me [br]to have them be brought into the work you know. 0:05:51.200,0:05:58.036 The work became more about quotation, [br]using texts from various literary sources. 0:06:01.160,0:06:05.800 I read lots of things. I just read [br]whatever I feel like reading. And if 0:06:05.800,0:06:09.837 something stays in my head long [br]enough it might turn into art. 0:06:17.240,0:06:23.240 It was the one thing that when I was [br]a child my mother would allow me, 0:06:23.240,0:06:30.714 any book I wanted, no matter the [br]cost. Expensive toys, or clothes, no. 0:06:30.714,0:06:42.552 But any book. So that kind of uh, attention [br]to books was, love of books came early. 0:06:45.880,0:06:53.400 Ideas take a long time to be born, you [br]know. They take a long time to gestate. 0:06:54.000,0:06:59.400 They take a long time to come into [br]the world. And that process is hard. 0:07:00.613,0:07:01.966 - Gloves on. 0:07:07.080,0:07:10.960 I guess what I’m committed to is, I don’t know, 0:07:10.960,0:07:15.952 not love of painting, but love [br]of the idea of making ideas. 0:07:21.059,0:07:26.157 The first text paintings I made [br]were single sentences by an author 0:07:26.157,0:07:33.410 named Zora Neale Hurston, an African American [br]woman, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance. 0:07:36.711,0:07:42.325 The way I was making the paintings was to use [br]plastic letter stencils and oil crayons. 0:07:42.325,0:07:46.520 If you’re using letter stencils, you’re trying to [br]make something with a sharp boundary, but oil 0:07:46.520,0:07:51.917 crayons want to break out of those boundaries. [br]They’re messy, they don’t keep their shape. 0:07:52.846,0:07:59.640 And for about six months I think I tried to figure [br]out how to make these oil crayons make nice, 0:07:59.640,0:08:04.240 neat letters. And then I realized that [br]the fact that they didn’t make nice, 0:08:04.240,0:08:07.787 neat letters was actually much more interesting. 0:08:09.954,0:08:17.000 Smudging them and transforming these letters into abstraction was what the paintings were about, 0:08:17.000,0:08:20.311 but it took six months to figure that out.[br][ chuckles ] You know? 0:08:26.120,0:08:32.600 At first it was really important for me that [br]I made these you know from start to finish. 0:08:32.600,0:08:38.080 Now that’s not so important to me. It’s more [br]important that I come in at a certain point 0:08:38.080,0:08:42.720 where there is a base for me to work off [br]of. And I find it interesting to work on 0:08:42.720,0:08:49.322 something that’s sort of started out of my [br]hands basically. 0:08:49.322,0:08:56.400 The kinds of line breaks and kinds of spacings that they would make in [br]presenting a text is very different than what 0:08:56.400,0:08:58.461 I would do. 0:08:58.461,0:09:02.210 And I often find that when I’m working, 0:09:02.210,0:09:10.529 it’s the mistakes or it’s someone else’s suggestion or intervention that [br]pushes the work forward. 0:09:10.529,0:09:15.346 You know it’s the things that I didn’t think I was going [br]to do that end up being the thing..... 0:09:16.661,0:09:24.318 And sometimes that means you have to lose a [br]little bit of control over things. You have to let them go to someone else. 0:09:24.318,0:09:28.836 Let someone [br]else work on them, collaborate with people. 0:09:29.840,0:09:36.320 So often people say, "I get your message," but [br]I don’t know think that message, if I have a 0:09:36.320,0:09:43.040 message, is so separated from what the object [br]is, how it’s painted. 0:09:43.298,0:09:47.025 Indeed that’s where the work starts from, 0:09:47.283,0:09:55.793 a kind of making rather than [br]a message that is then layered into an object. 0:10:03.280,0:10:06.920 There’s a series of paintings [br]called The Coloring Book Paintings, 0:10:06.920,0:10:10.814 which were based on the kids’ drawings. 