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.