Updated:2024-10-09 09:18 Views:100
T’s Art issue looks at the iconoclastic artists who have found power in saying no.
In the 1970s, the artist David Hammons started gathering hair from Black barbershops. In New York, he tacked the strands onto grease-slicked paper bags to make multidimensional collages, topped off with a few bones from barbecue ribs and a sprinkle of glitter. In Los Angeles, he affixed small tufts to pieces of wire and stuck them into the sands of Venice Beach; he let those wash away with the tides. He didn’t care much about making a work that he could sell. Then as now, Hammons wasn’t interested in catering to the art market — or even necessarily speaking to it. Over the course of his approximately 60-year-career, Hammons, 81 and currently based in the New York area, has participated in very few interviews. In a defining one from a 1986 issue of Real Life Magazine with the curator and historian Kellie Jones, he discusses his disdain for traditional galleries. “The rooms are almost always wrong, too much plasterboard, overlit, too shiny and too neat,” he says. “The work should be somewhere in between your house and where you’re going to see it.”
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Hammons is in the collections of major museums and has shown at a handful of galleries — his solo exhibition at the Los Angeles outpost of Hauser & Wirth in 2019 was one of the most recent and uniquely comprehensive opportunities to see his work, and a book on the exhibition will be released by the gallery’s publishing arm in February of next year. He’s currently featured in a group show at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea and will be in another later this fall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But since the beginning of his practice, many of his artworks have been public interventions, often carried out surreptitiously. A good deal of his works are likely known only to himself, his collaborators and the people who happened to encounter them in the moment, though even they might not have been aware that they were looking at a David Hammons. He frequently declines exhibition invitations and is not represented by a commercial gallery. The times he’s worked closely with an art institution, he’s been adept at bending that institution out of its regular shape and to his own idiosyncratic, anticommercial will. In 2014, Hammons started working on a permanent large-scale installation for the Whitney Museum of American Art called “Day’s End,” an open, stainless-steel structure that mirrors the shape and dimensions of the Hudson River pier shed that stood in its exact location until 1979; the work takes its title and inspiration from the artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s own 1975 intervention with the shed, when he carved holes in its floors and walls. Though the Whitney helped fund its construction and it sits directly across from the museum, Hammons positioned the work on public land. It is therefore “owned by everyone and by no one, open and free to all,” as the museum’s then-director, Adam D. Weinberg, wrote in an essay published around the opening.
ImageHammons in Harlem in the early 1980s, carrying a pole for one of his “Higher Goals” installations, which were basketball hoops at exaggerated heights.Credit...© 2024 David Hammons/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Coreen SimpsonHammons resists not only the norms of the art market but also the extra, arbitrary rules placed on Black artists. In 1975, his first New York exhibition took place at Just Above Midtown, a pioneering, experimental gallery that foregrounded artists of color. At the time, “Black artists were really in a major debate with one another about who’s a Black artist,” said JAM’s founder, Linda Goode Bryant. A popular position was that Black artists making figurative works were considered to be genuinely, politically Black, whereas those working in abstraction and conceptualism were not. Hammons’s show playfully convoluted that neat division; he stuck his greasy, hair- and barbecue-embellished bags to the gallery walls, turning Black people’s trash into ambiguous, provocative totems. “When people came in, they didn’t know what to do,” Bryant says. “People were debating and yelling and screaming at each other. … ‘How are you going to call this art?’”
“David, true to form, just [stood] there and look[ed] … He didn’t say anything,” Bryant continues. “He’s always been that way — will always be that way.” What follows, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Hammons’s establishing his New York studio, is an attempt to decode one of the most elusive artists of our time by looking at a selection of his lesser known works, as remembered by a few of the people who witnessed them along the way.
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