Critical Art or Kum Ba Ya?
This text is a review originally written after Glenn Ligon’s curated exhibition “Blue Black” in 2017 at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, unpublished until now.
A more radical form of disidentification was Sun Ra’s retreat from the category of “human”. And better to be an alien than unemployed.
— Glenn Ligon
Radical art today is the same as dark art: its background color is black….The ideal of blackness is, in substantive terms, one of the most profound impulses of abstract art. … The injustice of all cheerful art is an injustice against the stored-up and speechless suffering of the dead. All the same, black art has certain features which, if hypostatized, would perpetuate our historical despair. Therefore, as long as there is hope for change, these features may be regarded as ephemeral, too. … Actually, the ideal of darkness does no more and no less than postulate that art properly understood finds happiness in nothing except its ability to stand its ground.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Is Glenn Ligon a critic of identity politics, or a mouthpiece? Or is it that he is both, and ultimately neither? The contemporary art culture industry that recycles identity politics — once again — to keep itself going forces the artist’s hand, and artists in general are expected to “get in formation”. Yet, Ligon has made a career of aestheticizing the ambivalence about being put in such a position. He has made a career out of the conflicted feelings of necessarily participating in a culture he might rather not, and part of his appeal is his uniquely wry, Kafkaesque irreverence toward “identity”.
“Blue Black”, an exhibition curated by Glenn Ligon at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2017 was supposed to be timely; it was supposed to have been a corrective to the Kelly Walker exhibition at CAM in 2016; it was supposed to have appealed to the “new civil rights movement” in St. Louis. Ligon reacted to expectations by curating a vast range of artworks that utilize blue and black color schemes based on Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Black site-specific paintings. He extended its scope to other modernists like Mondrian and neo-modernists like Wade Guyton (a collaborator of Walker’s) and included a variety of other more obscure objects such as African Indigo cloths — the type that can be found at rural flea markets in Missouri. Many of the diverse artists brought together seem to stake opposing aesthetic positions, such as Kerry James Marshall and Jack Whitten: the former makes paintings that reflect his identity, whereas the latter’s less kitschy abstract self-portraits seem to question any semblance of individuation at all. Likewise, what is one to connect between the project of Norman Lewis, an old-Left character who upheld the continuing development of aesthetic abstraction, and Kara Walker, a postmodern visual studies artist who mines representational imagery? Beyond blue and black color schemes, what connects the kosmische minimalism of Ross Bleckner, and the didacticism of Malcolm Bailey? Carrie Mae Weems' Blue Black Boy, with its bold, front-facing subject contrasts sharply with Lynnette Yiadom-Boakye's painting of an individual with her back turned, shying away from the viewer (not unlike Ligon's own self-portraits). The last half-century of high culture is put on display in all its incoherence, and the artist’s curatorial project is a means to make sense of the vast overdevelopment and decay of postmodern culture. Cohering the incoherent is not just about identity, but a broader political project.
Yet it could also be said that nothing about “Blue Black” is timely. On a historical stage wherein identity politics is a relic fetishized by New York neoliberals with no imagination beyond postmodern dogma — it comes too late. And when so many are still lamenting the Democratic Party failure, (and putting their hopes on Biden in 2020) certain aspects will go overlooked, e.g. the critique of Clintonism that Ligon waged in the 90s via Dave McKenzie’s video work. That is, if this show is about identity politics at all, it is in many ways simply about color and light, or the ‘politics of visibility’. Its curatorial contribution to art history is a reflection on the legacy of identity art now passed, now a running joke to those not struggling to buy an art career, asking if the identity politics era has contributed anything to culture beyond right-wing censorship and art-burning. If it weren’t for 2017's cheap imitation “culture wars”, art that focuses on ‘identity’ today would be nothing more than a tired cliché or fodder for art school jokes. And although Ligon has made joke paintings, his work is rather deadpan too, a bit like someone being cast in the wrong role. It begs the larger question whether or not critique can be seen more generally today.
Exhibition view of “Blue Black,” West Gallery, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri (9 June — 7 October 2017). Ocula Magazine.
Carrie Mae Weems, Blue Black Boy, 1997. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery. The New York Times.
