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Lot Essay
With its words stencilled in thick, tactile black oilstick across a shimmering silver ground, Large Silver In Show Business (2008) is a vivid work from Glenn Ligon’s Richard Pryor series. Part of the celebrated body of text paintings which the artist has been making since 1990—many of which quote the words of celebrated African-American authors—these works restage jokes told by the comedian Richard Pryor, whose caustic stand-up act dealt provocatively with racism, sexism and black masculinity. Ligon began the series in 1993 and stopped after just four works, perturbed by their rawness and power. He began making them again in 2004—joking that ‘I wasn’t done with Pryor or he wasn’t done with me’—employing an array of colours that recalled the striking Pop palette of Andy Warhol (quoted in T. Coburn, ‘Glenn Ligon: I Am…’, Art Review, no. 29, January-February 2009, p. 65). The present work’s Warholian silver evokes mirroring and the flicker of the silver screen, engaging the dynamics of projection, representation and desire that are central to Ligon’s practice.
In his black-and-white text paintings, Ligon has lifted phrases from writers such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, often repeating a charged sentence—‘I am an invisible man’, ‘I feel most coloured when I am thrown against a sharp white background’—until it becomes illegible in a pile-up of excess pigment. These works create complex dialogues between visibility and obscurity, abstraction and figuration and material physicality versus the disembodied text. They speak in a black first-person while picturing the way such voices have been silenced and suppressed. The Pryor works, observes Richard Meyer, create a different kind of dislocation. ‘In their original context, the jokes depend on Pryor’s vocal performance for their success, on the rhythms and intonations of his particular delivery. Resituated as text paintings, the jokes become dissociated from Pryor’s voice and linked instead to the viewer’s … Ligon forces us to consider the vehemence of their stereotypes, the rage barely veiled beneath their humour, and the power of their obscenity in the face of a dominant (white) culture that simultaneously desires and dehumanises black manhood’ (‘Borrowed Voices: Glenn Ligon and the Force of Language’, in Glenn Ligon: Unbecoming, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1998, p. 19).
In making the works, Ligon himself felt Pryor’s words with a particular intensity. ‘They felt very raw to me’, he said: ‘… it is one thing to play James Baldwin and another thing to play Richard Pryor … Pryor’s jokes are quite scatological and racially charged so in order to use those texts I had to inhabit them in a way that was frightening but also was the very power of those texts to me’ (in conversation with S. Andrews, in Glenn Ligon: Some Changes, exh. cat., The Power Plant, Toronto, 2005, p. 177). The paintings’ formal qualities heighten their visceral sense of address. Some use shrill, high-keyed colour contrasts that echo the shocking impact of the jokes. In a number of gold-ground examples, as with the stately silver of the present work, the smudged and spattered text registers as a stark intrusion.
Alongside other early heroes including Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns, Ligon’s approach to the canvas has long been inspired by Andy Warhol. He sees Warhol’s semi-mechanical silkscreens of car crashes, movie stars and shadows as engaging—no less sensually than de Kooning’s oil paint—with the presences, absences and traces of the body. ‘Warhol understands that the depiction of flesh is one of painting’s jobs as well, although he goes about it by using photographic means and letting our investments in the bodies depicted do the work’ (in conversation with B. Kim, in Glenn Ligon: Unbecoming, op. cit., p. 52). Ligon seeks a similar response by employing language as a material force. The Pryor works, with their lewd bodily humour and their translation from spoken word to stencilled text, offered new ways for him to explore the painting as a site of embodiment, voice and spectacle.
In 2015 Ligon returned to Pryor once again. He created a video work from a recording of the iconic 1982 concert movie Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, which is the source of the joke in the present painting. Ligon silenced the recording and fragmented the image across seven screens, each tracking different parts of the comedian’s body, as well as his moving shadow. The work appeared at once to objectify, fetishise and also celebrate aspects of Pryor’s physical performance, creating a nuanced and deliberately incomplete portrait of a man who complicated and expanded notions of blackness in his own time. ‘The culture has definitely caught up to Pryor’, Ligon reflected in 2005. ‘…thinking about it historically, he was quite brave. Also, I discovered Pryor in my mid-adolescence so Pryor became a voice for that period of my life. A way of expressing things that I felt too timid to express’ (in conversation with S. Andrews, in Glenn Ligon: Some Changes, op. cit., p. 177).
In his black-and-white text paintings, Ligon has lifted phrases from writers such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, often repeating a charged sentence—‘I am an invisible man’, ‘I feel most coloured when I am thrown against a sharp white background’—until it becomes illegible in a pile-up of excess pigment. These works create complex dialogues between visibility and obscurity, abstraction and figuration and material physicality versus the disembodied text. They speak in a black first-person while picturing the way such voices have been silenced and suppressed. The Pryor works, observes Richard Meyer, create a different kind of dislocation. ‘In their original context, the jokes depend on Pryor’s vocal performance for their success, on the rhythms and intonations of his particular delivery. Resituated as text paintings, the jokes become dissociated from Pryor’s voice and linked instead to the viewer’s … Ligon forces us to consider the vehemence of their stereotypes, the rage barely veiled beneath their humour, and the power of their obscenity in the face of a dominant (white) culture that simultaneously desires and dehumanises black manhood’ (‘Borrowed Voices: Glenn Ligon and the Force of Language’, in Glenn Ligon: Unbecoming, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1998, p. 19).
In making the works, Ligon himself felt Pryor’s words with a particular intensity. ‘They felt very raw to me’, he said: ‘… it is one thing to play James Baldwin and another thing to play Richard Pryor … Pryor’s jokes are quite scatological and racially charged so in order to use those texts I had to inhabit them in a way that was frightening but also was the very power of those texts to me’ (in conversation with S. Andrews, in Glenn Ligon: Some Changes, exh. cat., The Power Plant, Toronto, 2005, p. 177). The paintings’ formal qualities heighten their visceral sense of address. Some use shrill, high-keyed colour contrasts that echo the shocking impact of the jokes. In a number of gold-ground examples, as with the stately silver of the present work, the smudged and spattered text registers as a stark intrusion.
Alongside other early heroes including Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns, Ligon’s approach to the canvas has long been inspired by Andy Warhol. He sees Warhol’s semi-mechanical silkscreens of car crashes, movie stars and shadows as engaging—no less sensually than de Kooning’s oil paint—with the presences, absences and traces of the body. ‘Warhol understands that the depiction of flesh is one of painting’s jobs as well, although he goes about it by using photographic means and letting our investments in the bodies depicted do the work’ (in conversation with B. Kim, in Glenn Ligon: Unbecoming, op. cit., p. 52). Ligon seeks a similar response by employing language as a material force. The Pryor works, with their lewd bodily humour and their translation from spoken word to stencilled text, offered new ways for him to explore the painting as a site of embodiment, voice and spectacle.
In 2015 Ligon returned to Pryor once again. He created a video work from a recording of the iconic 1982 concert movie Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, which is the source of the joke in the present painting. Ligon silenced the recording and fragmented the image across seven screens, each tracking different parts of the comedian’s body, as well as his moving shadow. The work appeared at once to objectify, fetishise and also celebrate aspects of Pryor’s physical performance, creating a nuanced and deliberately incomplete portrait of a man who complicated and expanded notions of blackness in his own time. ‘The culture has definitely caught up to Pryor’, Ligon reflected in 2005. ‘…thinking about it historically, he was quite brave. Also, I discovered Pryor in my mid-adolescence so Pryor became a voice for that period of my life. A way of expressing things that I felt too timid to express’ (in conversation with S. Andrews, in Glenn Ligon: Some Changes, op. cit., p. 177).