To understand Glenn Ligon’s work, it is best to understand Arjun Appadurai’s views of history, how people connect, and what ties people together. In, “Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization”, the author Arjun Appadurai describes five distinct ways to connect people using the phrase, “scapes”; ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes.1 These terms loosely explain how people will relate to each other and group together. In these means, people create imaginary maps, or worlds; as the world grows, we are able to relate and connect with people on a larger scale based on these ideas. Each scape is the “lay of the land” so to speak, they shift and change, but they are descriptions of movement primarily. “Ideoscapes” are the mapping of opinions or beliefs, often political or religious in nature. “Mediascapes” are the movement of media around the world and how it allows distant cultures to view each other. “Ethnoscapes,” describes the population as areas, where they are from how people move. These three scapes, “Mediascapes”, “Ideoscapes”, and “Ethnoscapes”, are the ones that Glenn Ligon is most in conversation with.
Throughout the book, Appadurai discusses “Global Culture Flow”, and imagined worlds. What are these worlds and how do they apply to content and people that are in Appadurai’s so-called imagined worlds? Appadurai asks why things happen where and when they do, but he answers his own questions with this concept of imaginary worlds. In short, these so-called imaginary worlds are how people connect and share ideas. Now, to speak in a less abstract way, “technoscapes”, or the levels and growth of access to technology has made the sharing of ideas faster and simpler than ever. Appadurai likes to use the word Isomorphism, as a concise way of explaining how people across the globe group themselves into similar “scapes”. Meaning that new ways of identity (and understanding identity) and mapping people in imaginary worlds are how history is forming. In this idea, history is not a thing that we can describe as having happened, because identity on an individual to a global scale is evolving so rapidly now. How we group and order people is entirely contextually dependent. This is because the “scapes” flow into each other, and are not predetermined. People cannot be grouped systematically; people are themselves creating an interflowing system of connection.
In, “Untitled (I am a Man)”, 1988, Ligon makes a literal recreation of a protest sign. The original sign was made famous in Ernest Withers' 1968 photographs of sanitation workers in Memphis. What was so significant about that sign to be put onto a canvas? Arjun refers to work of reproduction, “Reproduction of culture and image making is not eased by the effects of mechanical art”, Arjun states, “The pains of cultural reproduction, are not eased. As the shapes of cultures grow less bounded and tacit, more fluid and politicized, the work of cultural reproduction becomes a daily hazard”.1 Ligon is making a direct connection to the past, and to people who understand the historical content he is referencing. The imagery reproduced from a civil rights protest sign is so historically and currently relevant, is in itself a declaration of humanity. As a black and gay artist (having his own dealings with sexuality, racism and prejudice), this declaration seems to be restated directly by Ligon. However, that is dependant on the viewer, and how they are able to interact with those words on that canvas. It is not in the hands of the artist for a viewer to come prepared with the historical identity to be able to process and understand the depth of a piece of art. So how is Glenn Ligon in communication with Arjun Appadurai’s theory of how history is shaping itself?
Glenn Ligon is positioning a viewer in the present, in a world where black oppression still exists, and isn’t just a splotch on history that can be looked at in museums. Ligon makes connections based on historically-loaded imagery; confronting his viewers by taking images from the past and using ideas and phrases from the present to connect the two. Ligon seems to be in a discussion with forms of media in history, and connecting to this lineage of oppression. While today’s oppression might not look the same visually, and is not as restrictive or heinous as slavery, its existence is important to highlight. This is a form of mapping people through similar media and scapes. In the piece “Glenn Ligon and Other Runaway Subjects”, Huey Copeland discusses “the realities of black oppression and the myths of white freedom” in Ligon’s work as well as marginalized subject positions. In “Untitled(I am a Man)”, the spacing of the lines are intentionally off, placement of the words differ from the protester’s signs; it is clear that every detail of the reproduction of the image being referenced is clearly important to Ligon. He is talking to a community and collective of ethnoscapes, of people who can relate to the imagery (mediascape) and reference of the original text; there is a historical identity that is communicating with the viewer.
How might a viewer feel when reading the words, the confrontational “I AM A MAN”? One must wonder if Ligon is speaking about himself, to the viewer directly, or if a viewer might read those words on the canvas as their own. This confrontation through media viewed in a gallery is a kind of mapping in Appadurai’s view. It is a grouping of people who are open to being shown their place in the world, in “history” as it is evolving. One might argue that someone still having to declare their humanity is an example of how deeply the ethnosphere in America is still divided by prejudice, racism, and oppression. Ligon is connecting to aspects of history in his works of reproduction, by referencing a specific moment in time, a moment of danger. Ligon has the ability to keep something’s historical significance in the past, reproduce it presently, and give it a second life so that people may connect to it through their personal mediascapes. Arguably, his work is a direct reflection of how ideas flow through “scapes” to connect people, across space and time.
Why might Glenn Ligon seek to show a viewer something about their place in the world? Applying Appadurai’s theories to Ligon’s communication helps us understand who he is communicating with, how and even possibly why. With someone at an art gallery, with the art world as a whole; an art world where a black man may still need to declare his own humanity to be recognized not as a “Black Artist”, but as an artist. Through linking the past to the present through his references in his work, choices of historically loaded subject matter, and political context; Ligon is looking at the world and recognizing his connections to people across “history”. He is connecting to people in the past by recreating their imagery to speak to people in the present (and especially the 1990’s art scene). Through Ligon’s literal recreation of imagery and reproduction of a literal object that existed 20 years before, we recognize the use of multiple scapes at play. Appadurai would consider this to be an overlapping of “mediascape”, “ideoscape” and “technoscape”; a connecting of people in ways that would not be previously possible in the past, and especially the ability to understand how Ligon can have a conversation with “history” and with the present through art.
