david hammons – greg.org

DH ATL 45 RPM FTW

Over the years as I’ve kept coming across David Hammons works, old and new, which hadn’t been publicly known, I try looking again for any info on one of his major public works—which also nobody knew.

In 1979 Hammons was one of a group of artists commissioned to make work for the big new airport under construction in Atlanta. Here is how ATL Airport Art describes it:

The initiative to display artworks at ATL originated in 1979, when the Domestic Terminal was constructed during Maynard Jackson’s first term as Mayor of Atlanta. In 1979-1980, the Airport commissioned and installed large-scale, permanent artworks by Curtis Patterson, David Hammons, Lynda Benglis, Benny Andrews, Sam Gilliam and others. The Airport received its first of two Governor’s Awards for the Arts for this series of commissions, but an ongoing program was not instituted and the artworks were not maintained.

Benny Andrews’ chronology says he made a 95-ft mural, as did 13 other artists. Indeed, here is a 35mm slide showing Benglis’s giant mural. But Patterson’s website includes a large bronze relief. [Two, actually; he made another after the first got remodeled out of place.] And the project has five folders in Gilliam’s archive. But I’ve never been able to find a photo or even a description of Hammons’ work, or news of its status. [Though I think now the Airport Art site makes it pretty clear these early works are gone.]

But then reading Dr. Kellie Jones’ 1986 interview with Hammons again for the Mandela piece, which does still exist in Atlanta, I realized she’d asked him about it. [Of course she did.]

KJ: You did pieces for a while that had dowels with hair and pieces of records on them. Like the piece you did for the Atlanta Airport. 

DH: Those pieces were all about making sure the black viewer had a reflection on himself in the work. White viewers have to look at someone else’s culture in those pieces and see very little of themselves in it. Like looking at American Indian art or Egyptian art—you can try to fit yourself in it but it really doesn’t work. And that’s the beauty of looking at art from other cultures, that they’re not mirror reflections of your art. But in this country, if your art doesn’t reflect the status quo, well then you can forget it, financially and otherwise. I’ve always thought artists should concentrate on going against any kind of order, but here in New York, more than anywhere else, I don’t see any of that gut. It’s so hard to live in this city. The rent is so high, your shelter and eating, those necessities are so difficult, that’s what keeps the artist from being that maverick. 

So dowels, records, and hair? You mean like the extraordinary sculpture that just turned up at Christie’s this month? Untitled (Flight Fantasy) is from 1978, and is made of spindly bamboo reeds piercing a broken record filled like a taco with unfired Georgia clay. It is on view right now.

a david hammons sculpture from 1978, untitled (flight fantasy) hangs on a white wall. two halves of a broken record form an arc , filled like a taco with unfired georgia clay. the edges of the records have been drilled, and long thin bamboo reeds passed through. the reeds curve down at the ends from their own weight. thin curved wedges of record, like leaves or feathers, sprout from the center of the record taco, and others hang from the ends of the reeds. tiny tufts of black hair and colorful wound thread punctuate the reeds. two small dark discs on either side of the records give the hint of eyes, as in a ceremonial mask. this gorgeous and fragil looking work is at christies in ny in nov 2024 — David Hammons, *Untitled (Flight Fantasy)*, 1978, bamboo, Georgia clay, record fragments, plaster, colored string and hair, 22 x 60 x 9 in., selling 21 Nov 2024 at Christie’s

This sculpture has been in the same collection since it was made. It’s very domestically scaled, and I am having a hard time imagining how it would scale up for an airport. And I’m having a hard time imagining how something so fugitive and delicate would survive in what soon became the world’s busiest airport. On the other hand, given what we know about the conservation of unfired clay, I’m having an easy time imagining why it’d longer exist.

21 Nov 2024, Lot 7B: David Hammons, Untitled (Flight Fantasy), 1978, est. $2-3m [update: sold for $3,922,000] [christies]
Previously, related: David Hammons’ Free Nelson Mandela is in Atlanta, Y’allhttps://greg.org/archive/2024/08/08/what-happens-in-midtown.html

David Hammons’ Free Nelson Mandela Is In Atlanta, Y’all

David Hammons, *Free Nelson Mandela*, 1987, a 2015 installation image in Piedmont Park via Google Street View

I’m getting used to not knowing every work David Hammons makes privately, which he may or may not announce until years later. But I am not dealing well with only finding out about public sculptures commissioned more than three decades ago, which turn out to still be chillin’ in the random corner of a park in Atlanta.

TBF, Free Nelson Mandela IS mentioned in the 1988 intro to Dr. Kellie Jones’ 1986 interview with Hammons, one of the rare, foundational texts on the artist and his practice. But it never occurred to me that it wasn’t just a historic occurrence.

Anyway, it is a giant boulder with a “fan-shaped display” of iron bars topped with barbed wire. When it was originally installed, the gate in the prison-like fence was padlocked shut, and the artist had purportedly buried the key under the sculpture. Probably when it was moved to its permanent location in Piedmont Park, Hammons entrusted the key to Atlanta’s politicians, who opened the gate after Mandela’s release from prison.

The sculpture’s wikipedia page doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012, but by Mandela’s death in 2013, it had been cleared of extraneous, artist-unapproved shrubbery. The interpretation of the Smithsonian’s public sculpture inventory description has the inscription on the work’s back. Would that also have been behind or “inside” the prison fence? I don’t know. The current siting definitely makes the inscription feel like the front, though.

