This was a really exciting exhibition. In the first room
upstairs there were the works made by Hammons using a basketball, these were 4
drawing using the same method against a piece of white paper. They are done on
large pieces of paper; from afar they look like abstract minimalist landscapes;
it’s just when you get closer that you realise that he has done the works just by bouncing a basketball on the paper;
the dirt and the dust go from the street via the ball to the white surface of
the paper.
His interest is in common, daily lives as opposed to the sterile unreal life of Institutional spaces; but with the association of Basketball with young African Americans, it also alludes to the place of African Americans in American society and the repetitive bouncing of the ball as a ritual. This specific work hints at arte Povera and American gestural abstraction. I have also been told by the gallery that behind the works the artist has put suitcases which give a sculptural dimension to the piece, one piece in particular looked like there was something behind it as it wasn’t straight, adding to the mystery of the piece or of what we can see and can’t see. For many African Americans basketball is a way out of the Ghetto but Hammons seems to say that this might just be an illusion given the way he titled the works: Traveling. The bouncing of the ball might take the African American so far, but the implication is that this is only a temporary solution. Traveling (2002), also evokes the rule of basketball that says you can't take the ball and run with it. But, could it also be hinting about belief in oneself, by bouncing the ball in the doing, instead of waiting for something to changed from outside by higher powers.
David Hammons is interested in common everyday objects and their implication in their use and also in their historical associations. In past exhibitions he has used: hair, wine bottles, his own body. His art is about movement, using a ball to make an artwork involves a movement; it is also about process and has an element of repetition as he has to continuously bounce the ball to get a pattern but it is also a freeing as he using a daily object in his life to make art. In the past I had seen his sculptural work such as Kick the Bucket 1988 & Untitled 1989 which was made out of empty night train bottles put into a circular position of discontinued sequence on both sides, I would have liked to see this work again in the Gallery but I guess he is working on new things. Anyway the bottles allude to the fact that a drunk leaves just a trail of empty bottles, nothing else. His work is about the street. The objects, in this case empty bottles, still retain something or say something about who owned them. I find his work interesting because I also work with found objects from the street in my sculptures.
For example when he set himself up in1983 to sell different size snow balls on the sidewalk outside Cooper Union in 1983 after a Blizzard, people actually bought them, the artist didn’t set the price and the public bought the snowballs at whatever price, bypassing the gallery setting; it was done in the street and was easily accessible by anybody that passed by at that time. It questioned the objectification and commercialisation of art through art collecting, especially by the wealthy. It seems to me that Hammons is interested also in shaking up convention or what is seen as conventional.
Downstairs for example in the White Cube Gallery are not paintings but rugs covering a canvas, a rug (tarpaulin & plastic) that could have been used to cover a homeless person. His materials tell a story of the streets, this makes you think of the people living in the streets, or outside of society, there is tension between the painted surface underneath and the broken rugs lying on top of the canvas. It makes you think of a marginalised life, but also of how by putting the broken rugs centre stage they become like a ritual, they gain strength or a form of self-empowerment. He doesn’t have a dealer and has turned down offers of high profile shows, so seeing his work at White Cube makes it even more special. His work makes you question what can be seen and what cannot be seen as art.
Also in the room downstairs on the actual stairs was a fur coat which stands for wealth; this is covered in paint, basically vandalised but then again the artist by doing this gives it value, I personally found it to be a weak piece in the exhibition; I didn’t feel it added anything more to the rest in the main rooms.
In the same space opposite the lift there was a tribal Mask; again I didn’t find this to be a strong piece either, see pic above.The Mask was entitled 'The New Black'.To understand it you need to know the fashion magazines; there has been a lot in the fashion magazines last year about orange being the new black.
I would have
preferred to see his work using hair, dirty, daily objects etc. like Untitled
1990 which was made with metal coat racks, rubber, plastic bags, tin can and a
found hat, or A Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr, 1976, or the Indoor Hair
Garden 1977. Over all in his work one can see also
the influence of Marcel Duchamp and that of African American artist Noah
Purifoy. He is interested in the circulation of goods outside of official
economies which in a way resists being made part or included in an official
language. In the 1970's and 80's he was at the centre of a group of black artists centred on the pioneering gallery Just Above Midtown.
