Curators of museum collections are a cautious and often conservative bunch (conservation, after all, is their business). Artists, like the court jester, are invited in to stir things up and break the rules. Glenn Ligon’s All Over the Place at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is a model for what artists can do in such a setting.
As much about the museum itself, its history and its collection, as it is about finding new ways, and places, to display his own work, the 64-year-old Black US artist gives the place a shake-up and a shake-down. Ligon, as the title of his show suggests, is all over the place: on the pediments and columns of the museum’s exterior, among the museum’s ceramics collection, in the rooms dedicated to Italian and Spanish paintings and a gallery devoted to flower paintings. He has delved into the hidden stacks and rifled the print collection.
The museum’s frontage glows with white neon text: nine different English translations of the last two lines of Greek poet Constantine P Cavafy’s 1898 Waiting for the Barbarians. “Now what will become of us without barbarians? Those people were some kind of solution,” reads one. Another asks: “What are we going to do now without barbarians? In a way those people were a solution.”
The different formulations of Cavafy’s Greek text flex with yearning and complaint, all referring to the history of Cavafy’s home town of Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, from its founding as a centre of Hellenistic culture, to its subsequent status as a place of cultural, scientific and scholarly learning under French and then British colonial rule. On the flat East Anglian fens, Cambridge is not Alexandria but it often dreams of the past.
Ligon’s art is dense with quotation, repetition and variation, annotation, correction and disruption, using text as image, materiality as metaphor. Sticky and dirty and textured as it is, Ligon’s art is also a kind of commentary, which he brings to bear on the museum. In the ceramics collection, where pots and ornaments, jugs and figurines sit under glass or are serried in cabinets, a group of large rotund jars stand in the daylight on a big white table. You can almost touch them. There’s no barrier, no glass gets in the way.
Pimpled with glaze and imperfections (which makes them all the better) these jars, made in emulation of traditional white ceramic Korean moon jars, have a wonderful, bulbous heft. They’re all the same, all different, and their colours run from dark browns to bluish and indeterminate, purplish darks. Made by a Korean ceramicist working in Japan, when Ligon commissioned them he wanted them black, until he realised that his own idea of black was different from the way blackness was understood and perceived in much of Asia. The hues of the jars shift in the daylight as we move around them. What is blackness? Is a Black body ever truly black? Questions spin throughout Ligon’s art, and in his interventions and displays at the Fitzwilliam.
In another room Ligon shows us a suite of Edgar Degas’s cancelled etchings, including two seated portraits of fellow artist Édouard Manet, struck through with an etching needle to signal that no more prints are to be struck from the plates. But Degas’s corrections were less than conclusive. A group of 1954 Frank Auerbach drypoints (drawn on the etching plate with a nail, the crudest of implements) also refused the strictures and norms of printmaking etiquette. Several illuminated manuscripts and a Spanish medieval Hebrew bible, densely annotated by a later scribe, signal that things are never done.
A reproduction of one of Ligon’s own works is overwritten by notes made by a conservator, detailing all the cracks, stains, and other imperfections that a restorer might fix. None of these works, one might think, belong together. But they do, in all kinds of fascinating ways. This room – one not normally used as a public gallery in the museum – is but one of the delights of All Over the Place. Wherever we go, Ligon encourages us to stop and look and attend and to view things differently. There’s wit here as well as studiousness. “Look,” he seems to be saying. “Isn’t this interesting?”
Ligon is never more all over the place than in the rooms devoted to the Fitzwilliam’s collection of Italian and Spanish paintings. Disturbing the measured alignments of the paintings and antique furnishings, numerous small, stencilled black and red canvases by Ligon unbalance the formal arrangements of the galleries. Negro Sunshine, the paintings all say, in stencilled capital letters, repeating the words again and again over his canvases. Ligon’s Studies for Negro Sunshine take their collective title from a short story by modernist writer Gertrude Stein(1874-1946), published in 1909, in which she wrote of the “abandoned laughter that makes the broad warm glow of negro sunshine”.
Stein’s racialised language stuck in Ligon’s head. With his characteristic stencilled lettering, the words are blobbed, clogged, sometimes misregistered and paint-caked into illegibility, and swamped in acrylic and greasy oilstick and coal dust. Ligon’s little canvases are like unruly, uncouth visitors, refusing the air of studious appreciation and decorum these rooms of carefully lit, varnished paintings foster. Out of place, refusing any alignment and disrupting the order and flow of the museum’s gilded masterpieces, you can’t ignore them. They each demand being registered.
Ligon crowds the walls of another gallery with more than 80 botanical paintings from the museum’s collection. The walls explode with jostling depictions of bouquets and memento mori, paintings celebrating Dutch tulip mania, and others celebrating plants, previously unseen in the west, that had been imported to Europe as part of the collecting zeal of colonialists and empire builders. The museum itself never thought to stuff its walls with such visually cacophonous, luxuriant excess. It is a great way to show so many works that often languish unseen in the vaults, unloved and unseen, or, when they have been shown, are often passed over by visitors.
Along the way, Ligon is accompanied by other voices: Cavafy and James Baldwin, comedian Richard Pryor, the wonderful writer Teju Cole, and many others. His approach is generous, critical, sometimes sly, playful and erudite. If museums are looking for a way to expand their horizons, Ligon has found a solution.
• Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place is at Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 2 March