David Hammons, *Rock Fan*, 1993, surrounded by little protest rock fans, at Williams College

What seems more interesting is how formally resonant this sculpture is to Hammons’ other works of the time. Like, specifically, Rock Fan, the giant boulder topped with antique fans Hammons installed at Williams College in 1993, which is only the biggest of his rock- and fan-related works, if not the only politically topical one.

The full/official/original title of the work is Nelson Mandela Must Be Free to Lead His People and South Africa to Peace and Prosperity. Which, with meddlesome South Africans in the news lately, makes me wonder if Hammons would make a JAIL ELON MUSK sculpture, perhaps in a park in Pennyslvania.

Two for T

I was excited to read Nicole Acheampong’s feature on David Hammons in art issue of The New York Times’ T Magazine because I knew it would focus on some of the artist’s less documented works off the beaten art world path. [They’d asked me about images of Hammons’ public artworks in Savannah, but opted to not go the appropriated Google Streetview route.] And it does, and it’s great, and it’s especially nice for pointing me back to a profile I misesd in 2018 by M.H. Miller of LES publisher, poet and longtime Hammons whisperer Steve Cannon.

Cannon is one of the creative suns like East Village photographer Alex Harsley who looped Hammons into their regularly orbit from the early 1990s. In the white artworld, Hammons developed a reputation of being aloof, reclusive, evasive But the truth is, he just had his own people he’d rather be in dialogue with, and Cannon has definitely been one of them.

But I was stunned to read Julia Halperin’s cover story about Cady Noland, which tracks the artist’s rise, her apparent withdrawal from the art world—and the rumors or sniping around it—and her recent return to exhibiting her work. Noland’s dedication to the precise positioning and presentation of her work is an ongoing theme, along with the power her work derives from attention some saw as excessive.

I was stunned even though I’m quoted in the article—as “a Noland obsessive,” which lmao is going straight on my bio—stunned because though she refused an interview, Noland agreed to respond to Halperin’s inquiries. The article is thus replete with parenthetical denials of rumors and clarifications of others’ statements, as if she’s carefully correcting the position of each element in her narrative.

Noland also provided the Times with previously unpublished Polaroids. And they confirmed that the artist has been involved in the new installation of her work opening at Glenstone in less than two weeks. Also that the Raleses did indeed buy out her entire show at Gagosian. What is a collector but an obsessive with ten billion dollars?

The Secret Art of David Hammons [t mag]
A Blind Publisher, Poet—and link to the Lower East Side’s cultural history
Cady Noland and the Art of Control

Juneteenth Update From Hammons America Street

I thought it’d be nice to commemorate Juneteenth with a photo of David Hammons’ African American Flag flying over his public art installation, America Street, commissioned in 1991 as part of the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC, and preserved through the efforts of local community members. [The piece was installed on a vacant lot owned by the city.]

But the flag, which has been replaced over the years, is missing from the latest Google Street View image, taken all the way back in January 2023.

Was GSV working from home during the pandemic? Because the next most recent image is only from August 2019, and it shows a flag with stripes so faded they could almost pass as white. [sic] Which may mean the last replacement flag was the one imaged in Jan. 2017?

What’s the word on America Street now, Charlestonians? Has the flag been replaced in the last 18 months?

David Hammons Ball Print

David Hammons, *Icestallation* invitation card (recto), 1986, paint on paper, JAM via MoMA Library

A few months ago artist David Horvitz was looking into a story of one of his artist neighbors who knew David Hammons back in the LA day. While poking around for some corroboration, I realized this invitation to a 1986 Hammons show at JAM was only and ever published in Elena Filipovic’s 2019 Afterall One Work: Bliz-aard Ball Sale.

Filipovic’s researcher, Alhena Katshof pulled the invitation out of MoMA Library’s legendary Ephemera File, where it was scanned for the first time, I learned, by legendary librarian David Senior.

Anyway, the invitation is a silvery painted postcard with a hand-stamped ball, and a date, 3/13/83. One of the very few other examples of the invitation known to exist, along with the show’s terse press release, mention 2/13/83, so perhaps this one is an error. The show, Icestallation, consisted of a dingy 3-year-old snowball in a used and altered freezer, set amidst the detritus of JAM’s gallery renovation. As printed on the verso, the show was in April/May, so the date, presumably, was the snowball’s birthday? And so the date of Hammons’ Bliz-aard Ball Sale action?

Without contemporary recollections of the invitation’s production, Filipovic speculated, based on the size, that Hammons might have used a silver-painted tennis ball to imprint them. I think the seams on a tennis ball disqualify it, though. I’ve spent time trying to identify a similarly sized, seamless, and fuzzy-enough ball Hammons could have used. A round sponge seems like the easiest, but is it the most Hammons-ian? I’ve done the same exercise with Hammons’ favored printmaking medium—his own body—to imagine what might reliably produce a few hundred unperturbed, round imprints. Because it’s not a ball. So a knee? A calf? A cutout and a buttcheek? Is it even actually printed, not stenciled?

