The Brooklyn Rail

Three rooms in plum, white, and midnight blue; it took me a moment to register these colors as a deeper, darker version of the American flag. Like the rich velvet walls of a history museum, adorned with portraits of kings, queens, and their progeny, these colored walls endow the pictures that occupy them with a certain regality. The portraits hung here, in Glenn Ligon’s exhibition Break it Down at the Aspen Art Museum, tell the story of a single man, and yet many men. Such is the nature, Ligon suggests, of being Black in America.

Ligon describes the burden of self-representation and the limits of self-expression in a recent interview in BOMB: “Think about enslaved people’s narratives. They are autobiographies, but they were written with a burden. Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, for example, was meant to persuade white readers of Black humanity. He couldn’t write freely. His body stood in for all those who were not yet free. He was writing about the potential of Black people as a race, not just himself.”

It is this formulation of a type—of the many held within the one, and the histories that each individual carries forward—that takes shape within Ligon’s exhibition. This thematic focus is mirrored in the form of the works on view: prints and multiples, mostly. Many, if not all, could be considered self-portraits, though not in any traditional sense. Rarely does Ligon’s own visage serve as subject. Instead, in each work, a truth of his character, his heritage, and the culture that made him who he is comes into focus. It is from such oblique angles as school evaluations (End of Year Reports, 2003), character sketches written by friends in the style of ads for runaway enslaved persons (Runaways, 1993), and the avatar of childhood idols (Self-Portrait at Nine Years Old, 2008) that the viewer becomes acquainted with the artist.

These works that trade in specificity are counterposed by Figure (2001), a series of fifty unique screenprints on Color-aid paper, featuring the same two shots of Ligon, front and back, from the chest up. Somehow it is in this traditional portrait of the artist that we see and understand him least. As the ink streaks and washes away, it becomes impossible to discern in some of the prints whether the artist’s face or the back of his head is pictured. In others, his profile is completely blacked out, leaving only the shadow of a person. Here, it is the sheer seriality of the image—and Ligon’s subversion of Andy Warhol’s pop-cultural, mediagenic image-making practice—that lets the singularity of the subject’s visage fade, giving way, instead, to the reification of the indistinguishable many within the man. It is only in a select few instances, where Ligon’s features are sharp, that the brightness of his specific personhood shines out from behind his eyes—briefly, fleetingly disrupting the easy reproducibility of this man as a stand in for all Black men.

With a forensic bent and the distanced vantage of historical perspective, the exhibition’s second room places the proofs, tools, guides, and material bodies of Ligon’s work under the conservator’s veritable microscope—a metaphor perhaps for the test of time, and the fungibility of observation, let alone fact. For Condition Report (2000), Ligon asked his friend, a conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, to produce a condition report for his first text-based painting Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988), a reinterpretation of the signs carried by Black sanitation workers during a strike in 1968. The result: two prints of the painting hung side by side, one annotated with the conservator’s observations: black dots, circles, Xs, and swooshes identify drips, cracks, fingerprints, scrapes, and rubbings, all noted in writing around the margins of the image. The same scrutiny is afforded to the front (and back covers of Black Rage (2015 and 2019), a 1968 book by psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs that informed the legal concept of the same name.

In each instance, the fragility of the material reveals both its inevitably changing constitution and the variability of its significance. Unsettling the notion of history as a fixed series of known events rooted in material evidence, Black Rage and Condition Report draw viewers’ attention to the instability of each artifact, dramatizing the easily swayed focus of the viewer’s gaze, and by extension their perception of the world around. A paper template for the artist’s iconic neon piece, America (2008), is hung upside-down, its surface charred and marked from the process by which the molten glass tubing was bent into shape. This Untitled (2012) work similarly speaks of the afterlives and residues of material bodies that are so often ignored or hidden. Ligon, however, makes a point of drawing our attention to the underbelly of his practice—the templates, the crossings-out (Untitled [America/Me], 2022), the discarded tools (Untitled [Cancellation Prints], 1992/2003)—an impulse that attests to the fallibility and irreproducibility of all things, even prints and multiples. Through this kind of honesty, a truer, livelier picture of the artist emerges.

The influence that selective attention exerts on perception is again allegorized in Ligon’s Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features and Self-Portrait Exaggerating My White Features (1998), two larger-than-life silkscreens of the artist that play on Adrian Piper’s subversive 1981 work, Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features. With its titular descriptions written across the bottom of each panel, Ligon’s work presages its own reception, egging on viewers’ compliant imagination to see only what their minds want to, not what their eyes actually perceive. The most cursory observation will of course reveal there to be no difference between the two prints, so whether it’s gullibility or prejudice that prompts a double take, the jig is already up. We have failed to see the man for exactly who he is.

It is in the exhibition’s third and final room that the question of what viewers choose to see shifts from image production to individual reception. Circling all four walls, like flickering stars in a clear night sky, are a series of twenty-five carbon rubbings on canvas. By placing sheets of Japanese kozo paper atop a much larger, textured painting that reproduced part of James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village,” Ligon created positive, though highly irregular, prints of different sections of the surface and, by extension, the text. Baldwin’s essay, describing his own experience in a remote mountain village in Switzerland where the residents had never before encountered a Black person, here becomes—whether this was Ligon’s intention or a product of my own projection—a portrait of the artist himself in Aspen.

Baldwin’s account is of his own experience, how heavily the burden of representation and the image of all Black men hung over his narrative, I cannot know. Ligon’s exhibition, however, gives such questions a form. The viewers who pass his works, who pause however briefly, become that much more attuned to their own relationship with images, language, and the truths that representations may or may not be able to hold.