Condition Report
2000 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints. Though simple, each contains a nested stack of historical and self-referential quotations. Both black-and-white prints depict a version of Ligon’s 1988 painting, Untitled (I Am A Man) , which declares the words of the parenthetical in blocky black letters. Ligon’s painting, of course, is itself a reappropriation and, in some ways, a reproduction. Based on the simple, declarative protest signs carried by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Ligon’s painting recontextualized this now-iconic object as a work of art. While the print on the left of Condition Report directly mirrors Ligon’s 1988 painting, the print on the right of the pair includes marks, scribbles, and hand-written notations around the edges and borders of the image. These additions to the work are the condition report notes of the title, and refer back to the 1988 original—though this time not as it existed as a symbol of a historical event, but as it exists in the present as a rarified art object. Tracing a simple phrase—I AM A MAN—through these iterations as declaration, symbol, object, and surface, Ligon levies questions of representation and race, commodification and history, and the value and preciousness of one’s identity.
American artist Glenn Ligon is well known for his conceptually based works in paint, neon, photography, sculpture, and video. He draws upon American history, literature, and other sources to create works centered on the black American experience. Ligon filters through cultural sources to create compositions that highlight social inequalities, commemorate struggles, and point fingers at hypocrisy. Rendered in neon, through paint, and in other media, Ligon often draws out the words of others—be they the sanitation workers who protested in Memphis, Tennessee, with signs declaring I AM A MAN; or the controversial and confrontational Richard Pryor, whose jokes become electric letters on Ligon’s canvases.
Colors:
Related works of genres: » american conceptual artists, » lgbt artists from the united states
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Félix González-Torres
1992Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...
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Matthew Buckingham
2002Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*...
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Trisha Donnelly
2007Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
Related works featuring themes of: » Intertextuality, » Appropriation Art, » Collective History, » Color Photography, » Cultural Commentary, » American
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Hank Willis Thomas
2014South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
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Edward Kienholz
1984Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
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Hank Willis Thomas
2014Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
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Hank Willis Thomas
2014South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
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Carlos Amorales
2006This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
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An-My LE
2010The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...
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Arthur Tress Sought the Shadow Side of Photography Skip to content Arthur Tress, "Boy with Root Hands, New York, New York" from the series The Dream Collector (1971) (all photos Ksenya Gurshtein/ Hyperallergic ) LOS ANGELES — The earliest recorded evidence of humans’ fascination with dreams dates to antiquity, when Heraclitus wrote, “When men dream, each has his own world...
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Gregory Crewdson
2005Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
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Ari Marcopoulos
2008In Jackass (2008) by Ari Marcopoulos, his two sons, Cairo and Ethan, are pictured relaxing in a disheveled bedroom in their Sonoma home...
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Trisha Donnelly
2007Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
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Lisa Oppenheim
2003The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Related artist(s) to: Glenn Ligon » Andy Warhol, » Kara Walker, » David Hammons, » Felix Gonzalez-Torres, » Matthew Barney, » Christopher Wool, » Phil Collins, » Rachel Harrison, » Richard Prince, » Andrea Zittel
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Félix González-Torres
1992Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...
© » KADIST
Kara Walker
2005In her masterpiece 8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America , Walker unravels just that, the story of struggle, oppression, escape and the complexities of power dynamics in the history following slave trade in America...
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Kara Walker
Brent Sikkema, the Manhattan art dealer renowned for representing artists such as Jeffrey Gibson and Kara Walker found dead The post Brent Sikkema – Visionary Art Dealer Of Jeffrey Gibson And Kara Walker Murdered appeared first on Artlyst ....
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Marcel Pardo Ariza
2016In Linda, Lee & Dorsey, Louis (1988~, 2018) Marcel Pardo Ariza draws on Bay Area queer histories that have been uncovered from local archives and queer organizations, and connects them to people currently living in the Bay, where Ariza is also based...
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Carey Young
Report of the Legal Subcommittee is a print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a recent United Nations meeting in which various international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space...
