To be out of joint takes having perspective and moral fire; it takes disdain for the status quo and convention. The dual exhibition of Julius Eastman and Glenn Ligon, “Evil Nigger,” at 52 Walker, curated by Ebony L. Haynes, explores this disdain from two divergent perspectives that come to a synthesis in the exhibition space. Julius Eastman, an experimental composer and musician, is present through his musical compositions and framed scores of another musical work, Thruway (1970), not performed since his passing in 1990. Xeroxed copies of Thruway — a manuscript executed in abstract, intentionally esoteric ways — are in dialogue with neon sculptures and paintings by multidisciplinary New York artist and writer Glenn Ligon. This attempt at an orchestrated conversation, a gentle push for viewers to do their own investigation of meaning, provides conceptual tools — including the title of the show — to look at pervasive identity politics from a different, more radicalized angle.
To break boundaries, one needs first to build them –– only to then bend them well past the breaking point, far beyond what is digestible for contemporaries and potentially at a considerable cost to one’s mental and physical self. Eastman continues to be a figure who was unafraid to undertake this lonesome pilgrimage, and we continue to be grateful listeners to his minimal yet relatable atonal harmonies. Evil Nigger (1979) is the only musical composition performed here, by three self-playing Yamaha pianos every hour of the show. A fourth piano, a replica of a mahogany Weber piano owned by Eastman, remains silent. The title of the exhibition, like nearly all of Eastman’s titles, is challenging and intentionally abrasive, uncomfortable, and meant to be talked about. As Hamza Walker writes in the zine that accompanies the exhibition, his titles were “hand grenades” thrown at institutions, be it white musical minimalism, the avant-garde, or our sense of propriety. The artistic mission Eastman emphasized was that of a composer who was Black and gay and unapologetic for any parts of this identity, proudly using them as part of his art.
Many of his musical works were lost to us, having been destroyed by the police during an eviction from a downtown rented apartment in the 1980s, an event that led to a downward spiral in Eastman’s life. Yet here we see him resurrected and reaffirmed.
Ligon, in turn, functions as Eastman’s almost-doppelgänger, providing a visual and conceptual counterpart. At almost the center of the space, a freestanding neon sculpture renders the onomatopoeic text “sth” — the opening word of Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel Jazz — in flicking red and blue light. Here, Ligon, who has visually translated the depth and wealth of Black literary, pictorial, and symbolic traditions throughout his long and accomplished career, gives us a literary stand-in for the sound of sucking teeth, a cross-cultural expression that has become closely associated with the global Black diaspora.
Ligon provides other entry points for cross-disciplinary and cross-generational dialogue. His new neon sculptural work Sparse Shouts (for Julius Eastman) (2024) directly references Eastman’s Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (1981), in which the verb “speak” becomes a call to action. But even more importantly, the connection between the two artists is symbolic, or maybe even symbiotic. Eastman’s legacy of radicalism became a metaphysical building block for Lig on and artists of following generations. Although Eastman, in a spoken introduction to a 1980 Northwestern University concert, talked about field workers in relation to the term “nigger,” many artists and viewers will still identify with the implicit feeling of being sidelined, marginalized, and unheard.
Yet in tandem, the artworks on view provide a more nuanced critique, reflecting on the origins of anger, erasure, power, and inadequacy of language when working with the human spirit. Language and words can switch meanings, but the loss of nuances does not account for human discrepancies. Transliteration and the structuralist signification of language may sometimes lead further away from reality.