Previously, related, silvery, printed: David Hammons’ Spade, Again

David Hammons, A Fan, at PS1

David Hammons, *A Fan*, installed in “Rousing the Rubble” at PS1, 1990-91, image: MoMA

The way I have the installation views of David Hammons 1990 PS1 retrospective, Rousing the Rubble, open in my tabs for months, like a talisman or something, and still have to make the effort to see the unfamiliar right in front of me.

Like this work, A Fan, from 1989, in which a white female mannequin head is perched on a table leaf, turned toward a TV and VCR playing an archival interview with Malcolm X. Next to the TV is a palm fan, and an arrangement of funeral flowers on a white wire stand.

A Fan caught the attention of poet Yuko Otomo, who attended Hammons’ opening, and recorded the intense experience of the walkthrough in her journal. Otomo is an incredibly perceptive viewer. The Areidolia link above includes her writing about Hammons’ 2016 show at Mnuchin, too. Here’s an interview with her.

David Hammons’ A Fan, 1989, installed at “Strange Attractors: Signs of Chaos, 9.14.1989-11.26.1989, at the New Museum, NY

Hammons showed A Fan the year before, too, in “Strange Attractors: Signs of Chaos,” an exhibit of chaos science-related work curated by Laura Trippi at the New Museum. It was seen there by critic Maurice Berger, who wrote about it, and the resurgence of Malcolm X’s voice into contemporary white-dominated cultural discourse, in his 1990 ARTNews essay, “Are Art Museums Racist?”. ARTNews republished the essay in March 2020, to mark Berger’s death from COVID. It is depressingly fresh:

Without the Hammons piece the sensibility of “Strange Attractors” would have been very different, more typical of the splashy group shows of contemporary art that simply ignore the issue of race. That one image threw the entire show into question and pointed up the racial bias of its institutional context. Increasingly, across the country, similar catalysts are inserting painful questions into the heretofore complacent space of exhibition as curators with good intentions attempt to “include” the cultural production of people of color.

Berger quotes some of the Malcolm X video Hammons used: “There is nothing that the white man will do to bring about true, sincere citizenship or civil rights recognition for black people in this country. They will always talk but they won’t practice it.” Which, though it sounds like it could have been said yesterday, is an interview from UC Berkeley from October 11, 1963.

The TV, VCR, flowers, and fan are all different between the two installations. At the New Museum, the name Malcolm is spelled out in gold glitter on the red bow on the flowers. Of Hammons’ work at PS1, Otomo wrote, “[T]he feeling of being challenged was merely a result of the implosion of the ingrained hypocrisy inside us. Hammons’ work never shows off theory or words. They threaten us, the viewers, just by being there.” She noted that her companion Steve, explaining the unfamiliar cultural references to her, said he “had tried to listen to Malcolm X’s arguments in the 60s.”

Though it would be good to see it now, the present whereabouts/status of A Fan is unknown.

David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble, 1969-1990 [ps1.org]
Perpetual Ripplets: On David Hammons, Yuko Otomo, June 2016 [areidolia]
Strange Attraction: Signs of Chaos [newmuseum.org]
Maurice Berger’s Are Art Museums Racist? [artnews]
1963 Interview with Malcolm X [c-span.org]

Previously, related:
Also David Hammons in 1989: How Ya Like How Ya Like Me Now?
Also David Hammons in 1990: Pissed Off: Can You Hold It?
David Hammons in 1991: Public Enemy Nos. 2 — ?
David Hammons in 1995: School of Rock Fan

Hammons All Around Us

photo of an unnamed work David Hammons provided to The New York Times

“Sometimes I put clothes on the sculptures,” is how David Hammons revealed a previously unpublic intervention to Public Art Fund curator Daniel S. Palmer, who in turn has revealed it to us in The New York Times T Magazine.

For five or so winters, beginning around 2007, Hammons wrapped warmer clothing around a 19th century statue in Brooklyn of a formerly enslaved woman standing at the feet of a sculpture of a much more warmly dressed white abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher.

At least, that’s the photo we see, of the action we know. “I put clothes on the sculptureS.” Where are the others?

Remember, this is Hammons’ M.O. He only publicly showed his iconic Pissed Off nine years after he’d urinated on that Richard Serra sculpture. And of course, it’s iconic because Dawoud Bey photographed it.

How long will it take for us to get it through our heads that we are surrounded by David Hammons’ artworks we don’t even know about, and may only find out about years later, if we’re lucky?

Unless we can scan back through Instagram–2007? We need to look at flickr!–to see if anyone happened upon Hammons’ sculptural caregiving while walking the dog, and happened to take a picture. Some day maybe an algorithm will unearth unseen Hammonses from our global photographic record, like LIDAR mapping ancient cities in the jungle. But for now, we don’t even know who took the one photo we have.

[cf. putting little hats on Jizō in Japan]

A poignant take on the controversy surrounding public monuments [nyt]
Previously, very much related, 2018: Pissed Off: Can you hold it?
2013: Stop and Piss: David Hammons’ Pissed Off

Untitled (unnamed.jpg), 2019

unnamed.jpg, 930x1212px jpg displayed at 786x1024px, press release for David Hammons’ show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 18 May – 11 August 2019, via email

David Hammons is having a show. And the gallery, Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, sent out a press release. I marveled at it this morning, but it wasn’t until Powhida tweeted [d’oh, deleted!] about framing it that I realized it needed realizing.