He is famous for his body prints made in the 1970s in which he covered himself with grease and pigment and then he used his own body to create marks on paper. He studied in Los Angeles at the Chouinard Art Institute and the Otis Art Institute before settling in New York in 1974. David Hammons was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1943.
His interest is in common, daily lives as opposed to the sterile unreal life of Institutional spaces; but with the association of Basketball with young African Americans, it also alludes to the place of African Americans in American society and the repetitive bouncing of the ball as a ritual. This specific work hints at arte Povera and American gestural abstraction. I have also been told by the gallery that behind the works the artist has put suitcases which give a sculptural dimension to the piece, one piece in particular looked like there was something behind it as it wasn’t straight, adding to the mystery of the piece or of what we can see and can’t see. For many African Americans basketball is a way out of the Ghetto but Hammons seems to say that this might just be an illusion given the way he titled the works: Traveling. The bouncing of the ball might take the African American so far, but the implication is that this is only a temporary solution. Traveling (2002), also evokes the rule of basketball that says you can't take the ball and run with it. But, could it also be hinting about belief in oneself, by bouncing the ball in the doing, instead of waiting for something to changed from outside by higher powers.
David Hammons is interested in common everyday objects and their implication in their use and also in their historical associations. In past exhibitions he has used: hair, wine bottles, his own body. His art is about movement, using a ball to make an artwork involves a movement; it is also about process and has an element of repetition as he has to continuously bounce the ball to get a pattern but it is also a freeing as he using a daily object in his life to make art. In the past I had seen his sculptural work such as Kick the Bucket 1988 & Untitled 1989 which was made out of empty night train bottles put into a circular position of discontinued sequence on both sides, I would have liked to see this work again in the Gallery but I guess he is working on new things. Anyway the bottles allude to the fact that a drunk leaves just a trail of empty bottles, nothing else. His work is about the street. The objects, in this case empty bottles, still retain something or say something about who owned them. I find his work interesting because I also work with found objects from the street in my sculptures.
For example when he set himself up in1983 to sell different size snow balls on the sidewalk outside Cooper Union in 1983 after a Blizzard, people actually bought them, the artist didn’t set the price and the public bought the snowballs at whatever price, bypassing the gallery setting; it was done in the street and was easily accessible by anybody that passed by at that time. It questioned the objectification and commercialisation of art through art collecting, especially by the wealthy. It seems to me that Hammons is interested also in shaking up convention or what is seen as conventional.
Downstairs for example in the White Cube Gallery are not paintings but rugs covering a canvas, a rug (tarpaulin & plastic) that could have been used to cover a homeless person. His materials tell a story of the streets, this makes you think of the people living in the streets, or outside of society, there is tension between the painted surface underneath and the broken rugs lying on top of the canvas. It makes you think of a marginalised life, but also of how by putting the broken rugs centre stage they become like a ritual, they gain strength or a form of self-empowerment. He doesn’t have a dealer and has turned down offers of high profile shows, so seeing his work at White Cube makes it even more special. His work makes you question what can be seen and what cannot be seen as art.
Also in the room downstairs on the actual stairs was a fur coat which stands for wealth; this is covered in paint, basically vandalised but then again the artist by doing this gives it value, I personally found it to be a weak piece in the exhibition; I didn’t feel it added anything more to the rest in the main rooms.
In the same space opposite the lift there was a tribal Mask; again I didn’t find this to be a strong piece either, see pic above.The Mask was entitled 'The New Black'.To understand it you need to know the fashion magazines; there has been a lot in the fashion magazines last year about orange being the new black.
He is famous for his body prints made in the 1970s in which he covered himself with grease and pigment and then he used his own body to create marks on paper. He studied in Los Angeles at the Chouinard Art Institute and the Otis Art Institute before settling in New York in 1974. David Hammons was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1943.
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