In the Italian Renaissance room, there was a rehang in progress and one bare wall caught the leading US artist's eye. It was gold burlap wallpaper that had faded to coppery brown, except where paintings had been removed, he recalls. You saw the original gold. I thought, that's an exhibition in itself right there. These ghostly traces of previous displays ruptured what's meant to be a neutral backdrop to works of art. A museum's job is to present objects as if they're in an icebox, unchanged forever, he says. You can make other choices. There are other possibilities.
That identity, culture and history are contingent on who is doing the looking has long been central to Ligon's work. One of his origin stories as an artist is how, in 1984, he realised his studio mate had never even heard of his literary idol, the gay black novelist and activist, James Baldwin. He began quoting directly from Baldwin and marginalised writers like Jean Genet and Zora Neale Hurston in what would become his signature: paintings that wed abstraction to identity politics.
His work often features stencilled text in blurred black pigment and coal dust pushing the words into illegibility, partly to convey their cultural invisibility. This year is Baldwin's centenary and, Ligon says, there's a lot of Baldwin in this show, including a text painting that directly quotes his 1953 essay Stranger in the Village where he muses on being the lone black man in a Swiss backwater.
Setting the tone for the whole exhibition, Ligon has installed a huge neon work in the Fitzwilliam's entrance, titled after CP Cavafy's 1904 poem Waiting for the Barbarians. It repeats nine different translations of the poem's final lines reflecting on who is in the fold and who outside, and how our definition of us depends on who is looking.
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