Glenn Ligon in "History" - Season 6 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

[horn honking]

[LIGON] I'm an artist because the National Endowment for the Arts

used to give grants to individual artists.

So I got a grant for drawing in 1989.

That grant allowed me to make a decision,

which was, I could keep working the job that I was working,
40, 50 hours a week,

or I could use that grant money to take some time off

and really dive into this thing called being an artist.

And so that grant was pivotal, actually.

- Invites, please.

- I'm so sorry about this party. Like...

- It's fine.
- Okay. [laughs]

- It's all good.
- It's all good.

- Everybody wants to come to this party all of a sudden.

- We're gonna, like...

LIGON: One of the things about having a 
retrospective at the Whitney is that I feel

like I am coming to a place that I know very well,

because the Whitney has the largest collection of my work in the country.

I started showing at 
the Whitney in 1991, in the biennial.

I know all the guards and I know all the curators.

And so it’s a very easy place to navigate.

- Today I was, like, awful.
- That's all right, but you haven't changed your cell number?

- No, no, it's the same.
- All right, all right.

Any opening of an exhibition is a bit like,

“This Is Your Life.” So there were 
people that I haven’t seen in 30 years.

- I'm so proud of you, i don't know what to say.

Lots of family and lots of artist friends.

- I mean, the line is outside...

- We only just glance from room to room.

- I know, we have to have a picture, a picture time.

- Picture time.

[ laughs ]

LIGON: I won’t say it was fun to be there 
because I don’t like that level of scrutiny

and attention. But I think it was interesting 
to be around so many people who wished me well.

LIGON: The surprise of, of retrospective is

that there’s more consistency than I 
had thought in how the work appears.

There are several threads that tie 
together the show. One is an interest

throughout the work in issues 
of legibility and illegibility.

I’ve used language in various 
kinds of ways throughout my career.

Another is concern with American history.

Another thing is the return to color. And 
it is at the very beginning of my career,

the earliest works in the show, but 
it returns towards the end as well.

I didn’t really do drawings when I was a 
kid. I, I made copies of things.

So I would, I had a good business when I was a kid, 
doing drawings of cartoon characters from

the newspaper. And I would cut them out 
and sell them to my friends in school.

And when I was in high school I knew 
that I wanted to be an artist.

And my mother had sent me to after-school 
classes at the Metropolitan Museum.

And I think my mother sent me to art classes 
because she thought that’s what a well-rounded

citizen should have education in.

Sort of arts in a general sense.

But there was no one in my family who had been an artist and 
so there wasn’t really any role model for it.

But I think the idea that I actually 
was going to be an artist horrified her,

because artists don’t make any 
money. And what did she say?

The only artists I’ve ever heard of 
are dead. And she meant Picasso.

I think the artist that I was interested in 
when I first started working were de Kooning,

Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock. That whole 
generation of abstract expressionists.

At a certain moment I decided that being an 
abstract expressionist wasn’t quite going to do it.

And that produced a kind of crisis in 
the studio. And what I decided to do was to

incorporate the things that I was thinking about, 
the things I was reading into the work directly.

And the models for that were 
people like Jasper Johns or,

Rauschenberg. People who 
had used text in their work.

When I first started doing that, I decided 
that I was just going to use my handwriting.

And then after a while I decided, I’m 
not interested in telling my own stories.

I’m interested in what other people have to say.

There’s nothing wrong with self-expression, 
it just has its limits. And I think that the

things that I was interested in were already in 
the world and so they didn’t need me to create

them again in that way. They just needed for me 
to have them be brought into the work you know.

The work became more about quotation, 
using texts from various literary sources.

I read lots of things. I just read 
whatever I feel like reading. And if

something stays in my head long 
enough it might turn into art.

It was the one thing that when I was 
a child my mother would allow me,

any book I wanted, no matter the 
cost. Expensive toys, or clothes, no.

But any book. So that kind of uh, attention 
to books was, love of books came early.

Ideas take a long time to be born, you 
know. They take a long time to gestate.

They take a long time to come into 
the world. And that process is hard.

- Gloves on.

I guess what I’m committed to is, I don’t know,

not love of painting, but love 
of the idea of making ideas.

The first text paintings I made 
were single sentences by an author

named Zora Neale Hurston, an African American 
woman, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance.

The way I was making the paintings was to use 
plastic letter stencils and oil crayons.

If you’re using letter stencils, you’re trying to 
make something with a sharp boundary, but oil

crayons want to break out of those boundaries. 
They’re messy, they don’t keep their shape.

And for about six months I think I tried to figure 
out how to make these oil crayons make nice,

neat letters. And then I realized that 
the fact that they didn’t make nice,

neat letters was actually much more interesting.

Smudging them and transforming these letters into abstraction was what the paintings were about,

but it took six months to figure that out.
[ chuckles ] You know?

At first it was really important for me that 
I made these you know from start to finish.

Now that’s not so important to me. It’s more 
important that I come in at a certain point

where there is a base for me to work off 
of. And I find it interesting to work on

something that’s sort of started out of my 
hands basically.

The kinds of line breaks and kinds of spacings that they would make in 
presenting a text is very different than what

I would do.

And I often find that when I’m working,

it’s the mistakes or it’s someone else’s suggestion or intervention that 
pushes the work forward.

