History with a Small "h": A Conversation with Glenn Ligon

The publication of this interview with the artist Glenn Ligon coincides with his current midcareer exhibition, "Glenn Ligon: Some Changes," which opened in 2005 at the Power Plant in Toronto.¹ Ligon remains best known for his conceptual text paintings, which explore the construction of identities through language and representation. The work documented here, Lest We Forget (1998), is a rarely exhibited, somewhat ephemeral addition to his oeuvre. Ligon conceived the series during a two-month residency at Artpace San Antonio in Texas. There he created metal plaques inscribed with personal anecdotes about cruising and desire. He installed the plaques in the public space of the city where they visually resembled the historical markers found in abundance in the downtown tourist area. He then photographed them and left them behind to be discovered, stolen, or removed by whoever encountered them subsequently. The plaques have since disappeared, but the photographs he took of them in situ and a second set of the plaques remain and were exhibited at Artpace in 1998. I had the opportunity to talk with Ligon in February 2005 about how Lest We Forget relates to his larger body of work, his process in making the series, and how it challenges received ideas of history, identity, and communication.

Rachel Middleman: How did this project, Lest We Forget, begin for you?

Glenn Ligon: At Artpace there wasn't a mandate to do projects that were specifically geared toward San Antonio, but there was definitely a sense that they wanted some kind of interaction with the city. And I guess I just took that literally. I thought I should use what was available, and I found out that the bronze plaque makers were in Texas, right in San Antonio. I don't know if you've ever been to San Antonio, but basically it's a tourist town. Artpace is on the edge of downtown near the River Walk, and I was very aware of that being a tourist neighborhood and having all these historic markers—they're everywhere. Also, I don't drive, so that was another factor in the project. I walked around a lot. All those things came together to start me thinking about doing a project using bronze plaques. And as for the texts themselves . . . I mean the truth is sort of funny there. Like the one where I'm talking about meeting a guy and I said something like, "shuffling a little bit, a little something-something between us," but I don't know exactly what happened. Maybe nothing happened. The plaques read like you're in somebody's head, but the actual interaction between me and whoever it was is ambiguous.

Figure 1.

Glenn Ligon, "Hunky Guy," Lest We Forget (1998). All photographs courtesy of the artist

Figure 2.

Glenn Ligon, "Hunky Guy" (detail)

RM: What did you imagine someone passing by would think when they read the plaques?

GL: First of all, I wasn't sure that people would read them at all. Imagine a public park that has this plaque on a concrete pedestal and there are five other things like that in the park. The form of the plaque was just mimicking what was already there. They are so ubiquitous I don't think anyone really reads them anymore. It was funny to imagine how they could just be there forever without being noticed, or, if they were read, it would be because they were at odd sites like the side of the bus station. I wanted people to think about uses of public spaces, particularly queer uses of public spaces, because there was some cruising going on in the downtown area. Not that I ever really saw it in any sustained way, but it was supposedly there. I was thinking that rock plaques are about the official record and asking what it would mean to do things that were in the same language but were about the temporary, the transient, and the illicit. And even beyond that, about things that were so ephemeral maybe they didn't even really happen...