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  • Representational Static:Visual Slave Narratives of Contemporary Art
  • Janet Neary (bio)

In 1993, visual artist Glenn Ligon debuted Narratives, a series of prints that uses the antebellum slave narrative title page as a template for ironic commentaries on contemporary American race relations. Substituting his own autobiographical details in place of those of the ex-slave narrator, Ligon creates large mock-ups of slave narrative frontispieces that link the racialized conditions of production of antebellum narratives to the racialized conditions of contemporary African American art. Narratives challenges viewers’ expectations of black art and life by utilizing the autobiographical conventions of an earlier time, mimicking the baroque form and syntax of slave narrative titles and ancillary advertisements while keeping the contemporary subject always in view. One of the prints in the series, for example, The Life and Adventures of Glenn Ligon A Negro (1993) (see Figure 1), confronts the viewer with an unexpected collision of nineteenth-century literary conventions and late twentieth-century autobiographical disclosure. The historical displacement creates a frisson of competing expectations that operates as both punch line and trenchant critique, reducing the black post-civil rights era subject and the ex-slave narrator to type. In the competing discourses of authenticity on display, it becomes impossible to locate the “real” Ligon. Rather than “the unvarnished truth” (as it might have been called in the antebellum period) or a “confession” (as it might have been called in the post-civil rights era), Narratives presents a sly critique of the very notion of authenticity as it has been unequally applied to black artists and writers.1

Like the stencil paintings for which Ligon is perhaps best known—such as Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown against a Sharp White Background) (1990), inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928)—Narratives works by way of reference to canonical African American literature and is composed entirely of text.2 Although the prints are richly intertextual and often reference visual media—quoting prominent film and theater critics, or boasting “with a portrait” (Ligon, Black Rage)—there are no actual images in the series. Ligon avoids figuration and instead uses competing registers of text to frustrate the viewer’s assumption of an essential black [End Page 157] subject behind the representation and to call attention to our desire to see black suffering in what we understand to be black art.3


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Figure 1.

Glenn Ligon, The Life and Adventures of Glenn Ligon A Negro, from the portfolio Narratives (1993), photograph of etching with chine collé on paper. Image courtesy: Regen Projects, Los Angeles. © Glenn Ligon.

This essay investigates the emergence of the slave narrative in visual art at the end of the twentieth century and uses the representational strategies of [End Page 158] contemporary artists to decode the visual work performed in the original literary slave narratives. Ligon is only one of a diverse cadre of visual artists, including Kara Walker, Ellen Driscoll, and others, who turned to slave narratives as fertile ground for contemporary cultural critique at the end of the twentieth century.4 Like Ligon in Narratives, Walker, whose work has been described as “life-size cutout silhouettes of imagined slave narratives” (Hall), often adopts the subject position of the ex-slave narrator in her work; speaking as “an Emancipated Negress” (Walker, Slavery!), she uses two-dimensional silhouettes to produce and confront the viewer’s double vision so that both the historical subject and contemporary artist are in view simultaneously.5 Driscoll also plays with visual conventions of perspective and literary conventions of slave narration in her reinterpretation of a key chapter from Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), “The Loophole of Retreat,” but rather than speaking from the position of the fugitive, Driscoll invites the viewer briefly to inhabit that position by entering a structure reminiscent of the crawl space Jacobs occupied during her escape from slavery. While extremely diverse in art historical terms, these artists’ shared use of the slave narrative as template calls for transhistorical analysis of the form and a reevaluation of the inaugural treatment...

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