Condition Report

2000 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Glenn Ligon

location: New York, New York
year born: 1960
gender: male
nationality: American
home town: Bronx, New York

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:



No Title
© » KADIST

Félix González-Torres

1992

Behind 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...

The six grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the year 502 002
© » KADIST

Matthew Buckingham

2002

Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*...

Slow Graffiti
© » KADIST

Alex Da Corte

2017

Slow Graffiti was produced for Da Corte’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2017...

Lightning
© » KADIST

Paul Kos

1976

Parked on the shoulder of a single lane highway running through a desert landscape, Marlene looks over her shoulder from inside the car at a fierce storm looming over a distant horizon...

Related works featuring themes of: » Intertextuality, » Appropriation Art, » Collective History, » Color Photography, » Cultural Commentary, » American  
» see more

South Africa Righteous Space
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2014

South 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....

Oakland Girls
© » KADIST

Pascal Shirley

2006

Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...

Floor, Legs
© » KADIST

Elad Lassry

2013

In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions...

Other related works, blended automatically  
» see more

South Africa Righteous Space
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2014

South 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....

Gypsy
© » KADIST

Pascal Shirley

2006

Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...

Why fear the future?
© » KADIST

Carlos Amorales

2005

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...

Related works sharing similar palette  
» see more

Interview: Kansong Art Museum Shines Light on National Pride - via The Korea Times
© » LARRY'S LIST

A couple weeks ago, I met director Chun In-keon of the Kansong Art Museum...

Arthur Tress Sought the Shadow Side of Photography
© » HYPERALLERGIC

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...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Kitty Kraus

This work emphasises Kitty Kraus’s involvement with process, with alchemical transformations associated with Post-Minimalist aesthetics, Arte Povera, Joseph Beuys and Robert Smithson...

Anonymous
© » KADIST

Laura Lima

2017

Anonymous by Laura Lima consists of a series of fabric-based forms, over which rope has been arranged in varying textures and patterns...

Related works from the » 2000's created around » New York, New York  
» see more

Forest Gathering N.2
© » KADIST

Gregory Crewdson

2005

Forest 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...

Jackass
© » KADIST

Ari Marcopoulos

2008

In Jackass (2008) by Ari Marcopoulos, his two sons, Cairo and Ethan, are pictured relaxing in a disheveled bedroom in their Sonoma home...

Higher Horse
© » KADIST

Kate Gilmore

2008

In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red...

Untitled (Ruby Downing sitting between two Unidentified Men in a Room), Damaged series
© » KADIST

Lisa Oppenheim

2003

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...

No Title
© » KADIST

Félix González-Torres

1992

Behind 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...

8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America
© » KADIST

Kara Walker

2005

In 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...

Brent Sikkema – Visionary Art Dealer Of Jeffrey Gibson And Kara Walker Murdered
© » ARTLYST

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 ....

Related works found in the same semantic group  
» see more

Linda, Lee & Dorsey, Louis (1988~, 2018)
© » KADIST

Marcel Pardo Ariza

2016

In 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...

Prospectus
© » KADIST

A collection of Kinmont’s project descriptions, written over a 22-year period...

Cellman
© » KADIST

Fabrice Hyber

2003

The works of Fabrice Hyber provoke divergent ways of thinking...

Hermit Crab Project
© » KADIST

Charwei Tsai

2008

Charwai Tsai’s photograph documents her Hermit Crab Project installation upon the construction site of gallery Sora in Tokyo...