In retrospect it felt kind of remarkable that Glenn Ligon’s High Line billboard was installed in September 2024 even before [gestures around] all this. But then, there was a lot going on then, too. And the image itself has some history to it.
Of Untitled (America/Me), 2024, The High Line only said, “For this work, the artist manipulated a photograph of his 2008 neon,” which is true enough. In 2022, though, Ligon made a little edition, Untitled (America/Me), 2022, of a photo of America (2008) with Xs drawn by hand, which was split between Texte zur Kunst, Primary Information, and the Carré d’Art Nimes.
That work, or that image, at least, looks to be the same one the High Line calls Untitled (2008), but also the same as the Rubells use to illustrate their AP of America (2008). Which is different from the Tate’s Untitled (2006), the earliest version of a neon AMERICA, in which the tubes are painted completely black.
Anyway, in his conversation with Charlotte Burns on the new episode of Schwartzman &’s podcast, What If…? Ligon explains the billboard’s origin in more detail:
So, when I was approached by the High Line to do this billboard project, I went back to not actually the work, I actually went back to a postcard I had sent someone. There was an invitation, I guess for show that had that 2008 America neon in it, and I just took that postcard and mailed it to a friend and crossed out all the letters of America and left the “m” and “e”.
When I started thinking about that billboard I just happened to be at a dinner party at my friend’s house, and I saw that little postcard I sent them that they very kindly kept and put in a frame, and I thought, “Oh, that’s not bad.” [Laughs] So, I basically borrowed back my own work to make that billboard.
Though a postcard-sized print does seem like a non-trivial phase in the transformation from postcard to artwork, Ligon does not mention this 2022 edition. Yet the insights Ligon shares about that process of recognition are not negated, only pushed back in time a little bit.