Glenn Ligon: ‘I Love the Idea of Troubled Beauty’

Terence Trouillot Can you tell me about your upcoming show, ‘All Over the Place’, which opens this September at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge?

Glenn Ligon The premise for the show came from the institution’s director, Luke Syson. The Fitzwilliam is a comprehensive museum, with a collection that ranges from Egyptian artefacts to 17th- and 18th-century Dutch still-life paintings, from impressionist works by Edgar Degas to contemporary art. It also has an extensive selection of 18th- and 19th-century European porcelain, much of which is British, but there are significant German, Dutch, Korean and Japanese examples, too.

Syson, who is also an Italian renaissance painting scholar and European decorative arts specialist, heard about the ceramics that I produced for a show at Rat Hole Gallery in Tokyo in 2019; they were inspired by daeho or moon jars – traditional white porcelain ceramic vases made in Korea during the Joseon Dynasty [1392–1910]. In collaboration with a Korean ceramicist living in Japan, I made my own moon jars in shades of charcoal black. It wasn’t simply a case of painting a white moon jar black; the process required using different clays and firing at different temperatures. It took us about three years of experimenting with materials and techniques before we succeeded.

Initially, the idea was to install these moon jars within the context of the Fitzwilliam’s permanent collection, much of which dates from the heyday of British pottery, when the influence of Japanese and Chinese ceramics was at its height. I thought it was interesting that, alongside importing genuine Chinese and Japanese porcelain to the West, the British also developed an entire industry around creating knock-off versions. If European manufacturers could imitate Eastern designs and make their porcelain look Chinese or Japanese, they could increase their profits. The Chinese and the Japanese, however, realized there was a Western market for their porcelain, so they started designing for European customers as well. Ultimately, a whole spectrum of ceramics was produced, from the highly sophisticated to the truly dreadful. I found this commercial and cultural exchange completely fascinating.

Besides the moon jars, the majority of my works in the show come from the De Ying Foundation; they are installed in dialogue with the museum’s permanent collection. There are also some new pieces, including drawings that I’ve made by doing rubbings on Kozo paper on top of one of my ‘Stranger’ paintings, which uses a James Baldwin text. The neon Waiting for the Barbarians [2021] will be installed on the facade of the museum; it features nine translations of the last two lines of Constantine P. Cavafy’s 1904 titular poem.

TT Will the moon jars be exhibited inside the vitrines alongside the Fitzwilliam’s porcelain collection?

GL No, they will be on tables without glazing, similar to their installation at Rat Hole Gallery. I wanted them to be encountered differently from the museum’s European and Chinese ceramics collections. In other galleries I will not be showing my own work but using the museum’s collection to explore issues around collecting practices, wealth extraction and colonial expansion. For example, in the galleries where they show 17th- and 18th-century Dutch still-life paintings, I have proposed a floor to ceiling salon-style installation of flower paintings, inspired in part by Teju Cole’s New York Times article ‘Seeing Beyond the Beauty of a Vermeer’ [2023]. In this essay, he notes how the 17th century Dutch painter’s vanitas works were not only reminders of the fleeting nature of life and beauty, but also statements – in their depiction of foreign silks, flowers and animals – of colonial wealth. ‘No longer,’ he writes, ‘is a Vermeer painting simply “foreign and alluring”. It is an artefact inescapably involved in the world’s messiness.’ I love that idea of troubled beauty. These are not just flower paintings; these are records of empire.

TT Can you tell me about the title of the exhibition?

GL The show is called ‘All Over the Place’ because, whenever I came up with an idea for one gallery, the museum team would keep asking me: ‘But what about the Spanish gallery? What about the print room?’

I love the idea of troubled beauty. These are not just flower paintings; these are records of empire. Glenn Ligon

TT Are you engaging with every room in the museum?

GL Not every room, because the museum is huge, but there are interventions in nine galleries. The early renaissance painting gallery is decorated with gold wallpaper that is almost a century old. While its colour has faded from the sunlight, a number of the paintings in the room have been hanging there for decades, so the wallpaper behind them has retained its vibrancy. I thought it was beautiful, and I wanted to highlight the faded wallpaper as part of my interventions. I asked the curator of that gallery if I could take down all the paintings on one of the bays and they agreed. In that bay, I’m going to put up a single painting from their collection which is not usually on display – Adoration of the Kings [c.1520] by an unknown artist – alongside a drawing from my ‘Negro Sunshine’ series [2004–ongoing]. This Adoration of the Kings depicts Balthazar as a Black man, which is interesting because Blackness in representations of the Magi in European paintings was ubiquitous for a minute and then, at a certain point, it disappeared. I thought one way to make that history very visible again is to take down everything else and just put up these two works.

TT You have a long history with printmaking. Can you speak a little bit about your engagement with the prints in the collection?

GL In the Fitzwilliam’s holdings, they have some amazing prints by Frank Auerbach that he made when he was a student. He did drypoint etchings with a nail, then printed them by rubbing the paper on the plate with a spoon because he didn’t have a printing press. They are all about the process of their making, which has a relationship to my Untitled rubbing drawings [2023–ongoing], which they will be displayed alongside.

