When The New School’s University Center was constructed in 2015, the new and shiny entranceway opened to an empty multipurpose event space that sank into the floor below. The L1 Café, as it would soon be known, didn’t boast much: a small retrievable stage, a projection booth, a handful of chairs, and some steps to sit on above a stairway to the main lobby. When not reserved for an official event, the space felt awkward, cold, and barren, as though abandoned by the architect. The need to fill the space became apparent. It wasn’t long before Glenn Ligon was called.
Glenn Ligon, a native New Yorker, had his first studio above a neon lighting store in Brooklyn. A conceptual artist well-versed in incorporating words and language into his practice, The New School Art Collection Advisory Group rightly commissioned him to create a work that filled this empty space. This commission was particularly special because Glenn Ligon had never created an installation in his hometown, New York City. The University Center would be his first.
“The only way to put anything there was [to wrap it] around the walls,” a student said when interviewed by The New School Free Press at its 2015 premiere. Ligon’s solution would do just that. By taking interconnected phrases from an over one-hundred-year-old well-known work of poetry and blasting argon gas through it, he makes entire stanzas glow. And who else to quote but Walt Whitman, one of New York’s most beloved denizens? Long before he became famous (and infamous, in his time) for the sexuality coded into his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman wrote short sketches about, and salutes to, the everyday people he’d cross on the ferry or pass on the street from Brooklyn to Manhattan, imagining the community they formed.
“You sort of dive [into Leaves of Grass] at different points,” Julia L. Foulkes, a professor of history at The New School, writes, and that same attitude is reflected in Ligon’s neon installation. The words illuminated above and around the event café are meant to be passed in and out of, like an exhibit movie that repeats itself on loop. The space was designed to be sped in and out of by students, faculty, and workers heading to class, lunch, or the library.
“The quotes in this piece reflect a space of encounter and transience,” the artist said at its inauguration. Blazing words contrast the sharp angles of the ceiling. Ligon continues: “Words as art, art as light, light as implementation of solution, making vision a reality.” Charged particles of argon gas dance through bent glass and thought ignites as pink light. Solitude is found among the throng, for anyone willing to stop and take in a phrase or two. “Admiring it a long while,” as Whitman first wrote, “then dismissing it,” the work itself promises that it can be encountered over time; encouraging the viewer to sit a moment, to “stand in [their] place with [their] own day here,” giving the passers-by a rejuvenation that only good art – good poetry – can.
More than anything, For Comrades and Lovers embodies Whitman’s ideas of solitude as time spent alone that inversely enables someone to come closer to the city around them. A Parsons student interviewed at the work’s premiere whose attention is caught because “the purple is nice” can find a moment in the simplicity of colored words anchored overhead. For Comrades and Lovers interrupts the routine of hustle and commute and invites the viewer into a quiet, unassuming space that is accessible every day. The UC becomes a ground for transience, the neon illumination declaring a moment out of time. The solitary nature of reading creates a relationship between loneliness and community: being among the hundreds who encounter the same work, yet never speak of it. The viewer becomes one with the throngs they pass through.
As Parsons professor Lydia Matthews points out, time spent with the phrases wrapped around us is “less trying to adore the work, than to ask questions.” Does this space link the arts, the sciences, and language? It certainly seems to. Whitman would’ve been amazed to see his words illuminated. It would have been extraordinary in his time. It is still spellbinding in our own.