A Quote by Glenn Ligon
A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.
Related Quotes
At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.
Jazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your music as a way to tap into content. It's related to the way my text-based work still functions as abstraction for me. If I repeat a sentence down a canvas, the text starts to smudge and disappear. It essentially becomes an abstract piece. The meaning of the text is still there.
With Orff it is text, text, text - the music always subordinate. Not so with me. In 'Magnificat,' the text is important, but in some places I'm writing just music and not caring about text. Sometimes I'm using extremely complicated polyphony where the text is completely buried. So no, I am not another Orff, and I'm not primitive.
Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle.
To criticize mathematics for its abstraction is to miss the point entirely. Abstraction is what makes mathematics work. If you concentrate too closely on too limited an application of a mathematical idea, you rob the mathematician of his most important tools: analogy, generality, and simplicity. Mathematics is the ultimate in technology transfer.
The meaning of a work is not what the author had in mind at some point, nor is it simply a property of the text or the experience of a reader. Meaning is an inescapable notion because it is not something simple or simply determined. It is simultaneously an experience of a subject and a property of a text. It is both what we understand and what in the text we try to understand.
Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.
My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape.
Everyone accepts the abstraction of Bach. My work aspires to the same kind of abstraction, which is so engaging that you're distracted from asking about what it means. So many paintings have hidden meanings or need wall texts, but my work is not in that category. Once it's in the viewer's eyes my job will be judged on whether or not it is engaging and pulls you in to a kind of intelligence or poetic something going on there that makes it sustainable to look at.
I like acting with no lines because all of a sudden you're able to express things without always worrying about the text. It's great to have a great text, but there's a lot of stuff you can't say in words, and I think there's something really nice about good physical moments.
I work out a lot and I do yoga and I do Pilates and I'm kind of athletic. I've taken dance classes, but at the same point I'm just a total klutz.
Good web text has a lot in common with good print text. It's plain, concise, concrete and 'transparent': even on a personal site the text shouldn't draw attention to itself, only to its subject.
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 even says, "They don't believe I'm American - black people come from Africa." The essay is not only about race relations, but about what it means to be a stranger anywhere.
In our daily lives as programmers, we process text strings a lot. So I tried to work hard on text processing, namely the string class and regular expressions. Regular expressions are built into the language and are very tuned up for use.
I think whether you are a judge on my court or whether you are a judge on a court of appeals or any court, and lawyers too - and if you're interested in law yourself, you'll be in the same situation - you have a text that isn't clear. If the text is clear, you follow the text. If the text isn't clear, you have to work out what it means. And that requires context.
Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.
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