0:10:14.760,0:10:19.600 Often when I look for source material, [br]I don’t know where I’m going to find it. 0:10:19.600,0:10:23.328 And sometimes I don’t even know [br]what I’m exactly looking for. 0:10:25.443,0:10:30.840 When I found these, it was quite a [br]surprise. I didn’t know they existed. 0:10:30.840,0:10:38.100 So it’s the moment when educators are trying [br]to figure out, how do you teach black history? 0:10:39.080,0:10:44.157 So they create these coloring books that have [br]images that any coloring book would have in them. 0:10:45.937,0:10:53.217 Boys playing basketball juxtaposed [br]with images of people like Harriet Tubman. 0:10:55.280,0:10:59.196 I thought this was going to be an [br]easy project for me. 0:11:00.000,0:11:09.395 I really had to kind of inhabit the way a kid would [br]hold a crayon or paint a painting. 0:11:13.960,0:11:19.177 You know Picasso said he had to spend his [br]whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child. 0:11:19.177,0:11:22.106 And I know what he means now, it’s [br]hard. 0:11:24.000,0:11:26.412 But it was very instructive for me. 0:11:26.412,0:11:31.440 That disconnect between what the kids [br]imagine those images to be and what I 0:11:31.440,0:11:37.567 as an adult bring to an image of say, [br]Malcolm X was what the work was about. 0:11:42.880,0:11:48.000 I first started doing neons because there’s [br]a neon shop in my building. 0:11:49.315,0:11:58.393 And one day I was walking by the neon shop and the owner, Matt, [br]um, said, do you want a tour? And I said, sure. 0:12:02.760,0:12:11.080 He makes work for corporations, but he also [br]makes work for artists too. And I thought 0:12:11.080,0:12:14.475 that was an interesting pairing. 0:12:15.610,0:12:22.449 I’d been to that point, making paintings using black text on white backgrounds. 0:12:22.449,0:12:30.121 So really just as a joke, I said, um, you know is there such a thing as black neon? 0:12:30.121,0:12:37.966 And the owner of the shop, [br]Matt, said, that’s against the laws of physics, 0:12:38.404,0:12:46.400 because black is the absence of light. But then [br]we started talking about it a bit and I realized 0:12:46.400,0:12:52.962 that there was a way to do it, because one can [br]take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. 0:12:52.962,0:12:58.880 So it would read as a black letter [br]or a line, but it, it would also read as neon, 0:12:58.880,0:13:05.600 because there would be light coming from behind [br]that black letter. And once I realized that was 0:13:05.600,0:13:13.010 possible, it became the connection between [br]my painting work and these neons, using text. 0:13:14.480,0:13:19.732 Lots of artists have used neon, so there [br]are precedents for what I was doing. 0:13:38.045,0:13:40.080 - Wait, what is that? 0:13:40.080,0:13:44.896 Oh, so this is sort of telling you what the color’s going to look like when it’s lit inside. 0:13:44.896,0:13:46.514 - Wow. 0:13:46.514,0:13:49.534 How long do you have to pump [br]the gas into the letter? 0:13:49.534,0:13:52.801 SERGIO ALMARAZ: Ten, fifteen minutes, [br]forty minutes. 0:13:53.072,0:13:58.986 This is a neon gas, this is argon with mercury. And this is a mercury. 0:13:58.986,0:14:01.720 - And then this is helium.[br]- Right. 0:14:01.720,0:14:06.000 - And then this is argon gas. Argon with no mercury.[br]- Right. 0:14:06.000,0:14:10.366 INTERVIEWER: Glenn, you’ve been working with [br]neon and you never got the explanation for it? 0:14:10.366,0:14:16.173 LIGON: No, it just kind of [br]arrived, done. [ laughs ] It just arrived. 0:14:17.505,0:14:23.605 First Neon was based on a little fragment of a Gertrude Stein novel called "Three [br]Lives" 0:14:23.605,0:14:27.181 and it says, "Negro Sunshine." 0:14:27.764,0:14:35.191 I was interested in Gertrude Stein because she [br]is interested in America, American history, 0:14:36.000,0:14:45.563 trying to describe what America means, [br]which I think is one of my projects too. 0:14:49.086,0:14:56.889 For me, using neon was really about finding the [br]connection between the work I was already doing and the neon. 0:14:56.889,0:15:03.597 And until we had that discussion [br]about black light, that hadn’t happened. 