|
Untitled (Two White/Two Black) is related to the black and white, text-based paintings which established Ligon's reputation. This 1992 set consists of four images filled with repetitive sequences of stenciled quotations. These are layered, smudged, and distorted to challenge received notions about, in Ligon's words, "race as a social category." Two prints in black ink on white paper incorporate sentences from the Harlem writer Zora Neale Hurston's 1928 essay "How It Feels To Be Colored Me." Ligon has stated that these "play with the notion of becoming 'colored,' and how that 'becoming' obscures meaning (obscures the text) and also creates this beautiful abstract thing." Two images printed in black on black paper quote the first lines of Ralph Ellison's 1952 book Invisible Man. Ligon cites Ellison's metaphor of invisibility, describing the position of the African American "as ghost, present and real but, because of the blindness of racism, remaining unseen."
|
|
The 1993 set Runaways uses lithography to evoke widely-circulated, nineteenth-century broadsheets which advertised for the capture of runaway slaves. In addition to incorporating schematic images resembling the stock wood engravings often plugged into these advertisements, Ligon employs their textual conventions of physical description in categorical terms of gender, height, complexion, and clothing. But here, a difference: Ligon asked his friends to describe him as if asked to do so by the police. Thus Ligon himself becomes a missing person, assuming the persona of a runaway. In this form of autobiography, the artist confronts the notion of generalized categories based on external appearance, of texts which shed no light on the individual's singularity. How can we grasp anyone's individuality, he seems to ask, from such descriptions as "medium complexion," "very articulate, seemingly well educated, does not look at you straight in the eye when talking to you," "has big hands and fingers," "moves smoothly, looks like he might have something on his mind."
|
