 Glenn ligon |
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As with the work of Chris Ofili and Hew Locke, humour, often in the form of black comedy, is integral to Glenn Ligon’s work. Notwithstanding trademark stencilled texts begun in the early 1990s and produced at intervals ever since, Ligon has experimented with a range of materials (such as coal dust) and processes from installations through to performance-based video pieces. He has worked with children and their story books, with family snapshots and also with some of the most radical texts from black literature—Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin are but two of his sources. One might say his deepest engagement is with the given text and the ‘ready-made’ image which he then re-contextualizes or re-makes to the extent that the original survives visually—either in fact or implicitly—but at the same time is endowed with extended powers. The original words (or images) are heightened in their mordancy or pathos. Sometimes crushed into near invisibility or blatantly disfigured, they are also given a new and resonant ‘texture’ for contemporary reading. |
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