C urators of museum collections are a cautious and often conservative bunch (conservation, after all, is their business). Artists, like the court jester, are invited in to stir things up and break the rules. Glenn Ligon’s All Over the Place at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is a model for what artists can do in such a setting.
As much about the museum itself, its history and its collection, as it is about finding new ways, and places, to display his own work, the 64-year-old Black US artist gives the place a shake-up and a shake-down. Ligon, as the title of his show suggests, is all over the place: on the pediments and columns of the museum’s exterior, among the museum’s ceramics collection, in the rooms dedicated to Italian and Spanish paintings and a gallery devoted to flower paintings. He has delved into the hidden stacks and rifled the print collection.
The museum’s frontage glows with white neon text: nine different English translations of the last two lines of Greek poet Constantine P Cavafy’s 1898 Waiting for the Barbarians. “Now what will become of us without barbarians? Those people were some kind of solution,” reads one. Another asks: “What are we going to do now without barbarians? In a way those people were a solution.
” The different formulations of Cavafy’s Greek text flex with yearning and complaint, all referring to the history of Cavafy’s home town of Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, from its founding as a centre of Helleni.