The press release is a jpg titled, unnamed.jpg. It is 1212 x 930 pixels and 72px/inch resolution. In order to print it at that size, I converted it to a pdf 12.92 x 16.83 inches. I haven’t figured out quite how to print that yet, but it has only been a few minutes, so maybe chill or take care of it yourself? I’ll take a crack at it tomorrow.

untitled_unnamed_jpg.pdf (2019) [greg.org]

School of Rock Fan

David Hammons’ Rock Fan, rock, fans, shrubbery [?], little rocks with paper fans on them [?], Oct-Nov 1993, image: idiotbooks

[ONE THING WENT RIGHT IN 2020 UPDATE] When David Hammons’ How Ya Like Me Now?, a billboard-size portrait of a blonde & blue-eyed Jesse Jackson was being installed on a vacant lot in downtown Washington, DC in 1989, Black passersby who first encountered it without the soothing benefit of a museum guide or explanatory text took offense–and then a sledgehammer–to it. That incident and that work are now a major part of Hammons’ story.

Four years later, Hammons again encountered local resistance while installing another outdoor sculpture, which was then vandalized, and later destroyed. It all went down on the bucolic campus of Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

In October 1993 Hammons opened a show, curated by Deborah Rothschild, at the Williams College Museum of Art. Yardbird Suite, the indoor installation of boomboxes in trees playing Jazz was chill. The six-ton boulder placed in front Chapin Hall at the center of campus, with antique fans bolted to the top, was not.

“Hammons defends Rock Fan,” The Williams Record, 10/23/1993

Students began questioning and criticizing the piece as Hammons was installing it. He called it Rock Fan, which only seemed to incense those demanding deeper meaning or significance from this work of art temporarily in their midst. [He also told some agitated students that it was called The Agitator.] In Williams’ hyper-privileged and hyper-collegial culture, every gifted scholar was expected to be able to weigh in on everything. In practice, this meant students commented on Post-It notes on literally whatever poster, building, vending machine, or public sculpture they encountered.

From The Williams Record, Oct. or Nov 1993

They criticized the site, the title, the fabrication, the aesthetics, the imagined expense, and the disruption. Some complaints were reported in the weekly student paper, The Williams Record. Additional back and forth took place a daily student bulletin, plus the Post-Its. While he was on site, Hammons gave as good as he got.

“You don’t have to make it into some big mystery. Damn, relax. Use your energy on something else besides intellectual masturbation,” he said.

…

Hammons added that he was primarily interested in confronting and challenging people with images that they aren’t used to seeing or which seem out of place. “I’m in the business of making the invisible visible…Most of your eyes are very weak, so you need to see things you’re not accustomed to seeing so that your eyes get much stronger.” [WR 10/26/93]

In the first couple of weeks, a student or students [I haven’t been able to find yet] surrounded Rock Fan with their own sculptural responses: accordion-folded paper fans glued to small rocks [top]. Then came the painters, dousing Rock Fan with purple paint for Homecoming.

David Hammons’ Rock Fan, painted purple by unknown Ephs, 1993, image: a book illustration shot off a screen, apparently, by @art2sex

On March 3rd, 1994, David Hammons gave a slide lecture at SFMOMA, introduced by curator Gary Garrels, which ends with Rock Fan[s]:

And this is a piece at Williams College called Rock Fans.

This was protested. For about the last five months, they’ve been protesting this piece on their campus. And so some students made fans out of paper and put these little rock fans around the piece. It’s been vandalized and written about.

When the wind blows, the fans actually move. Someone said, “I don’t care how many fans you put on it, it’s not going to fly.”

And this is after Williams students painted the rock. Someone called me and told me that now they feel like it’s theirs, because they painted it their school colors.

The transcript of the lecture–but not the slides–was published this year by the CCA Wattis Institute as part of their year-long program devoted to Hammons and his work. The book, David Hammons Is On Our Mind, was created in collaboration with the artist. There are photos he selected, a poem by Tongo Eisen-Martin, and a text by Fred Moten. Reading Hammons’ narration of invisible slides creates an exquisitely baffling disjuncture that has to be intentional. It definitely sent me looking for things I was not accustomed to seeing.

Rock Fan was originally meant to travel to SFMOMA, too, but at some point Hammons decided it would not. He left it at Williams; it was removed in April, during Spring Break. The fans went back to the artist. I haven’t found the rock.

David Hammons, Rock Fan, 1997, textile on rock, Collection: WCMA, finally

In 1997 Hammons appropriated the Williams students’ response to his sculpture to make a new Rock Fan out of a stone and pleated fabric. In 2004 the director of the Williams Museum found out about it at Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn’s place, and acquired it for the collection. In 2012 Robbi Behr (’97) designed a Rock Fan-themed coffee mug for their 15th reunion.

Destroyed David Hammons: the Rock Fan Rock abides. [photo: Jordan Stein’s insta]

[UPDATE] Before 2020 destroys us all, we can at least know that Rock Fan Rock has not been lost, but abides still, and will continue–apparently past the extinction of humanity. Curator Jordan Stein found and visited it during a teaching gig at Williams, and posted photos on Instagram. It was apparently removed to a small hill near the Westlawn Cemetery. A fitting resting spot. Also it is still purple.