0:15:05.511,0:15:11.538 There are paintings that emit light. The coal dust paintings do... 0:15:16.560,0:15:23.080 Because they have this shiny black [br]gravel-like substance called coal 0:15:23.080,0:15:30.743 dust on top of them. And when you shine a [br]light on that, it sparkles and glistens. 0:15:31.520,0:15:37.600 And I started using coal dust in relationship [br]to paintings because I was thinking about 0:15:37.600,0:15:42.200 James Baldwin and the essay that I [br]was using "Stranger In The Village." 0:15:42.200,0:15:49.184 He’s an American author. He’s gone to Europe to [br]work on a novel and he’s in this little Swiss village. 0:15:49.184,0:15:56.120 It was written in the ‘50s. And the [br]essay is about his relationship to the people 0:15:56.120,0:16:01.292 who have no relationship to black Americans. 0:16:01.292,0:16:05.697 And he’s trying to think through what it means to be a stranger somewhere. 0:16:05.697,0:16:11.470 The kind of fascination [br]and fear that strangers produce. 0:16:13.079,0:16:20.366 I like the idea of using coal dust because it’s a waste product. It’s left over stuff from coal processing. 0:16:20.366,0:16:23.760 The way it’s used on the paintings [br]was interesting to me and seemed to 0:16:23.760,0:16:28.520 be a kind of parallel to what [br]Baldwin was talking about. 0:16:42.480,0:16:48.360 It gets sprayed with this acrylic glue, [br]cause otherwise all that coal dust is going 0:16:48.360,0:16:52.021 to fall off the drawing. 0:16:52.021,0:16:55.390 Glue and sprayers [br]don’t really go together. 0:16:58.664,0:17:07.038 So when it dries, it dries clear. Basically fancy Elmer’s Glue [br]and water. Nothing very mysterious. 0:17:07.038,0:17:08.290 Et voila. 0:17:17.038,0:17:23.089 Paint is a very sensual material. 0:17:23.089,0:17:27.830 It’s lovely [br]to work with and lovely to look at. 0:17:27.830,0:17:36.080 It’s also inefficient. We’re used to seeing text [br]printed, we’re not used to seeing text 0:17:36.080,0:17:43.480 made out of paint. And there’s a kind of [br]slowness and inefficiency about rendering 0:17:43.480,0:17:49.120 text in paint that’s interesting to me. It [br]slows your reading down and it slows the 0:17:49.120,0:17:52.813 viewer down in front of the paintings. 0:17:52.813,0:18:00.788 And I think we’re in a world that’s very fast, so things that slow you for a minute, give you pause I think are good. 0:18:17.296,0:18:20.440 LIGON: If you use jokes by a [br]comedian like Richard Pryor, 0:18:20.440,0:18:25.249 they need to be jokes in color. So the paintings [br]have to have color in them. 0:18:25.249,0:18:33.437 They allowed me to go back to my abstract expressionist days [br]when I made paintings that were very colorful. 0:18:35.016,0:18:38.412 - [ laughing ] 0:18:38.412,0:18:41.400 [ voices overlapping ] 0:18:55.935,0:19:02.440 [ LIGON ] Well the struggle is always that the [br]idea you have in your head about what you want to 0:19:02.440,0:19:13.640 say in your work versus the means you have to say [br]it with or your abilities or your skills or, 0:19:13.640,0:19:21.040 the technical limitations of the medium you’re [br]working in. So it’s, there’s always sort of, like, 0:19:21.040,0:19:25.960 the ideal painting in your head, and you never [br]quite get to that. And so you make something, 0:19:25.960,0:19:32.960 and it’s almost there, it’s not quite right, [br]you make something else. It’s almost there, 0:19:32.960,0:19:35.883 it’s not quite right. [br]You make something else. 0:19:35.883,0:19:39.112 It’s almost there, it’s not quite right. 0:19:39.112,0:19:44.485 But that process doesn’t end, [br]you know? Eventually just, that, that is the process. 0:19:44.485,0:19:46.782 You know, you just keep going.