Dia Publications Spotlight: “Artists on Andy Warhol” (2018)
Andy Warhol, Shadows, 1978–79. Installation view, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York, 2019. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York
In his essay featured in Artists on Andy Warhol, the third installment in a series culled from Dia’s Artists on Artists lectures, Glenn Ligon traces shadows in Warhol’s life and work. Ligon draws both formal connections to film and screenprints and conceptual associations with reflections and substitutions. Like much of Warhol’s art, shadows both imply a surface while intimating unknown depths. Serving as “evidence of things not seen,” these forms in Ligon’s text open up questions of death, Blackness, and sex, the latter including the following fantasy of cruising.
—Kamilah N. Foreman, director of publications
Warhol’s Shadows
By Glenn Ligon
SHADOWS AND LIGHT
Saturday, October 20, 2007
I’m sitting on a couch at Dia:Beacon, looking at Warhol’s Shadows. It’s a beautiful fall weekend and I expected to be alone here, but the gallery’s packed with people. I settle back into the cushions of one of the couches and watch clouds drift by through the skylights. The clouds make the room get dark then light, dark then light. I’m doing a lecture at Dia:Chelsea in New York on Warhol’s Shadows in December, so I guess I’m here to be inspired, though nothing particularly brilliant comes to mind. Indeed, nothing comes to mind at all. I’ve been sitting here for an hour or two, walking around, waiting.
There are four couches in the room. People come and go, sit down, get up, sit down again. Occasionally, guards walk through. They are young, dressed in black pants and shirts with walkie-talkies hooked to their belts—college students, I imagine. One has potential. Black hair, a little stringy and long, thin, and tall. Pale skin, ghostly almost. Piercings. Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Hard to tell. He shuffles his feet a little when he walks, seems shy. Thelma’s voice is in my ear, “never the owner, always the coat-check boy.” Still, there is something about this one that keeps me staring.
He makes a slow round of the gallery, and as he passes the couch where I am sitting he gives me a look. It’s his job, I guess. I have been sitting on this couch for an hour, maybe two hours. Who spends hours looking at paintings? It is suspicious. As he walks by me, he gives me a backward glance and heads toward the Sol LeWitts. Clouds pass over the skylights and the light flickers off and on, off and on.
Occasionally, people sit down on one of the couches. A hunky guy with blonde hair joins me. He’s studying Lynne Cooke’s essay while I check him out. Not my type, really, but he has his charms. I wouldn’t say no, although I have not been asked. I’m about to attempt small talk on Shadows with him when his wife appears, pushing the stroller. He rises and they wander off toward the Flavins. I’m alone on my couch again. I have to admit it, there are some cuties here. Who’d have known? The black-haired guard appears again. As he passes, he nods his head slightly. A little something-something between us, but so brief that I can’t be sure if anything really happened beyond what I felt.
It is almost closing time now. The sun is going down and the galleries are getting dark. Should I say something to him or just let it go? Or what if that nod wasn’t a signal of interest, just an acknowledgment of my presence? Has anyone ever hooked up here? I’m sure they have. All that dark space in the basement and unpoliced bathrooms? Please. Total action down under. My black-haired friend walks over. Up close, that rumpled, slightly smelly punk thing. Too many late nights drinking and not enough trips to the laundry. But so damned cute. “Last call,” he says, pointing at his watch, a hint of a smile on his face. I smile back.
Never did get his name.