Glenn Ligon: An Open Letter

This ain't no review. No poem, nor essay. It's chattar (sic).

Addressed to the particular but shared to and amongst a wider public. An open letter. A form often pertaining to some kinda social, some kinda political, rousing; “their reading doesn’t open up through metaphors,” as we are told, rather, potential meaning arrives when we sit with-and-in the failure of the social and political systems they address. That is, meaning (becoming-) arrives when certain doxa and values are suspended. Frozen in the air.

 

Shadowy debris, scattered over a flat ground. Or frozen in the air. The paintings included in Glenn Ligon’s exhibition, An Open Letter at Thomas Dane Gallery, break with his previous language-based paintings. Instead of pressing meaning through the content of essays, poems, or aphorisms, here the form of individual phoneme, the smallest sounds in a language - L 1 T P 9 0 I i M . V 8 J - becomes content. Becom(e mean)ing itself.

 

Dodging, ducking, in a candescent glow, moving through the space of display, two large fields of pulsating red acrylic cast the small glimmers of sound cascading down their surface into space. At first, the two appear as echoes; the common tone in their notes stretched like shadows. But, though Ligon’s print-paintings, echoes and shadows aren’t echoes and shadows; more like shared rhythms. Like the groundless jives of noise shared by players of jazz. Tuning in, each gutty note and notation falling from on the canvases, each thick high and washy low, warps and wains in its own way; just like players of jazz, each with their own eck, mmmm, ooo, and calamitous scream. Alone-together, here, atmospherics is surface. Content. 

 

Language fails to express so much. Ligon himself knows this and has “laboured to uncover the essence of language.” Entitled Debris Field, the series from which the works in An Open Letter are drawn shatter syntax in order to undermine the pervasiveness of value given to something that is merely a socially dictated agreement. Language. Out of the wreckage of this shattering, this rhythmic stammering, “the possibility of meaning, the elements of meaning” arise. 

 

Room two. Four works. Two pairs scat in double duet. Again, the same notes, different eck, mmmm, ooo, and calamitous scream. No dramatic glow, just grey-black patta on paper-white ground. Mu. Moments of enunciation in and as themselves, or figures within acts of speech. The joy arising from Ligon’s layers of silkscreen and oil stick lies in his debasement of systemic meanings. Meanings held too wilfully as fixed, syntactic truth. No fences, no borders, just flows between figures on and beyond some ground. Joy seen here is in free-flow, eye could say.

 

Eck, mmmm, ooo, and calamitous scream. This is not a review. No poem, nor essay. Its chattar (sic). My rousing sic chattar.

Toby Upson

Glenn Ligon, An Open Letter 
Thomas Dane Gallery, London 
until 2 April 2022