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:
Other related works, blended automatically
© » KADIST
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....
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2012Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
© » KADIST
Pascal Shirley
2006Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2012Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
© » KADIST
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...
© » KADIST
Mungo Thomson
2010In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...
© » KADIST
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2016Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
© » KADIST
Daniel Joseph Martinez
1978For I use to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied...
© » KADIST
Mungo Thomson
2014Starting with Bruce Nauman’s iconic artwork, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) , Mungo Thomson’s neon sign is one of a series that replaces Nauman’s quixotic mini-manifesto with aphorisms from ‘recovery’ culture, especially those made popular by alcoholics anonymous...
© » KADIST
Carlos Amorales
2007This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
© » KADIST
Douglas Gordon
2004Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
© » KADIST
Mungo Thomson
2008The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
© » KADIST
Walead Beshty
2010Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram...
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2012Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
© » KADIST
Daniel Joseph Martinez
2005Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P...
© » KADIST
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...