Image via whitecube.com. |
October 3, 2014 – January 3, 2015
25 – 26 Mason’s
Yard
London, UK
From whitecube.com:
White Cube
is pleased to present an exhibition by American artist David Hammons. This
survey of new and recent works is the artist’s first major gallery show in
London.
Over the
course of his career, Hammons has carved out a singular position. He first came
to prominence in the 1970s – when issues of politics, race and sexuality were
coming to the fore in the art world – with a series of prints made using his
own body. He went on to make performances (selling snowballs on the street),
sculptures (rock heads covered with hair clippings from Harlem barbershops),
and installations (a darkened gallery where visitors were given tiny
flashlights). His work draws on an eclectic range of tactics and techniques and
reveals affinities and influences as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, jazz and
improvisation, Bruce Nauman, the Watts Tower, Ed Kienholz, and street culture.
Yet he discreetly injects sociological content into the tropes of conceptual
art, offering mordant commentary on the position of African-Americans within the
dominant culture – as well as his own status as a maverick black artist within
an elite art system. His strategies for engaging with this system, as well as
his incursions into the market, have rendered him a legendary figure whose
impact is all the greater for his apparent elusiveness. Hammons is a
provocateur par excellence, the fox in the henhouse of conceptual art.
The ground
floor gallery showcases four basketball drawings. Hammons produced these
abstract compositions by repeatedly bouncing a basketball against a piece of
white paper. Formally, these drawings, like the body prints, are the by-product
of a physical movement, with the throwing of the ball hearkening back to the
procedures of American gestural abstraction. The use of humble materials, the
dirt and dust from the street which the basketball stamps into the paper, also
acknowledges the influence of Arte Povera. The grime of the street is
implicitly opposed to the sterility and fussiness of institutional spaces. The
artist has placed nondescript suitcases behind several of these works, in some
instances using them to push the drawing out from the wall. The addition of a
concealed object not only invests these flat works with a sculptural dimension
but also intensifies the sardonic note of social commentary. For many black
people in America, basketball was and is a way out of the ghetto, of ‘making
it’ – but the title of two of the drawings, Traveling, invokes the foul of
carrying the ball too far, and with it implies that such advances may be
temporary or illusory.
The larger
lower ground floor gallery features four of Hammons’s latest paintings. In this
series, the artist has draped a tarp or plastic sheet scavenged from the street
over a canvas painted in a lush Abstract Expressionist style. The tension
between distressed material and the abstract forms of the partially concealed
surface beneath yields a mysterious formal beauty. Here, high abstraction is
crossed with street culture, and the purity of the picture plane is interrupted
by the lo-fi cover. The use of the cover also endows these two-dimensional
works with a strong physical presence, blurring the line between painting and
sculpture. These hybrid compositions stand in ambiguous, and perhaps critical,
dialogue with European Modernism. At the same time, by turning on the
polarities of visibility and invisibility, perception and omission, insider and
outsider, they can be read as veiled commentaries on racial politics, art
history, and misrecognition.
Also on
exhibition is The New Black (2014), a
work from Hammons’s most recent sculpture series: an African tribal mask that
the artist has painted over in orange. While the sculpture may be read as a
riff on the faux primitivism of Picasso, its title is a piece of Duchampian
word play that invokes race, pop culture, and more particularly fashion – the
fashions of the art world, its intermittent flirtations with black artists and
black subject matter, as well as street fashion.
As a coda
to the exhibition, one of Hammons’s fur coat sculptures is exhibited in the
smaller downstairs gallery. The fur coat, a symbol of privilege, wealth, and
perhaps the collector, has been streaked with paint, as if vandalized or
graffitied. The irony, of course, is that here it is the mark of the artist’s
hand which confers value. The sculpture reflects a shift in the artist’s work
towards satirizing the vanities and pretensions of an art establishment that,
even in 2014, remains a whiter shade of pale.
David
Hammons was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1943. He moved to Los Angeles in
1962 and studied art at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) from 1966 –
1968 and the Otis Art Institute from 1968 – 1972. He settled in New York City
in 1974, living and working in Brooklyn.
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