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THE SECRET ART OF DAVID HAMMONS
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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 Los Angeles 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 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,” <https://tinyurl.com/yrwdht3s> 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 <https://tinyurl.com/yurs9v2m> 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.
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Hammons 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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1. “Venice Beach Hair Garden,” 1977
While in Los Angeles, Hammons made works with Black hair, gathered from barbershops. For “Venice Beach Hair Garden,” he pierced small clumps with thin metal wires — straightened out coat hangers — and planted the pieces in the wet sand of Venice Beach’s shoreline.
Tom Finkelpearl, the former deputy director of MoMA PS1 and curator of Hammons’s first major retrospective, “Rousing the Rabble” (1990-91): You might think of David as this rogue artist. He’s also very careful to have good, high-quality photographs taken of just about everything he makes. In New York, he had Dawoud Bey — now a MacArthur Genius. Before that, he was in L.A. and Bruce Talamon was the guy who took pictures of everything.
[The hair and wire sculptures] are typical of David’s public artworks: [they’re made] basically just for himself, completely on his own terms, on his own time. No budget at all. There’s no market value. He had no permission. [The beach installation] probably lasted a day or two at the most, and it was, in a way, done for the photograph or just for the experience of making it.
Bruce Talamon, a photographer and frequent collaborator of Hammons’s who documented many of the latter’s performances, installations and in-progress works after the two met in the early 1970s: I had a car that worked. So if he wanted to get from point A to point B sometimes, he’d call. And we’d jump in my little Fiat and ride out, and he’d never ask me to put my camera down.
We rode out to the beach that day in 1977. It was just the two of us. There might’ve been some passers-by, but no one, to my knowledge, stopped. There’s a great quote from Eric Dolphy, the jazz musician: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.” And it’s the same with the art. He started out on the sand, and then he moved closer to the water. The hair sort of looks like cattails in a swamp. And then the water came in and basically took everything away and, after a while, it was gone.
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Janine Cirincione, former director of Tilton Gallery, which staged back-to-back exhibitions of Hammons’s work in 1990 and ’91: The simple, minimal gesture is something that was always very important to him. He’s always looking for oddball materials, but also very personal ones. Hair is like a talisman in many cultures; it’s something that you don’t cast off or share or give away. And then, of course, the barbershop is an important social world for many people.
David was always a big fan of the artist Richard Tuttle, but when you think about these two artists — who are both working with bits of wire and tape and a found object or a found moment — their work couldn’t be more different. Richard’s, in my opinion, stays much more in the formal realm. And David absolutely has the formal nailed down, but then there are those allusions to personal space, to history, to memory, to the human body and the ways society has treated that body. And they’re usually funny. David tries to find the humor in everything. He is the kind of person for whom that is absolutely a survival mechanism.
Linda Goode Bryant, a filmmaker and the founder of Just Above Midtown gallery, which exhibited Hammons’s work in the 1970s and ’80s: He said, “I should be able to make art and not have to go to the art supply store.” So he went to barbershops. He was also working with brown paper bags with grease and barbecue bones. The work just took on a freedom. [While preparing for his first show at JAM] the gallery was so small — 720 square feet — that he decided that, until it was time for us to de-install the existing show and patch the walls and paint, he was going to store the work around the corner in the hallway in an area that was tucked away. And then the next day, he went to go find it and the maintenance man had thrown it out. [Laughs.] This was one or two days before the show. [The art collector] A.C. Hudgins had started hanging out at JAM and had met David. David said, “Oh, man, we gotta get some hair, we gotta get some barbecue bones.” A.C. said, “Come on, man, we’re going to Harlem.” So the pieces he made came from Harlem.
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2. “Delta Spirit House,” 1985
In the summer of 1985, the public arts organization Creative Time hosted its seventh rendition of Art on the Beach, an annual, outdoor program of installations and events, in what was then Battery Park Landfill along the Hudson River. For his commission, Hammons and his collaborators built a small, hexagonal house inspired, in part, by Black Southern carpentry styles. He also invited the jazz ensemble Sun Ra Arkestra to perform multiple times that summer alongside the structure.
L.G.B.: David had a reputation. So people who wouldn’t have necessarily always come to Art on the Beach [came that year] because David was doing Art on the Beach. I remember that being a big deal because David’s very good at saying no. People were hearing that David was building a house or something on the beach.
T.F.: David made the whole thing out of found wood, stuff he scavenged from here and there, from construction sites. He’d bring it over and just tap it [into the structure] by hand. He very carefully credited the two people he worked with: an architect named Jerry Barr and his girlfriend at that time, [the artist] Angela Valerio. So [“Delta Spirit House”] is officially a collaboration between the three of them because they all put in so much work — and by the way, back in those days no one credited their collaborators.
L.G.B.: Oftentimes, artists made sculptural works [for Art on the Beach] but this really looked like it could be a hut that someone was living in by the Hudson River.
