Glenn Ligon, 'Skin Tight'
In: Boxer: An Anthology of Writings on Boxing and Visual Culture. Edited by David Chandler, John Gill, Tania Guha and Gilane Tawadros. London: Institute of international Visual Arts, 1996, p. 59.
I was eight years-old in 1968 when James Brown released Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud. The single went to number one on the rhythm and blues charts and number ten on the pop charts. In his autobiography, Brown says that the song is "obsolete now" and was "obsolete, but needed" when it was recorded, but he made it so that children could grow up with a sense of pride. I remember the thrill I got when I first heard the record on the little black plastic transistor radio I carried to school with me every day. Although the rhetoric of the black power movement hadn't quite made it to the public housing project in the Bronx where my family lived, I knew the song expressed something new and subversive. I was well aware of the issues of race, having attended a predominantly white elementary school in a wealthy neighbourhood in Manhattan since I was six years-old, The song became the anthem of my own burgeoning black consciousness movement, although when I was around my white classmates I could only manage to whisper the response to James' Say it Loud, fearful and ashamed of its strident nationalism.
One year before the release of Say It Loud, Muhammad Ali refused induction into the US Army, on the grounds of his religious beliefs. In a statement issued at the time, Ali said: "I am proud of the title World Heavyweight Champion, which I won in the ring in Miami on 25 February 1964. The holder of it should at all times have the courage of his convictions and carry out those convictions, not only in the ring but throughout all phases of his life." Ali was immediately stripped of his title, his passport was confiscated and he was not allowed to fight for three years.
Although I knew nothing about boxing and wasn't interested in the sport, I knew about Ali and was fascinated by him. A Korean American friend said that when he was a kid he was also fascinated by Ali because he represented what he had been told was a very, very dangerous thing to be in America: a person who spoke his mind. Fiercely skilled in the ring and verbally adept, Ali was a scirocco that blew through the nation, embodying a 'New Negro' that was beginning to take the helm from traditional civil rights and religious leaders. Ali was also stunningly handsome. One sportswriter wrote that he "glowed, sort of a strange colour". His physical beauty penetrated to a region in my mind just beginning to be aware of my desire for the bodies of other men and seeing his image on TV or in the print media invariably caused me to skip a breath.
More recently Ali's words and his body became the centre of my installation Skin Tight, which employs the form of the punch bag as a means to investigate how black men have used boxing to confront issues of black American identity. The work deals with the construction of masculinity in relation to questions of violence, the commodification of black subjects, sexuality and resistance.
Joyce Carol Oates has remarked that although you play other sports, you don't play boxing. I believe she is correct in suggesting that boxing is where battles are fought far larger than the immediate spectacle of two fighters in the ring. Here in America, and throughout the world, people of colour have faced cultural and political struggles. Boxing is one of the most important and most visible arenas in which these struggles have been played out.