Glenn Ligon, Love and Theft

Gallery walking in Memphis can be a depressing experience, filled with cynical thoughts of paintings as suburban sprawl wallpaper: unchallenging landscapes, fake rachenburg, and decorative Demask floral pattern. However, one gallery lives up to its (otherwise) presumptuous title, the Powerhouse located in the South Main district downtown.

In Glenn Ligon’s Love and Theft, I feel privileged to be viewing such an important work by this artist, but also because of the location in Memphis it feels like it existing in the historical context. On the first floor is an installation of black and white wallpaper and gold canvases containing Richard Pryor jokes. On a conceptual level, the idea is interesting because Pryor’s Black Dick Jokes are in the form of long, enthusiastic stories, and here we are reading a few fetish cheap-spay-can-gold rebirths. In Kobena Mercer’s essay, Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary, she features Ligon’s recreation (1988) of the I AM MAN protest sign of the late sixties. However some of her questions that are present in this essay when she is reacting to Jean Genet’s Black panther speech seem to resonate with my own question with that were raised with the exhibition:

“Under what conditions does eroticism mingle with political solidarity? When does it produce an effect of empowerment? And when does it produce an effect of disempowerment? When does identification imply objectification, and when does it imply equality? I am intrigued by the ambivalent but quite happy coexistence of the fetishized big black dick beneath the satin trousers and the ethical equivalence in the struggle for post colonial subjectivity… The death of the author doesn’t necessarily mean mourning and melancholia, but, rather, mobilizing a commitment to counter-memory.”

Kobena Mercer
Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary
Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America


When I walked downstairs I saw a flickering neon AMERICA confronting the room about twelve feet from the floor of the industrial building. Outside of the window, our red white and blue is waving outside, self-doubting in the foreboding Memphis weather. Conveniently, and to my delight, I was experiencing this installation with a gentleman who helped install it. And, apparently, the fag was a happy accident, but if it wasn’t outside Ligon was going to bring a flag inside. Around the corner was a listening station of Martin Luther King and other auditory politically historical audio enhancements.

I don't think we can ever convulsively answer Mercer's questions, even a decade later. But the greatest thing about the show is that it made you question, and leaves you wanting to know more, to understand the greater complexity of race relations in Americas past. The history is long, and complex but this show is like the writing of Hemingway: we are only given the tip of the iceberg, the rest is under the water ready to be discussed, and discovered. But to continue the analogy, one wonders if the passage of time has a global warming effect on the "iceberg": is the message diluted because of our exposer, are we desensitized? And for the first time, I would like to announce: that the effect of global warming has no effect on the timeliness of race relations in America.