SONIA CHEUNG

After adornment the next most striking manifestation of the Negro is Angularity.  Everything that he touches becomes angular. . . . The pictures on the walls are hung at deep angles. Asymmetry is a definite feature of Negro art. . . . The abrupt and unexpected changes. . . . . The presence of rhythm and lack of symmetry are paradoxical, but there they are.  Both are present to a marked degree.  Negro dancing is dynamic suggestion. . . . every posture gives the impression that the dancer will do much more. . . . [the spectator] finds himself keeping time with the music and tensing himself for the struggle. . . . He is participating in the performance himself–carrying out the suggestions of the performer. . . . The white dancer attempts to express fully; the Negro is restrained, but succeeds in gripping the beholder by forcing him to finish the action the performer suggests. —Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression”  

In her essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression, ” African-American writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston assets that angularity, asymmetry, and dynamic suggestion are features that characterize African-American art.  However, these two untitled etchings by Glenn Ligon seem to exhibit none of these characteristics.  The prints are paired and presented like a spread of an open book, symmetrical and perfectly aligned both with each other and with the frame.  The full, thick, black capital letters are imposing vertical columns of weight on the white background that assume stability and certainty.  They are grainy upon close inspection—there is not a single truly sharp angle or edge, even at the top where the words are the most legible.

But looking at the etchings as more than just a two-dimensional image, the viewer finds angularity as promised by Hurston’s claim that “everything [the Negro] touches becomes angular.”  A sharp rectangle with four crisp vertices was impressed into the paper by the outer edge of the plate when printing–created entirely by physical force.  The angularity is achieved by the physical “touch” and only in the third dimension perpendicular to the paper and the wall.  The light gray shadows cast by the paper onto the mount make apparent the fact that only the top parts of the prints are fixed.  The etchings are hence hung at a deep angle to the wall.  The two pieces of paper moves, trembles, and sways abruptly with the slightest vibrations of the frame.

Similarly, although asymmetry is not seen in the etchings at first glance, it is apparent in the linguistic dimension of the prints.  The etching on the left reads, “I do not always feel colored,” negatively declaring the existence of exceptions to the norm, moments and gaps of “do not” in the otherwise continuum of “always feeling colored”; and on the right is “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” a positive statement of the most intense, violent situation charged and saturated with emotions.

Each statement is repeated again and again, breathlessly, without punctuation or pauses in between, but the spacing remains the same, keeping up the rhythm even as the words becomes less legible further down, increasingly blurred by stains of different degrees of blackness.  Not a single letter is altered in each repetition, but with each suggestive iteration all is changed: the viewer sees the calm, restrained statements become increasingly urgent and anguished but muffled cries between drowning, violent blotches as his eyes move down the print, and “tens[es] himself for the struggle,” like the audience of the negro dancer in Hurston’s essay.  These emotions, tensions, and meanings are filled in by the viewer himself, prompted by the “dynamic suggestion” of the etchings.  The etchings are then not unlike “the Negro dancer” who “succeeds in gripping the beholder by forcing him to finish the action the performer suggests.”

Ligons’ prints are hence filled with dynamic contrasts of stability and instability, restraint and dramatic expression.  As the viewer of the etchings, like the beholder of negro dancing, is forced into “participating in the performance himself–carrying out the suggestions of the performer,” the opacity and possibilities allowed by the suggestive piece are perhaps crystallized and reduced into the viewer’s single experience.  And as I write these sentences on my experience of Ligon’s etching, which include describing as clearly as possible my “completion” of the etchings’ “suggestions,” I am perhaps assuming the role of “the white dancer” who “attempts to express fully,” in contrast to “the negro dancer.”  This piece of writing is then inevitably totalizing and “white” as opposed to the “negro” etchings that stop at suggesting.  Thus, perhaps “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” may be read with such a suggestion–I want to feel colored, so I will create a white background that I can be thrown against.