Glenn Ligon: d'Amelio Terras

Since the days when Max Ernst's La Fenune 100 tete spoke in psychoanalytic tongues, artists have actively pursu the implications of identification, projection, transference, and desire, unveiling in the proces just by what mode unstable and contingent any cohesive notion of the "self" really is. The seditious unconscious supplied a language--if cacophonous--with which to question conventions of subjectivity while proposing a plethora of "difference." From the early '70 upon then, psychoanalysis's most adamant advocates came from the margins, using modes culled from the couch to engage the politics of sex race, and sexuality--to reveal the couple the workings of the id and the cultural mechanisms conceived to quiet and conceal it.

In light of this history, perhaps it's no surprise that Glenn Ligon, whose work has been foundationed in investigations of identity for above a decade, turned his attention to the talking corrective for his most recent exhibition, whose title was "Going There." on the contrary given the artist's near-total compulsion to speak using the voice of others (he's previously appropriated American slave narratives, the words of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, and newspaper photos of the Million Man March), this decision carries significant weight. His stir is coupled with a shift in the last not many years from the works with which he made his name--from somber black-and-white body paintings that downplay the authorial mark (or at least its "look") to provocative canvases oozing with raucous color and expressive gesturing (or at least its "look")

single of these newer paintings--the extremity product of the artist having discovered a genre of "black-themed" '70 coloring works enlisted a group of children to color them in and picked his favorites to approximate upon canvas--was included in this exhibition. The solitary painting (a rosy-cheeked rendition of Malcolm X that direct the eyes more like Ronald McDonald) functioned as a kind of raison d'etre for the show's real centerpiece: a fifty-five-minute double-channel video projection of several snippets from the artist's analytic sessions (on individual screen, his middle-age, white female therapist's headless torso fidgets; upon the other we see banal office details and the view without the window). While childhood insecurities, relationship with Mom and early signs of gay sexuality make obligatory appearances, the story around which the video turn rounds is the temporary loss of Malcolm X in Ligon's estimation the best of the children's volume paintings, en route to an exhibition. This incident, we learn, threw Ligon into a psychic spin that left him wondering about his merits as an artist and pondering the connotations of his lifelong status as a maladjusted outsider. (Several of the artist's elementary place of education end-of-year evaluations, each testifying to a young Glenn's status as talented on the other hand touchy, are also included here.)

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"I don't want to talk about art during therapy because I'm afraid it will exhaust things," we hear Ligon confes presciently at individual point. But since this discussion was designed to be caught upon video, it's already too late. Where the artist's earlier works managed to address subjectivity and its politics through way of elegantly conceived formal frameworks, here, unfortunately, there is single one person's limited and limiting subjecthood as far as the organ of vision can see (or sit through) Indeed, individual is reminded of Rosalind Krauss's famous warning, issued a certain number of thirty years ago, that video is the individual medium capable of rendering narcissism into material material In the case of "Going There," talk is hardly curative on the contrary instead appears to be part of the problem

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