How Ya Conserve Me Now?

“Found painting, FOUND courage” images: @videodante

The stairwell in the entrance to the University of Oregon library contains a large mural, Mission of a University, painted in 1937 by art professor Nowland Brittin Zane, of a quote by another faculty member, Frederick George Young. A social science professor and dean in the 1920s, Young saw the divine mission of a university aligned with the founding principle of Oregon itself: to elevate and preserve the white race.

Installation view of Nowland Zane’s mural, Mission of a University, 1937, in U. Oregon’s Knight Library, before intervention, image: uoregon.edu

Last night @videodante tweeted out photos he’d received of a fresh painting intervention on Zane’s mural: a slash of red paint crossing out “racial heritage.” As interesting, though, is the handwritten label for the new work, left on the wall [below].

“Which art do you choose to conserve now?” via @videodante

The materials, “Found Art, FOUND courage” are almost as awesome as the title, “WHICH ART DO YOU CHOOSE TO CONSERVE NOW?” Is it the title, or an epic challenge to the institution’s perennial decision of which facts, which history, which brushstroke, and whose heritage are their actions perpetuating? This quote has been recognized as racist and offensive–and has been the subject of critical and activist efforts to remove it–for years. There are at least three spots in the bottom corner of Zane’s painting where conservators chose to erase someone’s addition. So this is one more choice to be made in an ongoing dispute, and the artist knows what is at stake.

The author of this new work, though, offers another solution in a “fine print” addendum, apparently added on the spot, as the text curls up the side of the label. If the library is troubled by impending conservatorial complicity in reasserting white supremacism, the “artist gives permission to replace this placard with a more permanent one.”

What if they just leave it?

With David Hammons on the brain at the moment, I think of his 1989 outdoor painting of a blonde Jesse Jackson, How Ya Like Me Now? which was vandalized as it was being installed across from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Hammons subsequently showed it with a row of sledgehammers. And of six American Indian activists who painted Theodore Roosevelt’s statue in front of the American Museum of Natural History in 1971, who had their charges dropped if they paid the museum’s cleanup costs.

Since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the increased protests of confederate memorial statues, I’ve come to see painting as crucial, even central. After decades of inertia, monuments are suddenly painted or pulled down. Then they’re quickly covered with tarps or boxes or removed. Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

What if we recognize these gestures as generative, not destructive? What if we leave them? Keep them? Look at them? Study them? And when the time comes, conserve them?

Public Enemy Nos. 2–?

David Hammons, Public Enemy, installation at MoMA, 1991

I’ve written about “Dislocations” before. It’s one of the contemporary shows at MoMA that left a deep impression on me when I first moved to New York. It was in 1991-2 when Rob Storr curated huge, room-dominating sculptures by Chris Burden and Louise Bourgeois, and installations [!?] by Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper, the Kabakovs, and David Hammons.

I just found this 5yo photo of Hammons’ Public Enemy, which I guess I had looked up because I was deep into photomurals at the time, and really wanted to find (or make) Hammons’ big photocube of the piece’s namesake, Teddy Roosevelt and his Grateful Savages [sic, obv].

Public Enemy, 1991, installation view from MoMA’s archive

In the intervening years MoMA has upped their archival game significantly, by putting a ton of exhibition material online, including the press release, checklist, brochure, installation photos, and a pdf of Storr’s catalogue. [Oh wow, Sophie Calle was in that show? Guess her intervention–removing paintings from the Modern’s galleries–was so subtle, I forgot.]

This was the first work of Hammons’ I’d ever seen, probably the first time I’d heard of him. Which seems crazy now, but reading the show’s time capsule of a catalogue, maybe I wasn’t so far behind. Storr waxes and marvels at what is now known about Hammons’ practice:

Hammons has preferred the city as a workplace and its citizens as his audience and sometime co-workers. Street flotsam and jetsam are his materials. What he brings to the gallery is all and sundry that it traditionally excludes. What he extracts from those materials and brings to the objects and installations that he has created outside the museums are the marvels and mysteries that lie already and everywhere to hand along heavily trafficked thoroughfares, in public parks, and in the so-called vacant lots littered with the evidence of their constant nomadic occupation and use…

“I like doing stuff better on the street, because art becomes just one of the objects that’s in the path of your everyday existence. It’s what you move through, and it doesn’t have superiority over anything else.” [he said in an otherwise unpublished interview which I now think we should unearth. -ed.]

Storr goes on about Hammons’ improvisatory process, “like jazz,” in which, despite a year of lead time, “all options remained open and the result wholly unforeseen” until the artist arrived to install the work. Which must have given MoMA an institutional heart attack.

And which, really? Because you can’t just pick up four huge photomurals or a substrate for them. And those sandbags seem very manufactured and ordered from somewhere. True, if you just work fast enough, those NYPD barriers were all over town, free for the taking. [Do they still have those? For throwback protests?]

Silent Sam confederate soldier statue suddenly torn down at UNC Chapel Hill, image: @yesyoureracist

What I thought about yesterday was whether Public Enemy still existed, or could be recreated. What I wonder about today, though, is what it’ll take for Uncle Teddy to get the Silent Sam treatment.