While there are countless ways to illustrate the self-destruction of petit-bourgeois contemporary art, the self-undermining of identity politics provides one insight into the contemporaneity of a historically specific bourgeois ideology. As early as 2001, there was an evident discontent with identity politics coming from within. Bennett Simpson characterized the moment:
Some conversation in art was not happening or could not be placed. To name this placeless conversation “identity” would be true, and it would be misleading at the same time. For it was as much the interruption and disavowal of identity, as any positive attribution or negotiation, that suddenly seemed at stake. Even before America elected its first black president, many people spoke of our post-identity moment, in which categorizations of race, sex, and gender were no longer supposed to matter...but it was also obvious that many artists no longer had much use for the “cheering fictions” of representation and uplift held dear by previous generations. This was a time in which curator Thelma Golden could joke that “post-black was the new black”.... As she put it then, “post-black artists are adamant about not being labeled ‘black artists’, though their work is steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.” On one level post-black acknowledged a younger generation’s desire for works of art to be viewed free of what one writer Nathaniel Mackey has called “assumptions of representationality”. That is, free from a racially or biographically determined horizon of interpretation — even when a given work made explicit reference to race, culture, or other facets of identity. On another level, with its rejection of an “on message” content-orientation, the formulation suggested a perception that an older expectation internal to definitions of black art had become a kind of burden. “We must confront the neo-traditionalism that has taken hold as of late”.
An interesting word here is neo-traditionalism: just as modern artists tried to create social dissonance, “post-black” artists tried to manifest dissonance with a specific form of status-quo “neo-traditionalism” in postmodernism.
In “Blue Black,” blue and black color becomes a powerfully dissonant force that aims to swallow every preconception. It is pure negativity. Ligon had written about this previously in regards to Chris Ofili’s exhibition at the New Museum, specifically that Ofili has a feeling for a color that subsumes and “overwhelms” all concepts; concepts that in 2017 seemed more “neo-traditionalist” and not less. That identity culture has a fixation with a color that consumes identity is also self-negating. This aesthetic challenge to rationalization was evident in Ligon’s practice as early as the 90s with his repetitive, self-negating texts:
Ligon used plastic stencils to render text on canvases, paper, or directly on walls (or doors). These paintings incorporate various texts on “race,” from James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston to Jean Genet and Richard Pryor. When not playing in the graphics of black and white, the paintings engage the haptic chromatic effects of color-field painting, as in works by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Ligon's word paintings embody a dialectic of two formal impulses: reducing the appropriated texts to graphical artifacts, thus dissolving language; and, conversely, enacting an ambiguous constitution of identity through discourse and rhetoric. The stenciled words, serially repeated, function to trace both the physical, bodily act of marking that identifies the labor of the artist, and the externally constructed, given social-material delineations of that marking and of that identity. Through layered accretion, the avalanche of characters, and the devolution of the repeated act, the muddying of the mark, the constitutive delimitations are dissolved as such, leaving only the mark of marking, having seemingly collapsed in upon itself. The stenciled language, being constitutive, is impossible to opt out of. One is confronted in these works with physical monuments to the endlessly reiterated act, a Sisyphean task mimicking the whole relentless social project of producing "race." In this abject mimesis, the reifying mark ad nauseam of the self-reproducing rhetoric of race. [1]
Ad Nauseum in 1996 ... how much more so today! Even Carrie Mae Weems, the darling of white guilt neoliberal identity politicians has stated that “Black experience is not really the main point; rather, complex, dimensional, human experience and social inclusion ... is the real point.” She has also stated that “It’s hard to create new narratives when you’re trapped by what has been”. That is, her work isn’t about affirming “black identity” but rather represents a (stifled) attempt to move beyond it through recognition. “What has been” can’t now merely be considered American anti-black racism (that much is a given), but the specific neoliberal politics of anti-racism that has fostered an insufficient discourse that reaffirms racial stereotypes. Identity politics has become a sales spiel for the culture industry; the concept of “racism” has been devalued through overuse, as if it were written repeatedly. Just as the 2016 election was not about race, but jobs, art that deals with identity is not so much about race as it is an attempt to be marketable in the art world. Though, not necessarily a very good attempt.
Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (policeman), 2015. The Museum of Modern Art. Ocula Magazine.
Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against A Sharp White Background), 1992. MCA Chicago.
In his book, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Darby English also introduced the paradox.
