Walking in Memphis

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March 17, 2008 Am I going to Graceland? When I first came to Memphis almost a year ago, I visited the Stax Records Museum and the Lorraine Motel. I ate barbecued ribs and walked along the Mississippi River. But I didn’t go to Graceland. Too busy thinking about my upcoming show, or so I told myself, but perhaps that was me just being idiosyncratic. Then again, who has time for Elvis when B. B. King, Johnny Cash, Dusty Springfield, Isaac Hayes, and Otis Redding all recorded music here? Fuck Elvis. I really want to hear Al Green preach at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church. Peter Fleissig, the curator who organized my show at the Power House, has offered to take me, but next Sunday is Easter and I can’t go to the magnificent Rev. Al Green’s church on Easter Sunday without an outfit. Just ain’t right.

March 18, 2008 Went for a walk this morning and stood for a long time looking up at the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The motel is now part of the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum is an institution focused on the history of race relations in the United States, which is, by definition, somewhat depressing. I should have gone in and toured the exhibitions one more time, but I am not in the mood for race relations today. Sitting across the street from the museum in a lawn chair surrounded by homemade signs was Jacqueline Smith. Jacqueline was the last tenant of the Lorraine Motel, evicted some 20 years ago when it was turned into a museum, and she has maintained a sidewalk vigil protesting gentrification and the distortion of King’s legacy ever since. Perhaps this should have been my show at the Power House: a sign on the door telling folks that the exhibition space is closed, but if they want to they can walk around the corner and talk to Jacqueline about “the failure of the dream.” We nodded hello as I passed, but I was not in the mood for her today either.

March 19, 2008 The big blinking “America” neon is installed, but it overloaded the electrical system in the middle of the night and the whole building smells like burnt tar. Nice. The guy who installed it is busy fixing neon casino signs damaged after a recent tornado just south of here, but he has promised to come back this morning to have a look at it. The wallpaper has arrived, though the fabricator sent just enough to cover the walls in the upper gallery if we don’t make any mistakes when installing it. The image on the wallpaper is a close-up of a Warhol “Race Riot” silk screen, cropped so much that it is virtually abstract. A form of disappearance, which has been a constant theme in my work, but as it goes up on the wall the repeat in the pattern makes odd Rorschach-like images. James Patterson, a doctor who is on the board of the Power House, said it was very Origin of the World. I had to agree with him on that. On top of the wallpaper we will install paintings of Richard Pryor’s jokes, with the text in black on a gold background. Pryor’s record label was here in Memphis for a time, so the paintings have some local resonance. I think it will be good but I need to see it all up.

March 20, 2008 The volunteers arrived. Art students from local colleges, mostly. They were eager to start working, so I quickly made up a piece with fragments of text about Memphis and had them stencil it on the floor of the main gallery. Across the street, someone was filming a movie. There were dozens of production trailers, antique cars, and women in 1950s dresses. I was told Angela Bassett and Justin Timberlake are the leads, but the combination seems improbable. I kept an eye out for Justin, but no sightings today.

March 21, 2008 The Black Lips were playing at a club near the art school. The local paper said they are known for their neo-punk sound, and for having impromptu naked make-out sessions on stage. I had to go. The set started hours after my bedtime, and although the band members were cute, they were definitely not undressing (the singer was so stoned he could barely hold his guitar). When they played a laconic version of Dixie as an interlude, I knew it was time to leave. The one consolation were the shirtless guys in the mosh pit, who, after they finished jumping on each other and hurling beer cans at the band, politely said “excuse me” as they passed me on their way to the bathroom or to have a smoke. Folks got manners down South.

March 22, 2008 Went to Graceland today. I was wrong: Graceland is amazing. Elvis bought it in 1957, when the area around it was relatively undeveloped. It is still undeveloped, with the exception of dozens of Elvis-themed gift shops and attractions that line what is now Elvis Presley Boulevard. This being Easter weekend, the place is mobbed, so we decided to get a VIP pass, which for double the normal admission price let us skip the hour-and-a-half-long wait to get inside. On the VIP minibus that took us from the admissions building to Graceland was a Japanese tourist who kept mumbling something about “nigger babies,” to the amusement of all the black tour guides.

The parts of the house they let you tour are quite modest, but as a whole it is a horror show of bad taste, filled with kitsch you wouldn’t think twice about taking out to the curb. Adjoining buildings house Elvis’s gold and platinum albums, his jumpsuits, movie posters, photos, and dozens and dozens of sports cars. There is something quintessentially American about Graceland’s mixture of uncritical hero worship, rampant consumerism, and opulent vulgarity. In America, what you can’t sell, you kill, and Graceland is the site of a complicated story about Elvis and cultural miscegenation that has been killed by being turned into a theme park. The story of Memphis is being sold too, but Memphis is still messy, full of dilemmas of race and class that having a black president or a national holiday on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday won’t resolve. What I fell in love with in Memphis is all that messiness.

March 23, 2008 Exhibition opened last night. Lots of art students and collectors and museum people. The work prompted people to tell me stories about their relationship to the movement. Don and Mera Rubell had me mesmerized with tales of civil rights marches they participated in during the ’60s. Elliot Perry, a retired basketball player and collector who hosted a party after the opening, pointed out his grandfather in a famous photo of the civil rights march where the “I am a man” sign was carried. Listening to them, I realize that my relationship to that history is a bit distanced, even a bit clouded. Perhaps it is that distance that allows me to make the work I do; to even think of taking an iconic image from a march in 1968 and make a painting of it, then years later doing a “condition report” on an image of that painting, detailing the cracks, fissures, loss, and change it has undergone. The presence of the past in the present. I know this focus on the past is all “old school”: that we are in a post–civil rights era and, as one art student said to me at the opening, “Who wants to think about all of that stuff?” I suspect he meant to say, “Who wants to think about all of that stuff again?” I didn’t press him on the point.

“Figure/Paysage/Marine,” a solo show of Glenn Ligon’s work, is on view at Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris, from Oct. 21 through Dec. 23.  "Walking in Memphis" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.