Artwork and Text Resources: Steve Reich – Come Out (1966) + Glenn Ligon

Steve Reich's early tape-loop work, Come Out, 1966 was a seminal piece of American avant-garde music. The work responded to the Harlem Riots of 1964, by sampling the voice of a youth involved in the riots, 19-year-old Daniel Hamm, who talked about being beaten by the police and piercing his bruise a proof of his beating, which the police denied. Reich looped a phrase from Hamm's interview – "I had to open the bruise up to let the bruised blood come out to show them" – turning it into a hypnotically rhythmical sound piece, which fluctuates between order and chaos, sense and sound, form and content, art and the political.

Black American artist Glenn Ligon recently riffed visually on the piece producing a set of large-scale paintings, with misregistered screenprints of Hamm's phrase offering a visual analogue of the sound. (The works were shown at an exhibition at the Camden Arts Gallery at the end of last year.)

Is Ligon's text-art a way to carry on a tradition of "history painting" after abstraction? Is the point formal play, or reference to a black history which seemed to be being repeated in the Ferguson Riots around the time this work was being shown? (Another form of repetition?) Or is the point the "poetic" gulf between the work's formal play and its historical referent?