Public Enemy was installed in “Dislocations” at The Museum of Modern Art from Oct. 1991 through Jan. 1992 [moma.org]
Previously, related: Chris Burden’s Other Vietnam Memorial was in “Dislocations”, too

David Hammons’ Spade Again

David Hammons, Spade, 1972, 26×20 in., sold Apr 2017 at Swann Gallery, now at Sotheby’s with a 60% markup. This unmatted photo is from Swann, and it looks like the print had some tape ripped off of it. Sotheby’s fixed that by cropping their jpg.

I was very interested to see this David Hammons print on silver paper when it came up for sale a year ago at Swann. And now that it’s back at Sotheby’s, I’m kind of interested in what’s up. I don’t remember it selling before, but Swann says it did. [For just $25k, or a $20k bid+premium, against a $30-40k estimate. Maybe it sold afterward.]

For an important approach (face imprinting) to an important subject (spade) for an important artist (DH, prounounced duh), that was only realized in a tiny fraction of the original edition (50 declared, six printed), it seems like it should’ve been snapped up and kept.

Oh right, now I remember why I was so interested in it: because I wanted to finish off the edition myself. There was a Warhol print on silver foil paper, too. Seems tricky to execute.

David Hammons, Moving to the Other Side, 1969, screenprint, image via Swann

Not as complicated as making it in the first place, though. Hammons’ process of turning a bodyprint into a silkscreen was described in a 2007 sale of a 1969 proof, Moving to the Other Side [above]:

“When I lie down on the paper which is first placed on the floor, I have to carefully decide how to get up after I have made the impression that I want. Sometimes I lie there for perhaps three minutes or even longer just figuring out how I can get off the paper without smudging the image that I’m trying to print.” [Young, p. 8.]
Then the artist applied a fixative to secure the image to the thin layer of margarine, often, as in this work, with multiple impressions. The artist took this work one step further making a screenprint of a monotype, moving the print across the paper to create a multiple self-image.

This process made me think Hammons mirrored his profile for Spade, but I think they’re actually the two sides of his face, composited.

Anyway, a Spade in the hand…

Lot 426 David Hammons, Spade, 1972, no 1/50, screen print on silver metallic paper, est. $40-60,000 [sothebys]

UPDATE: wow, $100,000. Epic flip.
UPDATE UPDATE: Not really, more like epic shop. $100,000 is what a collector pays, and the markup for a collector who did not know or know where to buy this work just a year ago is 400%.

Assuming the seller bought it last year for $25k, their take yesterday after premiums (25% buyer, 10% seller) is probably only $72k. So their net is around $45k. Not bad for one work for a year, but not epic. Combined, the two auction houses got $35k ($7k for Swann, $28k for Christie’s). The original owner got around $18k. Plus 45 years with the work. Hard to say he’s not the winner here.

Pissed Off: Can You Hold It?

c.1990 Xerox poster for the Exit Art exhibition of David Hammons’ 1981 performance, Pissed Off. image NYU Fales Library Exit Art Archive via SAAM

I have been interested in David Hammons’ performance/interventions staged at Richard Serra’s T.W.U. for a while, so I made a point to listen to Columbia and Smithsonian American Art Museum pre-doctoral fellow Abbe Schriber’s presentation at SAAM yesterday.

Titled, “Word on the Street: David Hammons’s Negotiation of Rumor, ca. 1981”, Schriber spoke of Hammons’ “strategy of obscurity” and the careful ambiguities around the two projects, Pissed Off, and Shoe Tree, in which, respectively, the artist pissed on and threw sneakers over a three-plate Serra prop piece installed on a Tribeca traffic island at the intersection of Sixth Avenue & Franklin Street.

I knew the narrative of the situation, as constructed around Dawoud Bey’s handful of photos, was highly susceptible to, what? interpretation? bias? subjectivity? In a way, I think that’s Hammons’ point: how do we interpret what we see, even when we [should] know what we’re seeing is incomplete, an artist’s presentation?

What I did not realize, is that Hammons sat on these works without announcing or showing them for nine years. The work was first shown publicly in the 1990 Exit Art exhibition, “Illegal America.”

Whether it’s the myopia of the blogger and tweeter compelled to feed the content beast, or the tyranny of the new, it’s hard to imagine maintaining this kind of years-long silence about a work today. But that could also be the perplexity of hindsight. Maybe Hammons didn’t show Pissed Off because no one wanted to see it. Or he didn’t have the right context for it.

Which made me wonder again. Hammons’ Pissed Off was included in Exit Art’s 1990 show “Illegal America.” [Was the Xeroxed “poster” above, in the Exit Art archive at NYU, what was included in the exhibit? Was anything else?] But the 1990 show was a restaging of a February 1982 show of the same name. “Illegal America” was the first show Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo staged as Exit Art, and they did it at Franklin Furnace, which was located half a block from the site of Serra’s–and Hammons’–works. You could see Serra’s work from Franklin Furnace’s front door.

At SAAM, Schriber discussed Hammons’ interactions with JAM, an alternative space for emerging African American artists which had moved a couple of blocks west of Franklin Furnace, but she did not mention this earlier incarnation of “Illegal America.” 26 of the 36 artists in the 1990 show had also been in the 1982. Hammons was not among them. Was he going to be? Was he not?

Richard Serra, T.W.U., 1980-81, installed in Tribeca, image via publicartfund.org

It does seem like quite a coincidence that Hammons created two works involving the racialized and bodily precarity associated with illegal actions within pissing distance of the projected site of a show about artists working in the medium of illegality itself.

