Response to Ligon Interview

As I read Moran’s interview with Glenn Ligon, I wondered: Who’s doing the interviewing, Moran or Ligon?  I wondered this because Ligon (for the exception of the very end of his interview and during instances when he was asked specific questions pertaining to him personally) never brought the conversation back to himself or his artwork.  I think that this is an admirable characteristic of Ligon.  In Moran’s paralleling Ligon’s art to his career as a musician and teacher in jazz, Ligon gladly continues the conversation.  Art, in all of its many creative forms, is an endless conversation.  I think that this interview is a perfect representation of what a part of that endless conversation looks like.

In making this next comment, I’m admittedly doing some self-critiquing.  One part of the interview that really stuck out to me is when Ligon tells an anecdote about the guy who came up to him and said, “You know, when I look at your work, I don’t know what I’m looking at, but when I look at a de Kooning painting, I know what that is.”  Before learning about post-WWI Modernism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Conceptualism, etc., I honestly thought it was all a bunch of crap; I thought that these people effortlessly made their claim to fame by putting a few strange phrases together or splashing paint on a canvas without direction -- and got to leave with the title of “artist”.  In retrospect, I have a lot more respect for different expressions of physical art.  As Ligon says, “de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned,” along with other artists’ works.  My original concept of what art “is” (having learned this as a child, it consisted of symmetry, perspective, color coordination, etc.) certainly does not follow the criteria (whatever that is, anyway) of what art is in reality, which is a myriad of concepts expressed by different people at different times in different places.  As Ligon continues, he wants the same consideration of his work from audiences, that his work too is a language to be learned -- and worth learning.

I could go on about Ligon.  I think he’s a fabulous artist (after reading the interview I looked up some of his work), and he is one of many individuals who adds to the multitude of cultural makeup of US art.  Below is a piece by Ligon himself (1991).  I think it shuts the conventions of human civilization down in a split second of looking at it.  While we dwell so much on the arbitrary nature of color, national and ethnic identity, sociopolitical stance, and religious tradition; while we group together based on commonalities and segregate based on differences; while we come from fundamentally different backgrounds of culture and custom, we are all human beings.  Oh, you're different?  Well, I'm different too.  So that makes us the same in some way, too.  And that is black and white.  There is no gray area up for debate.

~ Gina Marroquin