There are also dozens of cancelled prints by Degas in the collection, although they are not very effectively cancelled because I think he had a sense that the plates would be printed posthumously, so he took pains not to disrupt the compositions. In addition to my own version of cancellation prints, I’m going to show a selection of illuminated manuscripts in tandem with works such as Condition Report [2000], where I also include marginalia around the border of the image.

TT The exhibition catalogue includes an interview with Nicholas Bell, the librarian at Trinity College Cambridge, in which you talk about the illegibility of the marginalia in these illuminated manuscripts, which appear almost as purely decorative borders. It made me think of your text-based work and this idea of legibility, or lack thereof, as second to the creative and physical act of drawing or writing.

GL Yes, the marginalia in the Complete Bible [c.1280–1300], for instance, is too small to read. It looks like an Islamic or Moorish decoration, but it is made up of words – totally illegible to me – in very elaborate patterns. As Nicholas pointed out, however, the readers of this text would have known what the text should be, so it didn’t have to be legible, it just had to be there.

TT Will you be writing didactics for the show?

GL Yes. For instance, I’m writing about how, in the mid-18th century, the Chinese made these vases that looked like British Wedgwood pottery. I thought it was so funny that the British were using Chinese motifs in their pottery and the Chinese were like: ‘We can do you too!’ The Fitzwilliam has two examples in their collection, so I thought, let’s pull them down off the high shelf they’re on and put them in a vitrine surrounded by these British versions of Chinese wares.

Writing is as hard as making artworks: puzzling over something, trying to figure it out. Glenn Ligon

TT Were you seeking these things out specifically or were these connections serendipitous discoveries made while mining the museum’s collection?

GL Nothing was really planned: that’s why the show has been so interesting to work on. I met with curators from various departments, gave them a rough outline of what I was interested in and they began showing me things. But a lot was serendipity. For instance, it was totally a happy coincidence that they had those prints by Degas and I’d made a series of cancelled prints myself. Asking the print curator if they collected cancelled prints was totally an afterthought, after hours of looking at other things, but the ask opened up a rich vein of inquiry into the collection.

TT Can you speak to this idea of artist as curator?

GL In 2017, I organized the exhibition ‘Blue Black’ at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St Louis. It took place just two years after the murder of Michael Brown, an innocent 18-year-old Black boy killed by police in nearby Ferguson. The show was also an homage to the discussions that I had with artists and activists living there, sitting around a conference-room table, letting me know what St. Louis was all about. Those exchanges were embodied in my exhibition design, where I hung a number of portraits depicting Black folks in the first gallery of the show, placing the viewer in the middle of the exchange of looks between these works. If I’m going to do a curatorial intervention, I need time to find something, to figure something out

I also did a show in 2015 called ‘Encounters and Collisions’ at Nottingham Contemporary, which toured to Tate Liverpool, although that was different again because it juxtaposed my work with works by some of my heroes. For instance, I’d never seen a show featuring both Willem de Kooning and Beauford Delaney – artists I deeply admire and who also knew each other – so I wanted to bring them together.

TT Your show earlier this year at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong included new text-based works from your ‘Stranger’ series [1996–ongoing], a decades-long rumination on James Baldwin’s essay ‘Stranger in the Village’ [1953]. There seems to be not only a strong commitment, but almost a deep erudition to a specific subject in your work, and I wonder whether you find parallels between your artmaking and your own curatorial, or even writing, practice.

GL I’ve worked with that Baldwin text for so long that I’ve realized it’s turned into something else: ‘Stranger in the Village’ has become the ground on which I make paintings. But, to answer your question: I used to think all of it was separate – the painting, the writing, the curating – but not any longer. For me, the writing is as hard as making artworks: puzzling over something, trying to figure something out. For example, I have some paintings that have been sitting in the studio for years. There’s something about them that I can’t figure out yet. So, I just keep puzzling through them. I guess that’s akin to the writing. I just keep puzzling through and, eventually, something will coalesce.

TT Your latest book, Distinguishing Piss from Rain, which was published this summer by Hauser & Wirth, is your first in many years. It collates more than 20 years of your writings on race, art and culture. What inspired it?

GL The book is an attempt to make available in one place key writings and interviews I have done. The last book of its kind, Yourself in the World, came out in 2011 in conjunction with my mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This volume updates that book with more recent texts. Writing is a way of thinking about other artists’ work and, even though it is hard work, it’s enormously rewarding. I keep telling my friends the next book is going to be an autobiography. I’m not sure why I feel I need to write one, except maybe a perverse take on the novelist Toni Morrison’s famous quote: ‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it’.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 245 with the headline ‘Conversation: Glenn Ligon and Terence Trouillot’

Glenn Ligon’s ‘Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place’ is on view at The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, from 20 September – 2 March

Glenn Ligon's ‘Distinguishing Piss from Rain’ is published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers

^{Main image: Glenn Ligon, Untitled #14 (detail), 2023, carbon and graphite on Kozo paper, 45.7 × 30.5 cm. Courtesy: © Glenn Ligon, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; photograph: Ronald Amstutz}