CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/8/2024

The highly anticipated writings of Glenn Ligon

It's a thrill to finally have our own copies of Distinguishing Piss from Rain, Hauser & Wirth Publishers' whopping 400-page collection of interviews and writings on art, history, race, sexuality and popular culture by the noted American artist Glenn Ligon. Weighing in at 400 pages, with 80 color and 20 black-and-white reproductions, this beautifully produced volume is edited by Primary Information publisher James Hoff with Introduction by MoMA curator Thomas (T.) Jean Lax. “Reading these essays when they were first published gave me a pathway through the art world as a younger curator,” Lax writes. “Reading them anew, I sometimes had the feeling of being told a story I had heard before but whose meaning I hadn’t fully understood the first or second time around. It was as if their full significance was still emerging, not unlike the way you know the unmistakable feeling of true love the first time you feel it, but nevertheless must practice receiving it, repeatedly over time. Love is a subtext and refrain in this volume. At least twice, Ligon invokes a phrase from bell hooks: ‘Love will take you places you might not ordinarily go.’ De Kooning’s ‘Flesh [is] the reason . . . oil paint was invented’ is also reprised across the writings. Who knew hooks and de Kooning had so much in common?”