Glenn Ligon @The Fitzwilliam Museum
20 Sept 2024 – 02 Mar 2025
ALL OVER THE PLACE.
Glenn Ligon, a giant of contemporary art, dealing primarily with issues around race through the use of text-based work. His messaging drawing on literary influences, whilst its constant repetition taking the form of an insistence. It’s undeniably powerful.
But I have a niggling doubt, a doubt that takes the form of a growing cynicism. I came away from the exhibition inspired, however the more I have thought about it (and I’ve thought about it a lot) the more cynical I have become and now it just can’t be ignored.
This review will therefore take a similar journey. It will start as surely Ligon and the Fitzwilliam intended, but towards the end I’ll allow the cynicism a voice too.
The Fitzwilliam is definitely attempting to shake off its dusty image. There was a time (and a not too distant one at that) when nothing really changed. You went in knowing exactly what you were going to see and experience. In fact you had a certain feeling that the visiting public were seen more as an inconvenience than anything else. They were the keepers of collections, collections which were startlingly unrepresentative and which beat a well trodden narrative by making a clear distinction between high art and native crafts. But that image is certainly changing. The Fitzwilliam is now exhibiting works by artists dealing with less conventional subject matter and is keen to explore new dynamics between their existing collections and the works of renowned artists. Glenn Ligon’s ‘All Over The place’ is just that. Billed as a ‘site response,’ Ligon was given the curatorial reins and allowed to rummage the Fitzwilliam’s extensive collection and then present his own work alongside and amongst it thereby forcing the viewer to engage with both in different ways. The title ‘All Over The Place’ really is just that. Ligon’s curatorial interventions aren’t restricted to a small side gallery but are spread throughout a large number of the main galleries.
Let’s start at with the entrance…
‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (2021)
‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (2021)
Gracing the magnificent columns of the museum’s portico, are nine varying English translations of the last two lines of Cavafy’s poem of the same name. The poem itself focusses on the decline of a city. Its inhabitants in a state of paralysis, worrying about the arrival of Barbarians, only to find that they never come and realising that in fact their arrival could perhaps have been a solution to their problems.
Clearly a poem highlighting our often irrational fears of the ‘other’, when in fact without the ‘other’, we cannot exist either. Ligon’s choice of placing this at the entrance to the museum is excellent. Not only I suspect, a dig at the historical gatekeeper of ‘art’ and ‘artefacts’ that the Fitzwilliam represents, i.e. what is your collection without us? But definitely a stark reminder of where we are in our society in how we view the ‘other’.
Little is more startling to see in a museum than its walls stripped bare. Ligon has removed all the existing Italian Renaissance paintings in the Upper Marlay gallery and hung just two pictures in their place. The gold wall covering faded in places to show the traces and ghosts of the prior hanging. It’s this trace of the past and its ghosts that are very much in play with the choice of the two works Ligon chooses to hang instead.
‘The Adoration of the Kings’ – Artist unknown
The Adoration of the Kings, by an unknown artist c.1520 represents the three kings on their arrival in Bethlehem. There are numerous versions of this scene in paintings and the central issue for Ligon is how blackness is represented by European artists at the time. One of the three kings, Balthazar (the one wearing a large white turban) is black. The skin tone is slightly darker than that of the other two kings, but less so than that of his attendant. How blackness is both acknowledged but also disguised and partially erased, is what Ligon addresses here with this choice.
‘Study for Negro Sunshine (Red) #2018.2’ (2018)
Placed diagonally up from the Adoration of the Kings, near the ceiling in fact, is one of Ligon’s own pieces ‘Study for Negro Sunshine (Red)’. Taken from a novella by Gertrude Stein in which she writes ‘Rose laughed when she was happy but she had not the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine. Rose was never joyous with the earth-born, boundless joy of negroes. Hers was just ordinary, any sort of woman laughter’ The racial stereotyping of the black woman is what struck Ligon. The repetition is his tool for driving the point home.
The similarities, despite being 500 yrs apart, are pertinent. Blackness and how it is perceived and represented has been troubling for a long time. Ligon’s work, perhaps the star we now need to guide us, in addition to the three kings.
