The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has been going through a process of self-reflection, reassessing its history and collections. Last year they won awards for their exhibition Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance; this spring will see a second show, Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition. Inviting Glenn Ligon to reinterpret, redisplay and critique the museum's permanent collection is another part of this process. Artist interventions are an increasing feature as institutions seek ways of engaging both with the past and with diverse contemporary audiences. The British Museum recently invited Hew Locke to do the same. However, while the Fitzwilliam's intentions are admirable, the impact initially seems strangely muted.
You know something isn't right when you walk past the first installation without noticing it. Waiting for the Barbarians is a set of neon scripts on the Fitzwilliam's imposing classical portico. The museum have used their grandiose entrance to good effect in previous exhibitions: noticeably plastering their columns in banknotes for Defaced. Here though, Ligon's potent message is small, dwarfed by the supporting scaffolding, barely illuminated. The effect is a visual whisper, arguably a little apologetic, and ultimately disappointing. Armed with a plan you can then make your way round the museum on a kind of Ligon trail. It is patchy: 'all over the place' seems an exaggeration.
Some pieces work better than others: black moon jars cluster amongst the porcelain displays with a sense of mild threat. You can't walk past these: in fact you have to resist touching their sleek bulbousness. Apparently similar, they are in fact individual; apparently monochrome, they are in fact infinitely subtle shades of blackness, apparently perfect they are a mass of surface blemishes. The matt vacuum sucks you in compellingly. Yet, their looming power distracts from the careful curations around them which reference cross-cultural appropriation and interaction. There is a running tension throughout Ligon's work between visual forthrightness and intellectual nuance.
Upstairs, amongst the fine art rooms the impact is also mixed. Ligon's academic hang of flower paintings is a joyous, riotous triumph. The Fitzwilliam always devotes this room to their impressive collection of floral art but it is usually hung with a sparse restraint that showcases the furniture and polished floorboards as much as the art. Here, flowers tumble off the walls so that you hardly see where one picture ends and another begins. This opulence, as the now customary line about still life goes, is supposed to underline imperial plunder, the capitalist drive for possession and control. But it is nature and art which triumph here. Repeated patterns, colours and forms constantly engage and distract, rippling across the surface, pushing out all thought of politics. Anyone who things flower paintings are tame and tedious, needs to sit here and soak this up. Sumptuous, sensual, subtle. If I was the Fitzwilliam, I would keep this display permanently. It is magnificent.
Elsewhere, Ligon tackles the familiar story of the Balthazar, the Black Magi. Isolating a single c.1520 panel on the wall, he makes us look closely, but ultimately it is not painting which holds the attention, it is the wall itself. Old paper reveals ghosts of pictures past in its eerie pattern of shading: gleaming gold finally seeing the light of day as the canonical paintings were stripped out. The only other image is one of Ligon's own - Study for Negro Sunshine (Red) - the first of a series which goes on an irreverent journey through the galleries, disrupting the natural order of symmetry and rhythm. A constant reminder of another presence, which is somehow never quite present enough.
The Fitzwilliam's intense little octagon gallery becomes the focal point of Ligon's interventions, dedicated to his own large scale, text-based works. After the gentleness, the quiet, these are raw screams of rasping texture, the words overlaid so frequently and violently that eventually they become blotted out entirely in a visual white noise. Stand in the centre of the room and it is a surround-sound assault, but up close to the surface of an individual canvas the complexity of material and message draw you in with the same mesmeric power of the matt moon jars. The museum's trail makes this the end point, but it pays to retrace your steps because Ligon's own works make his interventions all the more meaningful. This is a man for whom words are as important as images, whose inspirations are writers more often than artists. Do not underestimate him. Sometimes you don't need to be all over the place, you just need to be clever.