“I am A Man” supports Arjun Appadurai’s theory of imagined worlds and perspective of how history is being shaped. Appadurai sees history as fluid; constantly referencing, shaping itself and creating new histories from the old. Ligon recreates images of “historical” prejudice and oppression and reminds viewers of that the relevance of this content hasn’t gone away. Glenn Ligon’s work helps shape today’s understanding of modern oppression and its direct correlation to the subjugation of people of color today. History is not linear, it is constantly being copied, re-lived, rewritten, and repurposed.
Where one theorist’s limitations are reached, another might bridge certain gaps. Walter Benjamin’s “Illuminations” lend some understanding that go beyond Appadurai’s, and through time. So, what happens when ideas move through time? Why does Ligon choose to recreate imagery? Something about the world that Glenn Ligon is living in, makes him see the relevance of “I Am a Man”; there is a flash of danger, or “the tiger’s leap”. What is the importance of making this connection? Something about the world Ligon is living in is in contest, something that makes him find a connection to the civil rights movements of the past, and specifically the Sanitation workers protest of 1968.
In a broad way, Appadurai’s mapping could describe a way to connect them, but Benjamin recognizes why Ligon might have this “moment of danger”. Ligon seems to recognize that we must look back at the unending garbage pile of history to progress. Progress merely for the sake of progress, and without questioning “how” we have arrived in the present is useless. The so-called moment of danger is being dealt with by Ligon through the act of literal recreation. There is a choice to confront the past, a gesture toward repair from Ligon when he recognizes that moment from 1968, in 1988. Ligon is actively trying to move forward with an eye on the past, much like Klee’s “Angelus Novus”.4 In the Klee painting Benjamin references, it is our goal to deal with the future in the name of the past; we must question how we look at and digest the past. Something about the past must be fixed, or attempted to be fixed, to bring forth a future that isn’t progress for its own sake.
“There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism”.3 These words from Benjamin echo when looking at the work of Ligon, and especially in “Untitled (I Am a Man)”. Civilization is not formed without direct oppression, suffering, or exploitation of people. Ligon recognizes this in his own time and the sanitation workers protesting for better treatment, to be treated as humans. Calling to this moment in his own time is a desire of not letting things continue as they are.
While Appadurai recognizes the human ability to make constellations out of history, rather than reading it like a linear rosary bead, Benjamin actively questions the past’s role in shaping the present. Recognizing the active choice to make a grouping, to actively map people together is crucial to Benjamin’s understanding of history. Questioning how did we “get” here, with acknowledging that people purposefully made the choice to document and connect events in such a way. This is dialectical contemporaneity, and Ligon is producing dialectical knowledge; the understanding that something happening, to himself and in the world in 1988 caused him to connect with the 1968 photographs of the Memphis sanitation workers declaring their own humanity. What about Ligon’s world made him connect so directly to a specific moment in time? Through the analysis of “Untitled (I Am a Man)”, there is shown something about Ligon’s own experiences that made him connect to the sanitation workers from 20 years prior. Perhaps as a person of color, an artist, a gay man, and trying to exist in this world brought that desire to understand his own struggle better. Regardless of what motivated him, something about Ligon’s experiences resulted in the desire to declare his own humanity. Through Ligon’s carefully considered reconstruction of the sanitation workers protest sign, through the medium of paint, as an art exhibition, we see the moment of danger. Ligon takes the moment of their protest and moves it out of its own time and into 1988; choosing to ignore the linear progression of time to somehow fix or reconcile history, or fix the future. The flash of danger was one when Ligon recognized the moment as a connection between past and present struggles.
Within Glenn Ligon, there is a desire to change the future. With the careful questioning of the past and how we look at it presently, there are images of the past threatening to disappear, that themselves present as moments of danger. Ligon is an active student of history and re-witnessing the past, to reconcile and relive it for a better present. Ligon saw the importance, the danger of the sanitation workers protest signs, and the need to recognize them in his own present; and to prevent his own time from being homogenous, and empty. He prevents the moment he is in from being “like any other” by activating it, rupturing and creating an immediacy. Benjamin would see this moment of redemption as disrupting the usual homogeneity by calling forward a literal prior revolution through a protest.
Within Glenn Ligon, there is a desire to change the future. With the careful questioning of the past and how we look at it presently, there are images of the past threatening to disappear, that themselves present as moments of danger. Ligon is an active student of history and re-witnessing the past, to reconcile and relive it for a better present. Ligon saw the importance, the danger of the sanitation workers protest signs, and the need to recognize them in his own present; and to prevent his own time from being homogenous, and empty. He prevents the moment he is in from being “like any other” by activating it, rupturing and creating an immediacy. Benjamin would see this moment of redemption as disrupting the usual homogeneity by calling forward a literal prior revolution through a protest.
Ligon is in his own time a protestor and calling to name the struggles that are still being faced. In this he reshapes and maps himself with Appadurai’s scapes; “ideoscapes” and “mediascapes” are being made through time, connecting otherwise arbitrary or forgotten events purposefully. Ligon is creating a map, a constellation of his own design from his own experience in this recreation and reliving of history. In this examination of Ligon’s “Untitled (I Am a Man)”, Benjamin’s theses on history are echoed and supported in Appadurai’s views of history. Living with a sense of dialectical contemporaneity leads to a better understanding of the present and what it ought to be. Moments of danger from the past happening are now, waiting to be recognized, re-lived, and given new life.
Bibliography
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Copeland, Huey. Glenn Ligon and Other Runaway Subjects. University of California Press, 2011.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Suhrkramp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M., 1955.
"Angelus Novus." Angelus Novus by Paul Klee. Accessed May 09, 2019. http://www.paul-klee.org/angelus-novus/.
