One day you’re wondering where all the stories are about peoples’ experiences with David Hammons’ artwork, and the next, you’re seeing an entire oral history of working with Hammons that almost fills a whole issue of Ursula Magazine.
Randy Kennedy spent almost a year collecting accounts of the many, many, many people involved in Hammons’ massive 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth LA. That show, a culmination of almost two decades of interaction with Hammons and his crew, is already the subject of a whole-ass book. Though that book basically has no words.
The latest issue of Ursula (Issue 12) makes up for it. With thousands and thousands and thousands of words, it could be the most comprehensive account to date of working with and observing Hammons. [Obviously whole books of criticism have been written about Hammons’ work, which is not the same as Hammons working.]
Ursula 12 also includes Linda Goode Bryant’s essay about Concerto in Black and Blue, and this one quote from Ian White resonates with Bryant’s account, too. White, the son of artist and teacher Charles White, was hosting Hammons in 2018 when he was scouting out H&W’s LA space for a possible show. White is alongside Hammons, seeing how he sees:
Because a show for David is not just object-driven. He’s thinking about the space, he’s thinking about how new and existing works will interact, about how the work sits in the space, about whatever is happening around the gallery, out on the streets. He calls himself an urban archaeologist, something to that effect. So a lot of the time when you’re with him, you just wander around for hours. You’re looking for oddities and identifiers of whatever community or culture—or supposed culture—is evolving around you. He’s great at keying into that shit. He’s got a gift. I’ve seen a lot of people try to do it, but David’s different. He sees things that are easily overlooked. Things that, if you bring them to light, give you a different understanding of the world around you.
Literally two minutes later update: Am I going to have to liveblog reading this thing? Can you have a better shoutout for your book than this?
[Stacen] Berg [H&W partner & exec. director]: I think he was waiting for some constraints to be put on him. And if we just kept saying yes, then there was nothing to fight against. Our approach was: “We’ll do anything you want. If you want that space, you can have that space. You want all the spaces? You want the courtyard? You can have it.” I mean, he also carried around a book titled Tell Them I Said No, by Martin Herbert, about great artistic refusals.
OK, this one sticks out. On the one hand, there’s a decades-long cultivation of relationships with Hammons’ intermediaries, then him; which includes a conventional exhibition in Zurich in 2003 [with a misremembering of the text stenciled on the side of the boxes in the sculptures]:
[Marc Payot, H&W president]: …It was never going to operate like a conventional exhibition. There was no checklist or price list. There were no dates and very few labels on works, except the work of others that he included in the show, like Agnes Martin, Jack Whitten and Dan Concholar. The commercial side of the show was very limited and came very late. It would have been OK with us if it had never happened. Most of the work was not for sale and came straight from David’s collection and went back to New York after it was over.
The commercial side is not a show with a price list, but the timeline does not make it any less conventional. The talk at the time was that H&W bought the entire show, which is not just conventional, but traditional. This comment by Payot seems to belie that, but a lot of title transfers can fit behind the statement that most of the work “came straight from David’s collection and went back to New York.”
Conversations: The Best Tailor Makes The Fewest Cuts [hauserwirth/ursula]
Buy Ursula: Issue 12 in print [shop.hauserwirth]