There were a number of concerts; it wasn’t a one-off. David was a huge Sun Ra fan. They had a friendship of sorts. Sun Ra was doing some wonderfully out-of-this-universe kind of stuff. I think David was intrigued by that. I suspect he met Sun Ra through the artists and others that he developed friendships with in Brooklyn. It’s a network — kindred spirits find each other.
T.F.: [All of the artists featured at Art on the Beach] were responsible for getting rid of their things at the end. I don’t know if this is true, but I think it is: David put [the “Delta Spirit House”] out on the Hudson River and set it on fire. I heard that from him. But, you know, his stories changed 18 times.
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3. “Public Toilets,” 1990
Hammons, having found himself in Europe after winning the Prix de Rome, traveled to Temse, Belgium, in 1990 to participate in the show “Ponton Temse” at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent. For his contribution, he attached several urinals to trees in a patch of woods.
J.C.: Marcel Duchamp is one of the original tricksters of the 20th century, and he’s one of Hammons’s most referred to art-historical references. Duchamp’s catalogue raisonné, [a 1997 softcover edition of Arturo Schwarz’s “The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp”] is inside of [Hammons’s] “The Holy Bible: Old Testament” (2002), [a limited-edition artist’s book that] he rebound to look like a Bible; he’s positing Duchamp as the Old Testament figure of Modernism. In “Public Toilets,” the urinal is an immediate reference to Duchamp’s “Fountain” [a readymade porcelain urinal from 1917]. Hammons has the Duchampian desire to put whatever he says is art in unusual places in order to force a conversation about what art is and what’s appropriate.
T.F.: The other reference, I would say, is to Hammons’s own piece “Pissed Off” [performed in 1981], in which he [urinated] on the Richard Serra sculpture [“T.W.U.” (1979-80)]. [Hammons] said, “I’m in between outsider art, Arte Povera and Duchamp.”
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4. “Four Beats to the Bar,” 1990
In 1990, Hammons slid nearly two dozen condoms onto the spokes of a turnstile at a New York City subway station for commuters to unwittingly discover.
L.G.B.: I didn’t see the condoms on the turnstile. And yet during that [same] period, he sent me condoms through the mail! He did it once or twice, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he sent them to other people. I said, “David, why are you sending me condoms?” [Laughs.] “What is your message here?” [But] it’s not about [his reasons]. We all lived in a space where it’s for you to engage and experience it however you want to. Like, “I’m not telling you what this is. I’m not doing my job if I have to tell you what it is.”
J.C.: David has such a sly [and] subtle sense of humor. He really loved not only the element of surprise but also really and truly [generating that surprise] in the middle of unexpected situations, like during your workday or [while you’re entering] the subway. But [he also wanted to engage] real folk — who aren’t necessarily art world people.
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5. “House of the Future,” 1991, and 6. “America Street,” 1991
In the spring of 1991, Hammons traveled to Charleston, S.C., to make a work for the Spoleto Festival USA, an annual performing and visuals arts program. He was there at the invitation of Mary Jane Jacob, the curator of the festival’s site-specific exhibition “Places With a Past.” Hammons’s installation was a two-story house with the intentionally awkward dimensions of 6 by 20 feet, constructed from scrap materials and located in a Black neighborhood on a road called America Street, which is also the name of an additional work that he later made for the festival: On a small plot of land across from the first, he placed an edition of his “African American Flag” and replaced a sidewalk-level billboard’s cigarette ad with a photograph of Black children, their gazes upturned.
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T.F.: He loved to ride a bike around, and that’s [how] he found these two lots: He wanted to choose a site that was off the beaten track for the art audience — to explicitly do something, for the citywide Spoleto Festival, that was in a Black community and then challenge people to come see it. And then it was up to the festival to get him permission [from the city]. David’s not normally [installing public artworks] with permission and commissions and all that kind of stuff. But he really went all out to listen to people in the neighborhood, and in a way that most artists don’t. He was responding to the site in the sense of building something that reflected the architecture of the neighborhood, etc., but also [in the sense] of employing people from the neighborhood: [the contractor, Albert Alston, who built the house] was from right down the block, and [David] was handing checks out left and right — using the [festival’s] budget to put money back into the community.
[On one lot] was this billboard and then [on] the other is the house. It’s not a functional house, but it [essentially] became a community arts center. This kid, [a young local artist], had a show there [and Hammons paid him for participating].
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Ishmael Reed, the author of over 30 books, plays and poetry collections, who met Hammons at the New York gallery of the writer and publisher Steve Cannon, a mutual friend who hosted cultural gatherings for artists from the 1970s up until the 2010s: This comes right out of Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington, [who said to the Black community]: “You build houses. You do things in your artistic work that has something to do with functionality.” After the Civil War, Black people built their own houses. I think David hearkens back to that. This whole thing about self-sufficiency — that’s one strain [of] his philosophy.