You know it’s the things that I didn’t think I was going 
to do that end up being the thing.....

And sometimes that means you have to lose a 
little bit of control over things. You have to let them go to someone else.

Let someone 
else work on them, collaborate with people.

So often people say, "I get your message," but 
I don’t know think that message, if I have a

message, is so separated from what the object 
is, how it’s painted.

Indeed that’s where the work starts from,

a kind of making rather than 
a message that is then layered into an object.

There’s a series of paintings 
called The Coloring Book Paintings,

which were based on the kids’ drawings.

Often when I look for source material, 
I don’t know where I’m going to find it.

And sometimes I don’t even know 
what I’m exactly looking for.

When I found these, it was quite a 
surprise. I didn’t know they existed.

So it’s the moment when educators are trying 
to figure out, how do you teach black history?

So they create these coloring books that have 
images that any coloring book would have in them.

Boys playing basketball juxtaposed 
with images of people like Harriet Tubman.

I thought this was going to be an 
easy project for me.

I really had to kind of inhabit the way a kid would 
hold a crayon or paint a painting.

You know Picasso said he had to spend his 
whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child.

And I know what he means now, it’s 
hard.

But it was very instructive for me.

That disconnect between what the kids 
imagine those images to be and what I

as an adult bring to an image of say, 
Malcolm X was what the work was about.

I first started doing neons because there’s 
a neon shop in my building.

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.

He makes work for corporations, but he also 
makes work for artists too. And I thought

that was an interesting pairing.

I’d been to that point, making paintings using black text on white backgrounds.

So really just as a joke, I said, um, you know is there such a thing as black neon?

And the owner of the shop, 
Matt, said, that’s against the laws of physics,

because black is the absence of light. But then 
we started talking about it a bit and I realized

that there was a way to do it, because one can 
take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front.

So it would read as a black letter 
or a line, but it, it would also read as neon,

because there would be light coming from behind 
that black letter. And once I realized that was

possible, it became the connection between 
my painting work and these neons, using text.

Lots of artists have used neon, so there 
are precedents for what I was doing.

- Wait, what is that?

Oh, so this is sort of telling you what the color’s going to look like when it’s lit inside.

- Wow.

How long do you have to pump 
the gas into the letter?

SERGIO ALMARAZ: Ten, fifteen minutes, 
forty minutes.

This is a neon gas, this is argon with mercury. And this is a mercury.

- And then this is helium.
- Right.

- And then this is argon gas. Argon with no mercury.
- Right.

INTERVIEWER: Glenn, you’ve been working with 
neon and you never got the explanation for it?

LIGON: No, it just kind of 
arrived, done. [ laughs ] It just arrived.

First Neon was based on a little fragment of a Gertrude Stein novel called "Three 
Lives"

and it says, "Negro Sunshine."

I was interested in Gertrude Stein because she 
is interested in America, American history,

trying to describe what America means, 
which I think is one of my projects too.

For me, using neon was really about finding the 
connection between the work I was already doing and the neon.

And until we had that discussion 
about black light, that hadn’t happened.

There are paintings that emit light. The coal dust paintings do...

Because they have this shiny black 
gravel-like substance called coal

dust on top of them. And when you shine a 
light on that, it sparkles and glistens.

And I started using coal dust in relationship 
to paintings because I was thinking about

James Baldwin and the essay that I 
was using "Stranger In The Village."

He’s an American author. He’s gone to Europe to 
work on a novel and he’s in this little Swiss village.

It was written in the ‘50s. And the 
essay is about his relationship to the people

who have no relationship to black Americans.

And he’s trying to think through what it means to be a stranger somewhere.

The kind of fascination
and fear that strangers produce.

I like the idea of using coal dust because it’s a waste product. It’s left over stuff from coal processing.

The way it’s used on the paintings 
was interesting to me and seemed to

be a kind of parallel to what 
Baldwin was talking about.

It gets sprayed with this acrylic glue, 
cause otherwise all that coal dust is going

to fall off the drawing.

Glue and sprayers 
don’t really go together.

So when it dries, it dries clear. Basically fancy Elmer’s Glue 
and water. Nothing very mysterious.

Et voila.

Paint is a very sensual material.

It’s lovely 
to work with and lovely to look at.

It’s also inefficient. We’re used to seeing text 
printed, we’re not used to seeing text

made out of paint. And there’s a kind of 
slowness and inefficiency about rendering

text in paint that’s interesting to me. It 
slows your reading down and it slows the

viewer down in front of the paintings.

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.

LIGON: If you use jokes by a 
comedian like Richard Pryor,

they need to be jokes in color. So the paintings 
have to have color in them.

They allowed me to go back to my abstract expressionist days
when I made paintings that were very colorful.

- [ laughing ]

[ voices overlapping ]

[ LIGON ] Well the struggle is always that the 
idea you have in your head about what you want to

say in your work versus the means you have to say 
it with or your abilities or your skills or,

the technical limitations of the medium you’re 
working in. So it’s, there’s always sort of, like,

the ideal painting in your head, and you never 
quite get to that. And so you make something,

and it’s almost there, it’s not quite right, 
you make something else. It’s almost there,

it’s not quite right.
You make something else.

It’s almost there, it’s not quite right.

But that process doesn’t end, 
you know? Eventually just, that, that is the process.

You know, you just keep going.