January 18–May 4, 2008

 

G L E N N   L I G O N   b. Bronx, New York, 1960

In the late 1970s and 1980s, artists developed a conceptual language of mediation in which appropriation was at the forefront of the postmodernist dialectic that sought to obliterate the space between an original and its copy. Appropriation called into question the relevance of the modernist category of the author, the author being, in its etymological sense, the source of authority, of certainty. For Glenn Ligon, archives are likewise dependent on their manifest authority as the principal source of historical truth. His biting critique of Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs of black men in The Black Book resides in this gap between authorship and authority, originality and appropriation, and is motivated by a desire to destabilize the photographer’s idea of the black male body. In Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991–93), Ligon deconstructs Mapplethorpe's objectification of the black male body as a signal source of sexual stereotyping by using a series of texts drawn from theorists and commentators such as James Baldwin, Isaac Julien, Kobena Mercer, Richard Dyer, Essex Hemphill, and Frantz Fanon. Positioned in double rows beneath the images, the text panels describe the contested ground of this complex issue. At the same time, the problem of authorship shadows the license taken by Ligon in using Mapplethorpe's images. Here, conventional issues of authorship must be weighed against the archival methodologies of cultural analysis. In testing the assumptions of Mapplethorpe's conservative brand of studio photography as a work of authority, the postmodern work of appropriation suggests that what withers is the aura of Mapplethorpe's iconography of black male sexuality. Ligon's reading of The Black Book is against the grain, setting it off-kilter, placing it in archival remand.

 

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