It is an unfortunate fact that in this country, black artists’ work seldom serves as the basis of rigorous, object-based debate. Instead, it is almost uniformly generalized, endlessly summoned to prove its representativeness (or defend its lack of same) and contracted to show-and-tell on behalf of an abstract and unchanging “culture of origin”. For all this, the art gains little purchase on the larger social, cultural, historical, and aesthetic formations to which it nevertheless directs itself with increasing urgency. And in the long term, it runs the risk of moving beyond serious thought and debate. Viewed this way, the given and necessary character of black art — as a framework for understanding what black artists do — emerges as a problem in itself. … black art is a myth desperately in need of a critical mythology. [2]
This captures identity politics at its most ambitious, namely that ‘blackness’ might be our best insight into the fundamental alienation of modern society because there are specific, yet highly abstract projections to push against. In this sense, it has something in common with the line of thought now particular to the anti-Deutsch movement: it presumes that the moving contradictions of capital are consolidated into a particular social group or social character. But that is also why it is problematic: the anti-Deutsch ideology overdetermines the discourse around anti-semitism in an epoch in which the major contradictions are more dynamic and less identifiable. Ligon himself had waged such a critique against overdetermined readings of Steve McQueen’s video work by critics who could only see issues of race when race was probably the least interesting aspect of the work. (One is reminded of Benjamin noting that Proust’s great contribution to literature was his examination of snobbery, not time!) It is a matter of the truth content of the work, and identity politics in its current form being an obstacle to that. The line of thinking put forth by Ligon, English et al proposes an indirect form of social critique.
Exhibition view of “Blue Black,” with Simone Leigh’s Dunham, 2017. Pulitzer Arts Foundation.
However, the Post-Black generation’s project to move beyond postmodernism reintroduces the incomplete project of modernity, having nowhere else to turn. When taken seriously as “rigorously object-based”, it’s not off the hook, but rather the only thing on it! Post-black art is unavoidably part of, and emblematic of a neo-modern culture, taking root in the Obama years of sophisticated, powerless art — petit-bourgeois art-for-art’s sake reupholstered for the 21st century. Giorgio Morandi for all. The attempt to make late capitalism elegant in the Obama years has the effect of making the concept of elegance look trashy. Consider Ligon’s statement that “Stillness and interiority can function as a critical stance, a kind of resistance.” The idea of “interiority” appears to return to the tradition of Hölderlin and German Romanticism, (if not back to the tradition of the monks). And this is why the post-black generation is so symptomatic of a more fundamentally modern emptiness or asceticism: it returns to a historical moment wherein aesthetics struggles and fails to become political. It ultimately finds a half-constructed aesthetic ideology. While the politicization of aesthetics has long been an incomplete project, (one worth continuing) culture in the neo-modern era usually ends up idealizing aesthetics as a reaction to the normalized anti-aesthetic. In turn, critical art becomes a formalized distortion.
In terms of politicizing aesthetics, most 'progressives' will attempt to continue doing more of what hasn't worked within identity politics. Identity politics are truly archaic, and have long served as a mere means to reproduce the culture industry, a culture industry that is less and less appealing to those involved. There is a fight to hang on to the ideology, in what Laurie Rojas identified as the “doubling down” of identity in the wake of Democratic Party failure. More of the same. It isn’t working. We now see on one side is the “weaponization” of culture against the projected racism of Trumpism, but also the weaponization of culture against culture itself, paradoxically by none other than artists who pretend to carry the torch of culture. The torch of aesthetic experience turned inward. Within this culture war (that only differs in how much more boring it is today) the radical critique of identity politics from within will be rendered more invisible, not less. Early on, Thelma Golden and Ligon tried to get ahead of the reproduction of meaningless multiculturalism, a moment from which we’ve regressed, not progressed.
You know, when I have looked at many of the ways in which culturally specific exhibitions are organized I always think of a megaphone. That’s the image in my head, and it always seems that these projects start from the wide end of it. So basically, all of these shows have a title and then a colon and it will say African American Women Artists: Finding their Truth, so that there really is no justifying principle to put people together other than race or gender. And I thought with Black Male, what if I could go on the other end of that megaphone, the narrow end, and I come up with a subject that way. … it was just a response to what I imagined was going to continue — that post-multicultural moment when there was just so much desire to keep holding hands around the table and sing “Kum Ba Ya”, and look-at-all-of-us-colored-people-together, and here-we-are, we’re black, we’re strong, I just felt like that was going to keep going indefinitely and I thought let me just get ahead of that.
