Art Quote by Glenn Ligon

“I think there's an interest right now in the performance aspect of artworks, instead of just hanging things on walls. We're in a moment when a lot of younger artists are looking at work from the '60s and '70s - they are looking at the pieces by Marina Abramovic or Vito Acconci. These pieces have a time element. They were performed live. To perform them again now isn't simply an homage, because it's a different audience, a different moment.”

Glenn Ligon

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Art Artist Audience Different Homage Interest Moments Right now Thinking Wall

More by Glenn Ligon

Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.

Glenn Ligon

Race is not something inherent to one's being: One does feel more or less colored, depending on the situation.

Glenn Ligon

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A key text for me is James Baldwin's essays. And, in particular, his essay Stranger in the Village. It's a text that I've used in a lot of paintings. The essay is from the mid-'50s, when he's moved to Switzerland to work on a novel, and he finds himself the only black man living in a tiny Swiss village. He…

Glenn Ligon

It's a great idea: to feel the rhythm of something by seeing how it flows on a page.

Glenn Ligon

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So much of my work has been about disappearing.

Glenn Ligon

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I'm interested in when language fails, when it is opaque.

Glenn Ligon

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In writing, something is always left out: it can't be articulated in the space of an essay.

Glenn Ligon

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Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters…

Glenn Ligon

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Much of my work is engaged with 'America' - the idea of America.

Glenn Ligon

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My mother really didn't come from artists. Her famous quote to me was, "The only artists I've ever heard of are dead." The pottery…

Glenn Ligon

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I like having a studio to go to. It's like having a job.

Glenn Ligon

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I switched up so that I could work 12-hour shifts at the firm on the weekends so I could have days free to paint. But it was almost like I had a secret life, because I wasn't showing any of my work. It was just in my house. In '89, I got a grant from the National Endowment for the…

Glenn Ligon

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True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and…

Benjamin Franklin

“Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.”

Aeschylus

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I think most artists feel like they're outside society - no matter how many accolades they receive, or how much money is in your…

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The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

Erich Fromm

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That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Ray Bradbury

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“So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and…

Justina Chen Headley