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