The flower’s gallery, was perhaps the most unexpected of the interventions in that none of Ligon’s works were actually present. A complete re-hang to resemble a salon-style display of opulence and beauty. The display of exotic flowers and foods quite overwhelming. Ligon doesn’t take the skill of the painters away from them. As Ligon points out ‘The flower paintings showcase the virtuosic skills of the artisans, yes, but they also represent the spoils of empire, artfully arranged’. Tremendous.
This is not to say that all the interventions were, in my opinion, successful.
‘Study for Negro Sunshine (Red) #2018.#’
‘Study for Negro Sunshine (Red) #2018.#’
Randomly breaking up the formal structure of the existing galleries by interspersing classical paintings arranged ‘just so’ with his messy, sticky ‘Study for Negro Sunshine (Red)’ texts certainly draws attention to them. They disrupt the careful alignment of the permanent displays. But does it achieve anything else other than disruption? Maybe that’s the intention to simply disrupt the established order. But compared with some of the other interventions, this lacked a bit of punch.
Korean Moon Jar
‘Untitled’ - Glenn Ligon (2019)
Interested in the influences that shaped the development in ceramics in the East and West, Ligon focusses on the white Korean Moon Jar. Working with a Korean ceramicist working in Japan, Ligon develops his response; black moon jars. There is a dialogue to be had in the process of the sharing of ideas and the development of new techniques and even what it means to be black, but black moon jars instead of white ones seemed a little tame.
The interventions, were at times inspiring and poignant whilst others left me unmoved.
There was however a gallery solely of Ligon’s work and, faced only with the intensity of his own work, without distractions, this was perhaps the most impactful.
Installation view
Untitled (I Feel Most Coloured When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) - Glenn Ligon (1990)
Text as art has the effect of pulling you in. There is a built in response to seeing text and that is to try and read it. Ligon plays with intelligibility and illegibility. Our desire to read and decipher what is written increasingly thwarted as the text becomes increasingly unintelligible. An allegory perhaps to society’s inability to understand the black experience? But there is humour too; Ligon’s depiction of a Ricard Prior ‘joke’, raises a smile whilst managing to highlight some of the complexities and contradictions of navigating this field.
The cynicism started to creep in some days later.
Last year The Fitzwilliam held the exhibition ‘Black Atlantic’ which displayed and highlighted how much of the collection was built up and benefited from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Artists such as Barbara Walker were invited to respond to some of these works. The responses were excellent. The Royal Academy held ‘Entangled Pasts’ which its curators explicitly stated was to ‘explore how deeply the effects of Colonialism have permeated the RA and its past’. Currently Hew Locke’s exposé on institutional theft is at the British Museum, his own work, a response, sitting alongside selected pieces from the Museum’s collection.
Back in 1992, Fred Wilson curated an exhibition titled ‘Mining the Museum’ in which he responded to the collection at the Maryland Centre for History and Culture. He took items from the collection and used them to draw attention to the local histories of blacks and native Americans. It was a landmark exhibition, which drew both praise and criticism, for what it highlighted was deeply unsettling; museums and their collections were up to their necks in the fruits of the slave trade. But the point was that the genie was now out of the bottle, there was no going back, museums, rightly, had to address their past.
What has happened, according to Kwon in her excellent essay ‘One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity’, is the commodification of the artist, not in a Warhol sense, but, in the way they have become providers of ‘critical artistic services’. The artist is employed to engage with a collection in the same way that they have engaged with other collections and by taking on this ‘administration of aesthetics’ they give legitimacy to those institutions. The institutions can then claim that they are responding to their past. The artist as threat has been seduced and pacified and institutions can continue to hold on to and exhibit their collections.
Mining the Museum occurred 32 years ago. Yes awareness of the histories of museum’s collections has improved, but can we honestly say that much else has changed?
The Fitzwilliam Museum is clearly uncomfortable about its past and about how it acquired elements of its collection, Ligon’s All Over the Place is their attempt at convincing the viewer that they are doing something about it and because Ligon has curated it, then they really mean it. Don’t they?