Glenn Ligon: Untitles (Bruise/Blues)

Stevenson presents Untitled (Bruise/Blues), 2014, a neon installation by Glenn Ligon. The work was presented at his exhibition Call and Response at the Camden Arts Centre in London in 2014, and a similar work was shown at the central exhibition of the 2015 Venice Biennale, All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor.

In Untitled (Bruise/Blues), suspended letters spell out the words ‘bruise’ and ‘blues’, blinking on and off. The work takes as its point of departure composer Steve Reich’s seminal 1966 recording Come Out, in which Reich loops the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six – a group of black youths beaten and wrongfully arrested during the 1964 Harlem Riot. In the recording Hamm is heard saying, ‘I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the blues blood come out to show them’ – a slip of his tongue replacing ‘bruise’ with ‘blues’. At the time the violent treatment the Harlem Six received at the hands of the police sparked widespread criticism from people like Malcolm X and James Baldwin, two figures whom Ligon continues to reference in his work.

About Ligon’s Camden Arts Centre exhibition, Megan Ratner writes in the book for Come Out, ‘Ligon’s paintings directly reference the Harlem Six, but were made 50 years later, in an America of escalating inequality at every level. Coming out means acknowledging national truths too.’

Text-based work has been at the centre of Ligon’s oeuvre as a means to explore sexuality, identity and history. In the past he has used fragments from the pages of writers such as Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Gertrude Stein to create paintings, prints and neon sculptures. Ligon says about his use of text:

This is the third time Stevenson has shown Ligon’s work in South Africa. In 2010, on the eve of the World Cup, Stevenson presented a solo exhibition in its Cape Town gallery consisting of a neon text work, the 2008 video Death of Tom and several text paintings, including one based on Richard Pryor’s ‘I went to Africa …’ joke. In 2012 three drawings by Ligon were included in What we talk about when we talk about love, an exhibition curated by Federica Angelucci about the complexity of love in all its forms. For Stevenson it is a particular privilege to build on this sustained engagement with the current project.

The history that informs Untitled (Bruise/Blues) resonates strongly with recent cases of police brutality in the United States and South Africa. The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner sparked widespread protests and debate about the institutional racism that permeates the American police force. In South Africa the killing of 34 striking miners at Marikana in 2012 is freshly embedded in our memory, and has been followed by other reports of incidents of casual use of violence by members of the SAPS. The use of a ‘white human shield’ by protesting UCT students last year to protect themselves from the batons of the riot squad highlighted deeply ingrained police behaviour that treats white and black bodies differently. More broadly, Untitled (Bruise/Blues) confronts further parallels between the US and South Africa, such as the after-effects of erasure and displacement, and the continued presence of violence, both immediate and systemic, decades after the dismantling of legal discrimination.