MEI KAZAMA

In her essay, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Zora Neale Hurston speaks of the importance of action to Negro life.  As Hurston notes, “His words are action words. His interpretation of the English language is in terms of pictures. One act described in terms of another. […] It is easier to illustrate than it is to explain because action came before speech.” Hurston speaks to two important points here: that pictures, images, illustrations are essential to Negro life, and that action and doing precedes any naming of acts.  Such characteristic facts are reflected upon in Glenn Ligon’s etchings, Untitled, 1992.

The bold and clear language at the top of the paper and running throughout the entire landscape of the piece is immediate:  “I DON’T ALWAYS FEEL COLORED” and “I FEEL MOST COLORED WHEN I AM THROWN AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND.” Ligon’s use of language causes us to ask: How do the prints show the importance of action, and action that comes before the naming of acts (ie. speech and language), if the piece is primarily constituted of words?

The complexity of Ligon’s visually simple and seemingly straightforward piece can be found in  the process of printmaking.  Ligon uses various printmaking techniques in creating these works, specifically: etching, sugar-lift, aquatint, and spit-bite.  All require an application of or submergence into solutions and/or chemical substances that eat away at the plate (which then create the grooves that allow the ink to catch onto the plate and print onto the paper).  Ligon’s process is thus active — melting, dissolving, destroying, scarring, rubbing, and wiping are what create the works — and such action came before the creation of the immediately visible text of the piece.

The importance of act before language is also visually manifest within the piece itself.  The text, as it runs down the page, becomes increasingly difficult to read due to patches of black ink.  These patches read as splattering and, thus, action.  They also further confuse and negate the presence of language, alluding to Hurston’s point that, “the white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics.” The letters become increasingly like symbols as they come into contact with the splotches of black ink.

Yet what persistently lingers is how Ligon’s piece emphasizes the idea that action comes before any naming of action.  The active making results in a visual form we can identify as text, and it directly refers to Hurston’s claim that “action and doing precedes any naming of the acts” are essential to Negro life.  However, the immediately identifiable text makes invisible the action of the making process that precedes it. It becomes a fixed communication of text rather than a form of possibility. In other words, there is a troubling reduction of action by way of its naming.  Ligon is reaching and returning to action as action, action without naming, as he splatters.  He distances us farther and farther from “legibility” and closer to a confrontation of unnamed action: action without determined shape, action with potential.  Ligon’s etchings are a site at which action and the naming and reduction of action necessarily coincide.