Could it be? “Illegal America” opened in February 1982, and included The Real Estate Show, which had taken place in 1980. Pissed Off happened sometime in 1981, but T.W.U. was only installed until July 30th, 1981, so that gives some parameters. Would Hammons have visited Franklin Furnace before, during or after Pissed Off? Would they have known of his work? Were they interested? Or not? If Hammons was going to be in, he wasn’t. If he wanted to be in, he wasn’t. Did something go down?

Would the Exit Art folks or Franklin Furnace have known in 1982 about the subject of Hammons’ artist statement for the 1990 show, which Schriber presented, and which I had never heard of?

“Pissed Off” is about the fact that in New York City a man doesn’t have any public access to relieve himself in a decent manner. There is no way for a gentleman to relieve himself in a gentlemanly manner without having to buy a drink.

Keep the rage going.

What started Hammons’ rage? Sure, a city and a system that denied the needs of its citizens on the most basic, bodily level, and putting a gentleman at risk of police intervention for the most basic necessities, but was there anything else?

Can you imagine Hammons and Bey the morning of Pissed Off, one of them with a camera, and at least one of them dressed in a dashiki that, as Schriber put it, gave him “the look of a city forager.” What if they visited Franklin Furnace that morning? To drop off some slides? To talk about a show? Have a chat? Just to look around? What if they said they were there for a meeting? What if they asked to use the men’s room? Can you imagine what could have happened?

Hammons’ nine year wait seems short, and also way too long. And I don’t think he’s done.

Papo Colo kept a copy of the 1990 “Illegal America” catalogue, which should be a pdf [issuu]

Previously, related: Stop And Piss: David Hammons’ Pissed Off

44 America: David Hammons’ House Of The Future & America Street, 2007-2017, 2018

David Hammons & Albert Alston, House of the Future, 1991, photographed in 2006 by ksenia_n

In 1991 the artist David Hammons was invited by Mary Jane Jacobs to create a site-specific work in Charleston, South Carolina for a new, visual arts program linked to the Spoleto Festival. Jacobs had patterned the exhibition, “Places With A Past”, after the Skulptur Projekt Münster. Spoleto founder Gian Carlo Menotti hated the whole thing; the exhibition divided the board and got the director fired (he came back a couple of years later, after Menotti quit), but the show’s art historical reputation has only grown.

That said, Hammons’ is the only one of 61 installations left standing, thanks in large part to his early decision to collaborate with Albert Alston, a local builder, who seems to have maintained and championed the work over the ensuing 27 years.

Hammons and Alston built House Of The Future on a vacant, city-owned lot on Charleston’s segregated East Side using architectural fragments and materials from renovation and demolition projects nearby. It is a 6×20-foot teaching model of Charleston’s signature style, with labels for each component. At some point, a young, local artist used the ground floor as studio space, and Alston oversaw other public programmatic uses. On the back of the House, Hammons painted a quote from African American writer Ishmael Reed:

The Afro-American has become heir to the myths that it is better to be poor than rich, lower class than middle or upper, easy going rather than industrious, extravagant rather than thrifty, and athletic rather than academic.

[Though Reed gets–and takes–credit for the quote, it seems that it actually originates with musician/composer/sociologist Ortiz Walton. Reed quoted Walton’s critical history of cultural exploitation, Music: Black, White & Blue in a 1973 review for Black World Magazine. Reed & Walton seem to have been frequent collaborators and interlocutors, so maybe this is one more of those Hammons/Alston situations. In any case, the quote itself was criticized by some in the community, and it has disappeared and reappeared from the wall of House Of The Future with various repaintings. According to an unrelated 1995 lawsuit by a disgruntled muralist, though, it was integral to the community’s embrace of the installation that helped preserve it after the Spoleto Festival ended.]

At some point after the May 1991 opening of “Places With A Past”, Hammons’ second element was realized kitty corner from House of The Future. America Street is a small, grassy bump of a park on another vacant lot, where Hammons’ iconic African American Flag flies from atop a 40-foot pole. A black and white photo of a group of children looking up, as if at the flag, filled a sidewalk-scale billboard that had previously featured ads for liquor and Newports. From this 1996 account of the Spoleto fallout over “Places With A Past”, it sounds like the works survived some entropy, if not straightup neglect. But both the flag and the picture have been replaced over the years.

Detail of David Hammons’ America Street, 1991, a billboard photo of local kids looking up, img: gsv, jan 2017

I have not visited Hammons’ piece(s), except in Google Street View. The first thing I noticed was they differed in appearance from the historical photos. I realized GSV’s own decade of historical imagery is useful here, for marking the changes this tiny house and its neighborhood have undergone.

Clicking through the changes wrought by time on a piece of Southern vernacular architecture, I immediately thought of the work of my late neighbor, the photographer William Christenberry. He would travel back to his native Alabama year after year for decades, photographing the same houses, churches, and stores, usually documenting their deterioration and subsumption by kudzu.

William Christenberry, Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama, 1983, image: Hemphill

What I was seeing in Hammons’ and Alston’s piece was the opposite: a structure built from the castoffs of renovation and gentrification, surviving thanks to a small but persistent maintenance effort. And through it all, year in and year out, no matter the storms or racial strife that battered some other flags in South Carolina, Hammons’ star-spangled banner is still there.

