Black Like Me: Reconfiguring Blackface in the Art of Glenn Ligon and Fred Wilson

Black Like Me Glenn Ligon Fred Wilson Nka•31 Journal of Contemporary African Art 30•Nka Peter Erickson I n works entitled “Black Like Me,” two contemporary African American artists, Glenn Ligon and Fred Wilson, explicitly address a standard text of the early civil rights movement, Black Like Me, by the white author John Howard Griffin. Ligon and Wilson’s responses come three and four decades, respectively, after the original moment. This time gap provides a measure of the ongoing difficulty of recognizing and confronting the unresolved issue of blackface in Griffin’s book. Ligon and Wilson enact their critical perspectives through the medium of art: how the artists translate textual material into a visual field is a crucial aspect of how they create new vantage points. Their critiques are conducted by means of visualizing language. In this cross-media appropriation, the process of transposition loosens up the text, pries it out of its normal location on the page, and puts it on display. Alternatively, words are entirely supplanted by new nonverbal forms. These exposures give the language a different look so that it loses its obviousness and becomes available for reinterpretation . To change the medium is to challenge the story. Griffin’s narrative lends itself to visual transformation because his intervention in racial looking Glenn Ligon, Black Like Me or, The Authentic Narrative of Glenn Ligon a Black Man, from the portfolio Narratives, 1995. Etching with chine collé on paper, 28⅛ x 21⅛ in. (71.44 x 53.66 cm.). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.© Glenn Ligon, gift from the artist, courtesy of Regen Projects. At this time, when I most wanted to lose the illusion , I was more than ever aware of it.”5 Yet immediately upon leaving the phone booth, Griffin eagerly resumes the illusion. He embraces the night—“The night was always a comfort”6—and slips into Hughes’s lines: “Night coming tenderly / Black like me.”7 Griffin’s troubled perception of his wife and family now frames and constrains the poetic desire to which he is nevertheless drawn. But the undercurrent of tension between the two sides of this divided self remains elusive. His vague sense of complication does not impede Griffin’s estimation that he has successfully completed his mission as an advocate and political ally of blacks. In the next two sections, I turn to Glenn Ligon and Fred Wilson ’s inventive disruptions of Griffin’s feeling of achievement. The two black artists’ intervention in Griffin’s prior appropriation of Hughes, I argue, is both racial and sexual: Ligon and Wilson reclaim not only Hughes’s blackness but also implicitly his homoeroticism.8 “almost, if not quite, a perfect fac simile” In two works from the same time period but in different media and dimensions, Glenn Ligon reappropriates Langston Hughes’s key phrase from Griffin’s Black Like Me. Ligon’s Black Like Me (1993) is one of nine etchings with chine collé in the series of Narratives displayed as a group in his 1993 exhibition To Disembark at the Hirshhorn Museum .9 Black Like Me #2 (1992), a larger-scale, stenciled painting with oil stick and acrylic gesso on canvas, is one of five Ligon works purchased by the Hirshhorn in 1993.10 I shall argue that the second piece extends the first and in doing so develops further the themes of the exhibition as a whole. The exhibition title not only establishes the literary tone and texture but also hints at the thematic complexity by presenting us with the puzzle of a volume title without a corresponding poem inside. Gwendolyn Brooks’s volume To Disembark surfaces , without the author’s name, both as the title of one of the Narratives and as the title of the overall exhibition. Within the original source, there is no poem by that name. The missing poem evokes the motif of teasing absence that runs through the entire exhibition. Ligon had previously introduced this theme in Untitled (I Am A Man) in 1988 through the haunting absence of Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated in the context of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis: when one imagines the voice of King speaking...