T.F.: As I understand it, [the house has mostly] been preserved by neighborhood folks who thought it was worth preserving. And the person who helped David build that, the contractor, he really feels like it’s his thing. He’s adopted it. And that’s exactly what David’s talking about. If people in the neighborhood believe it’s theirs, then you don’t have to worry about making something out of bronze.
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7. Untitled Works Recreating the Logos of the N.B.A. and M.L.B., 2000
In “Untitled,” Hammons took the insignias for the N.B.A. and M.L.B. — white male silhouettes against blue-and-red backgrounds — and made the figures Black. He also changed the colors from blue, white and red to the colors of the Black Liberation flag — red, black and green — before printing them out as stickers. The work echoes Hammons’s 1990 “African American Flag,” which similarly transforms the United States flag into a Pan-African emblem.
L.G.B.: My apartment [in New York] was where artists lived and hung out if they didn’t have places until they could get [their own]. And so [Hammons] was by there a lot. He’d have some [of these stickers] on him and hand them out to whoever he felt like handing them out to. I’ve got one or two of them at my house, sitting on a shelf because I like them so much.
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[The stickers] were his way of representing Black players who aren’t recognized fully for all their amazing talents. He incorporates aspects of being Black in many of the things that he does, and he does it in a way that disrupts your assumptions of what [Blackness] looks like. Because if people [were] doing something a certain way, he was always just trying to figure out how to do it differently. He would take [his work] as far as he could take it, but always within the context of being Black.
I.R.: He belongs to a school of artists who would take brands and invert them, like [Andy] Warhol did. But at the same time, he’s a Black nationalist — that’s obvious; it becomes almost heavy-handed in his work that he’s a Black nationalist.
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8. Unnamed Performance With the Henry Ward Beecher Monument, Columbus Park, Brooklyn, 2007-14
At Columbus Park in Downtown Brooklyn is an imposing bronze statue of the white abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher. The figure stands upright, his gaze elevated, and he’s dressed in multiple, layered coats. Beneath the larger-than-life Beecher are two white children and a diminutive Black woman, who’s wearing a simple dress and looks up at the abolitionist, proffering a palm frond at his feet. For several winters, Hammons visited the statue.
L.G.B.: He took me to the park to show me the statue, and he told me what he was thinking about doing. He was living [nearby] in Dumbo at that time, as I’m recalling it. I remember him telling me, “I want you to look at this.” He would do that with people: “I want you to look at this.” [He said], “I think I’m going to do something with that. It’s cold out here.” And I said, “You’re gonna put a coat on her?” Then he did it. And I saw it, and I was just blown away.
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9. “Charles White — Leonardo da Vinci. Curated by David Hammons,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017-18
The artist and teacher Charles White was an important mentor to Hammons, who took his night classes at Otis College of Art and Design (formerly known as Otis Art Institute) in Los Angeles in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Esther Adler, a curator in MoMA’s Department of Drawings and Prints: I didn’t really set out to work with David Hammons per se. I was in the process of working on a Charles White retrospective back in 2015. I was in touch with Ian C. White, who is White’s son and the director of [his] archive. I casually [said to Ian], “You know, I’d love to talk to David Hammons about this show. I imagine that’s impossible.” At that point, I hadn’t realized that Ian and David were still close. [One day], Ian and I arranged to meet for coffee, and he showed up at the museum with this older, very well-dressed gentleman. I thought it was just some other person waiting in the hall. It took like five minutes for Ian to say, “No, this is David Hammons.” I was completely blindsided and unprepared, but Hammons was generous and lovely. That was the first time I met him. And then over time, he brought this kernel of an idea — that he might be interested in highlighting the importance [of his relationship with White] through a curatorial project. [The resulting show] was almost like a side hustle [to the White retrospective], but one that required borrowing a Leonardo da Vinci drawing [from Queen Elizabeth II, by way of the Royal Collection.]
There were only two works in the show. “Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man)” (1973) is certainly the most important Charles White work in MoMA’s collection. Leonardo da Vinci is a household name that even people who have no use for contemporary art consider a master artist. And he was juxtaposing White’s role in that same way. And then the birthdays help: [White and da Vinci were born] April 2 and April 15, almost 500 years apart. [Hammons] ended up commissioning a Vedic astrologer to do charts interpreting the spiritual essence of these two men. The project became an artwork. I don’t know if that was David’s intention.
David also made a very beautiful poster that says “Charles White — Leonardo da Vinci.” and then on the side in teeny, tiny type, it says, “Curated by David Hammons.” It was very representative of his role in this as a facilitator. That’s really what I was most impressed by: his generosity in turning attention to other artists and people who were meaningful to him.
I was looking through old emails [from when we were preparing this show], and he would constantly say, “Don’t overthink it.” And so, some of the decisions became much easier, things I would [have otherwise] spent all this time stressing and obsessing over. It would just be clear to him what we should do.
_Nicole Acheampong_NYTimes