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Lot Essay
Created as Barack Obama was poised to become the 44th president of the United States, Untitled (America) (2008) is one of Glenn Ligon’s most powerful and iconic neon works. Its seven letters, together spanning more than 3.5 metres across, spell out ‘AMERICA’. The neon tubing is faced with black paint, diverting its glow into a halo that emanates from behind: fixed to a white backing, the word appears to float above the floor. Over the course of an hour, its light fades out before brightening again. Alluding to both the optimism and ambivalence of its political moment, the work is something of a national portrait, presenting the idea of America as a fragile beacon of hope. As Ligon explained in 2008, ‘there is this sense that America, for all its dark deeds, is still this shining light’ (quoted in J. Moran, ‘Glenn Ligon’, Interview, July 2008, p. 84).
Ligon, who has been using language in his art since the 1990s, began working with neon in 2005. The idea started with a visit to a lighting fabricator, who, when Ligon asked if he made black neon, showed the artist a white tube with the front painted black. Ligon had been musing on the phrase ‘negro sunshine’—used in a 1909 novella by Gertrude Stein—and used this phrase in his first neon work, Warm Broad Glow (2005), attracted by the paradoxical image of darkness and light. Other works ensued using various other texts, in different sizes and light-dark combinations. Their careful modulation of opacity, repression and visibility plays out across Ligon’s practice as a whole. The neon works have an epigrammatic clarity, however, that sets them apart from the more abstracted approach to language seen in his painterly practice, where words often fall apart or become unreadable.
2008 was a pivotal year for America. Obama, officially elected in November, was about to become the country’s first black president. At the same time, American society was being rocked by a severe financial crisis, and the nation was engaged in seemingly intractable conflicts in the Middle East. Ligon explained that the present work was partly inspired by a line from Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859): ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ America could elect Obama while also betraying its ideals at home and abroad. ‘Yes, that’s where America is’, he said. ‘… Those things are going on at the same time. Of course, because the piece is a black covering over white neon, it gets read as black America/white America, and those kind of binaries, which is a part of it. I’m not denying that. But I think that maybe if the piece has a kind of richness, it is because of the ambiguity’ (quoted in J. Moran, op. cit.).
Ligon made a number of different ‘America’ neons, versions of which are held in museum collections worldwide. In Untitled (2006, Tate, London), the neon tubing is almost entirely black, with light only emerging through chips in the paint. In Rückenfigur (2009; editions in Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston), each letter of ‘AMERICA’ is turned inwards to the wall, exposing its reverse and delicate wires. A later work, Untitled (America, America) (2015, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), features two flickering, steel-backed signs laid face-down on the floor. Ligon’s neons use a font known as American Typewriter. Where earlier examples trace the text in lower case with a single line of tubing, in the ‘America’ works the characters are capitalised and given a double contour, lending them a greater presence and openness.
Glowing on and off, the present work captures the fragility of America’s promise, seeming as likely to burn out forever as it is to stay alight. ‘In Ligon’s sign, America looms large and powerful, yet its letters are thin, open, and permeable’, writes Scott Rothkopf. ‘The work brings to mind a solar eclipse, in which the sun’s radiance silhouettes the lunar body passing before it. America is shrouded in blackness, yet this blackness is not merely a sign of race, and from within the darkness, an auspicious light spills forth’ (‘Glenn Ligon: AMERICA’, in Glenn Ligon: America, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2011, pp. 46-47).
Ligon, who has been using language in his art since the 1990s, began working with neon in 2005. The idea started with a visit to a lighting fabricator, who, when Ligon asked if he made black neon, showed the artist a white tube with the front painted black. Ligon had been musing on the phrase ‘negro sunshine’—used in a 1909 novella by Gertrude Stein—and used this phrase in his first neon work, Warm Broad Glow (2005), attracted by the paradoxical image of darkness and light. Other works ensued using various other texts, in different sizes and light-dark combinations. Their careful modulation of opacity, repression and visibility plays out across Ligon’s practice as a whole. The neon works have an epigrammatic clarity, however, that sets them apart from the more abstracted approach to language seen in his painterly practice, where words often fall apart or become unreadable.
2008 was a pivotal year for America. Obama, officially elected in November, was about to become the country’s first black president. At the same time, American society was being rocked by a severe financial crisis, and the nation was engaged in seemingly intractable conflicts in the Middle East. Ligon explained that the present work was partly inspired by a line from Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859): ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ America could elect Obama while also betraying its ideals at home and abroad. ‘Yes, that’s where America is’, he said. ‘… Those things are going on at the same time. Of course, because the piece is a black covering over white neon, it gets read as black America/white America, and those kind of binaries, which is a part of it. I’m not denying that. But I think that maybe if the piece has a kind of richness, it is because of the ambiguity’ (quoted in J. Moran, op. cit.).
Ligon made a number of different ‘America’ neons, versions of which are held in museum collections worldwide. In Untitled (2006, Tate, London), the neon tubing is almost entirely black, with light only emerging through chips in the paint. In Rückenfigur (2009; editions in Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston), each letter of ‘AMERICA’ is turned inwards to the wall, exposing its reverse and delicate wires. A later work, Untitled (America, America) (2015, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), features two flickering, steel-backed signs laid face-down on the floor. Ligon’s neons use a font known as American Typewriter. Where earlier examples trace the text in lower case with a single line of tubing, in the ‘America’ works the characters are capitalised and given a double contour, lending them a greater presence and openness.
Glowing on and off, the present work captures the fragility of America’s promise, seeming as likely to burn out forever as it is to stay alight. ‘In Ligon’s sign, America looms large and powerful, yet its letters are thin, open, and permeable’, writes Scott Rothkopf. ‘The work brings to mind a solar eclipse, in which the sun’s radiance silhouettes the lunar body passing before it. America is shrouded in blackness, yet this blackness is not merely a sign of race, and from within the darkness, an auspicious light spills forth’ (‘Glenn Ligon: AMERICA’, in Glenn Ligon: America, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2011, pp. 46-47).