Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic On the day I meet the American artist Glenn Ligon, he arrives a little late, clad in navy blue and slightly out of breath. He\u2019s spent longer than expected touring the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge. He had, he tells me, been delighted to find both the hand-written manuscript and the first edition of AA Milne\u2019s Winnie-the-Pooh on public display there and then dismayed that he couldn\u2019t take a picture. Pooh, it turns out, is the intellectual property of Disney in the UK. \u201cIt certainly made me consider the question of ownership all over again, and what I\u2019ve managed to say about all that, here at the Fitzwilliam,\u201d muses the 65-year-old Ligon.We are standing outside Cambridge\u2019s fabulous treasure house. The Fitzwilliam Museum contains more than 500,000 works, from antique bas-reliefs from Persepolis to outstanding C\u00e9zannes, and Ligon has been given licence to raid and rearrange its contents, popping up in eight of its high Victorian spaces in various ways.The result, called Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place, starts even before you enter, the upward-curving pillars of its grand portico now embellished with lines of illuminated type in bright white neon, outlined in black. \u201cWhat will become of us now without Barbarians? Those people were some kind of solution\u201d, reads one of the seven slightly different translations of the same lines glowing on the facade.The words were written in 1898 by the modernist poet CP Cavafy \u2014 gay, Greek and unrecognised until later life, who died in Alexandria in 1933. The poem from which they come is called \u201cWaiting for the Barbarians\u201d, and although Cavafy\u2019s barbarians are not real, they imply a marginalised other, whose role was only noticed once they were no longer there.\u201cI assume whatever idea I have, someone will say no,\u201d says Ligon, who was born in the Bronx. Instead, he explains as we walk into the museum\u2019s opulent foyer, he spent three years \u2014 off and on \u2014 in this building, diving into its dusty depths, and bringing unlikely things to the surface, encouraged to do so by increasingly keen curators. \u201cThey really let me poke about,\u201d he says. He hasn\u2019t run riot, but rather performed a delicate dance through its galleries and archives: light-footed, sometimes humorous, occasionally dark.In a corridor usually lined with early Italian art, for example, he has removed a series of religious paintings that had hung there for decades. Left behind are golden-coloured squares of the original wallcovering, shielded from the light for nearly 100 years, highlighting the stagnant immutability of the museum display. He has hung a single picture, bright and small \u2014 the \u201cAdoration of the Kings\u201d (c1520) \u2014 in which Balthazar is shown as a dark-skinned man, a single figure, according to Ligon, that represents the entire continent of Africa. \u201cI think that this gallery can hold the presence of Blackness and the absence of the Medici paintings,\u201d says Ligon, perhaps questioning the mind-blinding excess of work which museums traditionally offer us.In another gallery, though, he has filled the walls, top to bottom, with 80 flower paintings \u2014 voluptuous, and mostly 17th-century Dutch, works that were largely extracted from storage and required serious conservation. Flowers tumble from baskets, flourish out of Grecian urns, are paired with ripening peaches and bunches of grapes.\u201cThey had 15 paintings there before,\u201d says Ligon. \u201cBut my own work is about repetition. If I repeat something over and over again, does it turn into something else?\u201d The more you look, the proliferation of fruits and flowers putrefies into the dark-hearted abundance of empire; in Ligon\u2019s best-known works, he prints the same lines over and over, until they are an inky black, sticky surface where meaning becomes drowned out.At the Fitzwilliam, it is Ligon\u2019s text work \u201cStudy for Negro Sunshine (Red)\u201d that dominates. In places you can\u2019t escape the jet-black oil-stick letters on a deep red background, the phrases lifted from Gertrude Stein\u2019s novella Three Lives. \u201cI think she liked the opposition of the idea \u2014 negro and sunshine, brightness and darkness \u2014 but she was also talking about a surface joy; she had no interest in the inner lives of Black people whatsoever,\u201d says Ligon of the words used to describe the disposition of a Black woman in the novel.\u201cNegro Sunshine\u201d is all over the Italian room, multiple wood-framed versions dotted around the heroic old masters. That Ligon wanted his work hung too close, too high, too uncentred, was at first a challenge for the museum\u2019s technicians, who work to well-regulated rules of display. \u201cThen I heard there was a little problem with the word \u2018negro\u2019, that it\u2019s triggering,\u201d says Ligon. He points out an adjacent painting: a rendering of the rape of Lucretia by Titian. \u201cNo trigger warning,\u201d he says, eyebrows raised.It\u2019s not just the mechanisms of display that Ligon has disrupted, though he\u2019s done so royally in the ceramics gallery, where cabinets line the room, stuffed with airless displays of porcelain. \u201cWe had to get special insurance to have them so close to the edge of the table,\u201d he explains of his series of moon jars, free-ranging across a large low plinth, that he made with a Korean potter living in Japan over several years in the late 2010s. They are black versions of the traditionally luminous Korean archetype; Ligon describes his as \u201clumpy and imperfect; they absorb the light\u201d. They touch, too, on ideas of blackness. \u201cThe potter would point at something I would call aubergine or brown and say it was black. I had to expand my idea of what black was, and I thought that was fabulous,\u201d says Ligon.More importantly, he has questioned the very idea of perfection, the fundamental mantra of museology, instead finding scored-through Degas prints in the archives, never intended for display, and getting excited about the tiny annotations in the margins of priceless old manuscripts. Art, after all, is about process and Ligon\u2019s own is shown in the browning pages of Baldwin novels from which he took words, so thickly spattered with printing ink as to appear redacted.\u201cI\u2019ve just found out that all Baldwin\u2019s works are online now so this is from a bygone era. No more books,\u201d says Ligon.There has been much talk of late around the accessibility of museums, to whom they are really available, and how to \u201copen them up\u201d. Solutions include an interpretation that emphasises diversity and comparisons with the contemporary world, or the giddy excitement of interactive experiences. But here\u2019s another idea. Invite an artist into an institution, give them three years, and don\u2019t say no.To March 2, fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic On the day I meet the American artist Glenn Ligon, he arrives a little late, clad in navy blue and slightly out of breath. He\u2019s spent longer than expected touring the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge. He had, he tells me, been<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":157686,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-157685","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":157687,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157685\/revisions\/157687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}