In other words, particularity is an opportunity to expand upon, not reduce to. And it expands into a more fundamental feeling of bourgeois alienation. Golden had elsewhere touched upon the ambivalent situation in which the discourse of race in contemporary art pitted artists against that context in which they were reared. But this was framed as something to get beyond through actual artistic production that is self-critical. It is reminiscent of what Benjamin described regarding the newspaper in the 1920s: “In a word, the literarization of living conditions becomes a way of surmounting otherwise insoluble antinomies, and the place where the word is most debased — that is to say, the newspaper — becomes the very place where a rescue operation can be mounted.”
Glenn Ligon, Self portrait exaggerating my black features / Self-portrait exaggerating my white features, 1998. Duke
In this regard, Ligon and the post-black generation have more in common with Kafka’s alienation than BLM. “A more radical form of disidentification was Sun Ra’s retreat from the category of ‘human’. And better to be an alien than unemployed.” The “human”, as in Hegel, is a category, not a given. And in an essay titled “Untitled,” Ligon irreverently states an appreciation of Warhol as a kind of hunger artist who would rather starve than be complicit with culture in its current form:
I first saw Andy Warhol’s Shadow paintings at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in 1979. I remember thinking that it was an awfully big room in which to show paintings of nothing. Although I never met Andy Warhol, I saw him once on the street in SoHo. He was thin, ghostly, and almost transparent. To make a career out of being fascinated with one’s own disappearance is quite a feat. I realized that if disappearance could be a subject matter, I could be an artist. [3]
Generally speaking, Ligon’s aesthetic is a dialectic of visibility/invisibility. Hegel noted that the essence must appear. But in Ligon’s school of thought, the essence appears as something invisible, a blind spot. Ligons’s appropriation of James Baldwin’s essay (“Stranger in the Village”) — about the alienation of a black man in Switzerland — is in this historical moment not merely about being a black artist in a white artist’s world, but about being an outsider within a white-guilt neoliberal culture industry. Ligon’s interest in James Baldwin is not so much a concern about social rights for black Americans (that much is assumed), but gets at something more fundamentally alienating: Baldwin is an expression of a deep and confused ambivalence, being forced to address things he’d rather not have to, not having the language to do it, etc. The text that Ligon refers to is Baldwin’s more subjective, conflicted writing, not his writing for The Nation, etc. Deepness — the theme of a projected type of ‘people’ — is tantamount to ambivalence about being part of the incomplete project of humanity more generally: being complicit with, and even central to something one does not understand. But ambivalence is in turn the foundation upon which a depth of self-conscious bourgeois individuality might take root. Similarly this is the case with Ligon’s appreciation of Mondrian’s Composition in Blue and White, a grid composed of white, blue, and black. The elision of ‘black’ from the title implies that the most essential aspects of a given organization may also be the most invisible. It concerns black in its particularity, but points beyond it in offering a thought experiment on how to perceive what Adorno once termed the ‘blind spots’ of social vision; those things that fall outside of the rectilinear concept of history.
Likewise, this self-negation of black is the case with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, an acute product of the post-black generation. Her preferred medium is painting, and she has more in common with Manet than BLM. She has stated that in her attempt to merely paint ‘black’ skin, a whole gamut of colors ranging from green to orange are necessary. In order to paint black, black has to go outside itself, so to speak. This is very obvious, literally elementary — even in public elementary schools there is a fundamental teaching of painting that stresses any one color being comprised of every other color. The goal is to recover the elementary, the ground zero, clearing away superfluous social ideology of “values”.
Until dark matter can turn into a kind of anti-matter, it is merely the reproduction of dark prehistory, history in the shadows. //
Piet Mondrian, Vertical Composition with Blue and White, 1936. Wikiart.
[1] Chris Cutrone. “‘A Feast of Scraps’ Glenn Ligon’s Art, Photography and the Social History of Blackness in America.” Accessed June 29, 2020.
[2] Darby English. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007.
[3] Artists on Andy Warhol. Edited by Katherine Atkins and Kelly Kivland. Contributions by Robert Buck, Glenn Ligon, Jorge Pardo, Kara Walker, and James Welling. Dia Art Foundation, 2018.