DIVYA SAMPATH

Jean Toomer’s Cane follows a journey from South to North and back to the South. The poems in the South are a destabilizing combination of a pastoralism and yearning for the rolling and fecund Georgian landscape set against the oft-unspoken negative space of violence and discrimination of Jim Crow. In the North, the gritty urban scenes are grayer and cold. Yet while Toomer does much to show a strong contrast between geographies, also at work is evidence of miscegenation. The borders of the map have blurred as people, ideas, and economies pass through the separating membrane. The South has factories next to cane-fields, the North has found new disguises for minstrel shows in its jazz clubs and a different harvest awaits back-breaking reaping.   

The works of both Ligon and Puryear are similarly preoccupied with negotiating ideas of boundary. In Ligon’s prints, the ordered and rigid typeface becomes nearly impossible to read as the ink bleeds outside the confines of the stencil. The repetition of a single line in both prints imbues a sense of endlessness—the prints quoting Hurston end without completing their iteration (“…I am thrown against a–”). There is an invisible negative space, where the process of becoming black(er) is furthered in ways we cannot access. The cyclicality of the text in Ligon’s work stands in contrast to the transience embedded in the processes utilized by the artist, like sugar-lift, where the artist etches a copper plate, paints over those lines with a sugar solution, and then covers the entire plate with a waxy acid-resistant fluid that sticks to the plate. The sugar is dissolved by placing the plate in water, creating positive spaces while the resistant-fluid fills the rest. When the plate is then placed in acid, the acid bites into the tracks created the dissolved sugar, building a three-dimensionality to the plate that allows the artist to produce prints. The sugar is a raw material that is a part of the process but is absent in the product, its escape crucial to the creative process. The labor coded into the production of these prints is significant: sugarlift prints require mechanical intervention to press onto paper, and Ligon intentionally chooses to have two borders, to show how the the force of printing deepens the paper beyond its dimension. The border pressed into the page by the force of printing strictly cuts-off the ink blots, caging them in, while the second, external border declares that what is on display is precisely their containment.This is the product of a writer, a painter and a sugar harvester, that all end up coagulating into opaque blackness, as the lines separating these disparate occupations are erased.  

Puryear’s woodcut prints, a medium he describes as “forc[ing] decisiveness” (SFGate, 2000), are negative spaces created by carving borders to images rather than carving out what fills them in. Within the binary framework imposed by the material itself, he breaks down the separation between the women from Cane he is representing and their environments. While some are more abstract than others, each print situates the woman against another image. In “Bona,” for example, each side of the woodcut shows a different figure, the white Bona on the left and the black Paul on the right. Bona fetishizes Paul’s racial ambiguity in Cane, which awakens Paul’s racial consciousness. To her, his lack of perceivable racial boundary is thrilling, and it is after he becomes aware of his blackness, his veil, that she leaves him, no longer “fascinate[d]” (Toomer 104). Her figure is abstracted to appear like a topographical map, elevated above Paul. Paul looks out his two windows to see the South in one and Bona in the other, Puryear showing this other visually-permeable boundary with wood-grain light streaming onto Paul, depicted as the artist’s mannequin holding on by a thin line, recalling clothing hanging to dry on a breezy Georgia afternoon or perhaps something more insidious. Working with a material that fights anything other than a binary separation of black and white, where in-between shades are impossible to find, Puryear presents the while boundaries can be crossed, they will always exist, always constrain, always impose constructed hierarchies like mountains.  

By playing with positive and negative spaces, spaces that are determined by the materiality of the sugar and wood themselves, both Ligon and Puryear pick up Cane’s gestures of the transgression of boundaries, mixing that cannot be contained. Both interrupt art forms that are traditionally binary, black/white, favoring neither; no boundaries are entirely dissolved, and some, like Ligon’s internal frame, feel permanent. The discomfort of the infidelity of lines and edges pushes the viewer into the very same cycle of Toomer’s readers, a journey on an endless loop.