Analyse Study For Frankenstein

When I entered the Gary C. Werths and Richard Frimel Gallery at the Saint Louis Art Museum, I was drawn to Glenn Ligon’s art piece, Study for Frankenstein #1.

At first glance, Study for Frankenstein looks like a print of flat text in black ink on white canvas. The first three lines of text are legible, and after that the ink smudges and blurs until the bottom of the canvas, where the last line is completely illegible. I found myself focusing on the first line of text, “Sometimes I wished to express.” What immediately came to mind was the fact that this piece was representative of two types of expression: the image and the written word. As the viewer, the meaning of the piece comes from both the meaning of the text and the way the text looks

It took a little longer for me to decide what the artist’s ideas were. The quote is about the difficulty of self-expression, but there seemed to be a deeper meaning behind this piece. According to the plaque describing the piece, Glenn Ligon’s work is often about race and social invisibility. Taking that into consideration, I remembered that one of the themes of Frankenstein is the theme of the other or the outsider. Discussions of race often bring up the fact that racial prejudice exists because of the belief in and the fear of outsiders. I found several possibilities for meanings in the gradual smudging and blurring of the oil stick pigment on the canvas, which relate to the themes of race and social invisibility. First of all, the oil stick pigment is black and the canvas is white. I interpreted this as symbolic of black people in white society. Furthermore, I concluded that the blurring of the black text is representative of the lumping together of black people until they become an entire unit. I noticed that the artist seems to have wanted to emphasize the filling of the negative space around the text. I have several interpretations for that choice. The first is that self-expression can be difficult because one’s words and ideas can become muddled