Artist Web Projects Spotlight: Glenn Ligon, Annotations, 2003
Glenn Ligon, Annotations (detail), 2003– . Collection of the artist, commissioned by Dia Art Foundation for the Artist Web Projects series. © Glenn Ligon
By Kirsten Mairead Gill
Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Dia Art Foundation
In this series, we revisit works from Dia’s series of Artist Web Projects. Inaugurated in 1995, this series is the longest-running program of its kind in the United States, commissioning artists to create original projects for the internet. The full archive of projects is available here. Glenn Ligon is well known for his text-based paintings, in which language—and in particular the languages of racial difference and identification—takes on a figural dimension, becoming image. In Annotations, created in 2003 for Dia’s Artist Web Projects, Ligon approaches the relationship between image and text from a different, more subjective angle.
Recreating a family photo album on the web, Ligon collaged both found photographs and some of his own family photographs with text, also setting parts of the album to music. Each photograph is linked to additional content—another image, an album within an album, audio playlists and soundbites of Ligon singing, lists of obscure fears and medical conditions, and stories that may or may not relate to the image they accompany. The effect is a labyrinthine and fragmented narrative structure, driven by the contingency of its relations and the sense of mystery created in the encounter with the album’s largely anonymous subjects. While the title Annotations might imply an explanatory text for the images in Ligon’s album, the process of writing in the margins is allusive and associative, a mnemonic device not oriented toward the recall of specific facts, but rather the evocation of a broad and contradictory range of experiences.
The project speaks to the importance of family photos among African-American communities, at turns left out of and dehumanized by the public photographic record—a systematic erasure that is ongoing to this day. But Ligon also plays slyly on the silences within black vernacular and family photography. Amongst the trove of images of couples, family groupings, and young children, the viewer stumbles across a lone pornographic photo of a man, naked and with an erection, seated on a bed and looking through an album (one of several albums within the album). A click on this photo leads to another of a young girl holding a camera in one hand and pointing back at her photographer with the other, creating a ricochet of gazes and alluding to the mechanisms of visibility and invisibility structuring the experience of social marginality. Ligon’s work has consistently addressed the intersecting erasures of being both a black man and a gay man in a nation that has worked tirelessly to deny the full existence of both—see, for example, his 2008 artist book Housing in New York: A Brief History, 1960–2007.
A number of other Artist Web Projects engage with the relationship between photography and language in the evolving image-world of the internet. In Words and Photos (2014), Iñaki Bonillas also worked with the family photo album, constructing a scaffolding of text by which the photos may be identified and organized. In Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi’s Poetry as not, with singing (2015), images are randomly pulled from the web, with user-generated text translated algorithmically. Along with these projects, Annotations foregrounds operations of chance, and the explores the complementary relations between images and words, opening up new possibilities for reading and experiencing the visual.
Please note that in order to run Annotations, users must enable Flash on their browser.