In the spirit of Christenberry, I decided to make some historic GSV printsets [prints of screenshots; GSV is a screen medium] of Hammons’ and Alston’s House Of The Future and America Street. I’ve followed Christenberry’s format, but I’m skipping the traditional photographer’s approach of making editions of a bajillion in a thousand sizes. Each set of 7-9 images is printed small (8×10 in.), in an edition of 2, plus 1 AP: one for you, one for the museum, one for me. Because srsly, why overthink it? If anyone actually wants to buy them, I turn into some kind of crazed Amazon artworker pick&packing prints all day? Hard pass right now, thanks. If you don’t move in time to get it, just make your own.

All the pics are after the jump.

Continue reading “44 America: David Hammons’ House Of The Future & America Street, 2007-2017, 2018”

Untitled (Sold Out), 2017, Leather Wrapped Stone from Nordstrom

David Hammons, Rock Head, 1998, image via: hairisforpulling
In 1992 David Hammons took clippings from the floor of a barber shop in Harlem and affixed them to the crown of a melon-sized stone from Harlem. He brought the stone back to the barber shop for a haircut alongside his friend and muse, the Lower East Side poet John Farris. The performance is known as Haircut. Hammons has made several similar sculptures of black hair attached to stone, then trimmed and cut with tramlines, which have been titled Rock Head or Stone Head. They are inspired by history and their surroundings. Black living is at their core. They honor uniqueness and celebrate the individuality of each piece Hammons creates.

“Made Solid is a collection of leather products designed and handmade in Los Angeles by Peter Maxwell and Mia.
Our design is inspired by our history and our surroundings. Western living is at our core.
We honor uniqueness and celebrate the individuality of each piece we create.
“The name Made Solid references the connection we create through our creative process and the end result of our labor. Making a solid connection between the raw leather our hands touch and the well used pieces our friends love is our constant goal.
…
“We are connected to our surroundings, bringing natural elements to our work. Ocean, sand, stone and sky are referenced.
“We bring our lifestyle to our work.”

In 2013, Maxwell and Mia conceived “one of their most popular and recognizable pieces” in collaboration with “one of their oldest friends,” Los Angeles designer Cristy Pitoc. Their Leather Wrapped Stones are sourced locally, “selected for shape and color,” and vegetable tanned leather is stretched around each stone with the wet molding technique used in saddle making. The edge is stitched, beveled and burnished by hand. “The leather is bound to the stone for life.”
“Use as a paper weight, worry stone, doorstop, art object – whatever it is to you.”

Wrapped Leather Stones have been featured in design-appreciative blogstores, literarily themed artisanal and locally sourced menswear emporia, and well curated home and lifestyle shops to, I’m sure, appropriately contemplative acclaim.
For the Holiday 2016 season Made Solid Leather Wrapped Stones were also curated into the Love, Pop-In Stores at select Nordstrom locations and at Nordstrom.com:

A paperweight? A conversation piece? A work of art? It’s up to you, but this smooth Los Angeles-area stone–wrapped in rich, vegetable-tanned American leather secured by sturdy contrast backstitching–is sure to draw attention wherever it rests. A traditional hardening process gives the leather a beautiful ombré effect. Like all Made Solid leather pieces, this one is cut, shaped, sewn and finished by hand in artist Peter Maxwell’s Los Angeles studio. Using vintage leatherworking tools and traditional saddle-stitching techniques, Maxwell aims to create beautiful designs that embody both simplicity and functionality, and that develop rich character and patina over time.

The collaborative contributions of Mia and Pitoc went unmentioned, but the availability of a leather wrapped stone did not, and Nordstrom’s Leather Wrapped Stone went viral in December as an object of superficial, reflexive media mockery and superfluity, the diametric opposite of their creators’ intentions. It appears they also sold out, but at what must be considered too high a cost, or too low a return; at the moment no Wrapped Stones are available in Made Solid’s online store.
Earlier this week Nordstrom confirmed they would no longer carry the licensed merchandise of Ivanka Trump, citing poor sales. Yesterday Ivanka’s father tweeted in outrage over the haters’ and losers’ slights, and the White House press secretary literally said Nordstrom’s decision to discontinue stocking Ivanka was an attack on the president’s policies and family. Discount clearance stores TJ Maxx and Marshall’s also both dumped the toxic, failing brand. Today as I type this, the other White House flack is violating federal law by literally declaring a commercial promoting Ivanka’s brand and telling people to go buy it.
Untitled (Sold Out) (2017) consists of things that actually did sell at Nordstrom, namely a Made Solid Leather Wrapped Stone. So whatever it is to you, it is now also a declared, limited edition inspired by [our rapidly unraveling] history and its surroundings. Though I will endeavor to pin it down, the size and location of the edition is presently unknown. Both small and medium Made Solid Leather Wrapped Stones purchased from both seasonal appearances at Nordstrom are included, but Made Solid Leather Wrapped Stones purchased elsewhere, are not, no matter what their size.
Fakes already abound, but if you believe you have an example of this artwork, please provide images and appropriate documentation of the provenance, and I will gladly issue a signed certificate. Requests for confidentiality will be honored.