"Hammons confronts our commodity-predicated perception of the dear, the beautiful, and transforms our perception of and reception to the humble detritus of our society..."
A pivotal example from David Hammons’ celebrated series of tarp paintings beginning in 2007, Untitled is a captivating refutation of the traditional tenets of painting. Executed in 2009 and constituting a vibrant array of rich hues and expressive brushwork, Hammons’ color-drenched canvas is subsequently shrouded by a crumbling black tarp peppered with tears and texture, epitomizing Hammons’ fixation on the appropriation of found materials and the wry parody of his constantly evolving practice. What does it say about an artist that he should eschew flat, hangable works for decades, return to them in t.mes for one of his first overtly “commercial” gallery shows, and then obscure the paintings themselves with rubbish bags, dirty tarpaulins and plastic sheets. A juxtaposition of materials certainly, with the sun-streaked tarp contrasting with the vivid, painterly abstraction but also a subversion of expectation, a lampoon of the art world.
This sly undermining of expectation and the critique that accompanies it echoes some of Hammons’ earlier work. In 2007, for instance, the artist presented a show that saw him daub swathes of paint onto expensive fur coats, ruining familiar objects (at least to the gallery viewing public) for artistic ends. 1983 saw the artist selling snowballs following a snowstorm to passing New Yorkers in Cooper Square, charging increasing amounts based on the size of the ball in an overt capitalist critique. In Untitled, by appropriating urban waste and detritus, Hammons elevates the abandoned object to the status of high art, challenging the preciousness of both the medium of painting and its aficionados by assigning value to something inherently worthless. As Lowery Sims observes, “Hammons confronts our commodity-predicated perception of the dear, the beautiful, and transforms our perception of and reception to the humble detritus of our society”, and in doing so parodies the emphasis placed on the value of objects over and above their meaning. (Lowery S. Sims, ‘Art as a Verb: Issues of Technique and Content’ in: Exh. Cat, Baltimore, Maryland Institute College of Art, Art as a Verb: The Evolving Continuum, 1988-89, n.p.) In Hammons’ words:
The irony is of course that Hammons has, despite his best efforts, become an art world star, eternally elusive and remarkable in his ever-changing and all-encompassing oeuvre. He is also supremely influential. For all that attempts have been made to draw a line from Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblage works and the Arte Povera movement to Hammons’ multifaceted practice, this would be to ignore a pivotal and revolutionary element of his work, namely, its preoccupation with race and the African American experience. This interest permeates all elements of his practice, especially his choice of materials. As Kellie Jones observes, “the bones, sans the missing/consumed barbecue, type of hair and grease… were employed by Hammons specifically as intimate and personal comments on the [African American] culture.” (Kellie Jones, ‘The Structure of Myth and the Potency of Magic’ in: Exh Cat., New York, MoMA PS1, David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble, p. 24) These are materials that convey a sense of absence – hair removed from black heads, wine bottles emptied by black lips, chicken consumed by black teeth. By using them, Hammons exposes the absence of representation for the African American community in the art world. Duly, the juxtaposition of the canvas against the black tarps draping over and masking the painting reflects the structural inequalities that prevent that community from gaining access to these art forms. The found and associative materials collects ed by Hammons from the sides of streets in Harlem literally block our view, just as the African American community is blocked from entering and communing with the art world. This practice recalls the work of Mark Bradford, who incorporates elements of found posters, endpapers and graffiti in his own tarp works, as well as El Anatsui and Nari Ward. For all these artists, the symbolic racial charge of the constituent parts of their work is of immense importance, and this conceptual leap is deeply indebted to Hammons’ work of the last 50 years.
“The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my t.mes playing to that audience?”
Untitled constitutes an attempt to dismantle entrenched traditions of high art. As Tom Finkelpearl, the curator of Hammons’ major 1991 retrospective, has pointed out, Hammons embraces dirt. Setting up a dirt versus clean cultural duality, he juxtaposes Hammons and Koons, Courbet and Ingres, Fellini and Spielberg, Jagger and Manilow. By bringing the unsanitised contents of the street into the gallery, Hammons defiles the space and forces the viewer to acknowledge the work’s origin. His work is confrontational, but it is not without heart. As Finkelpearl observes, “his view is focused and unflinching in its critique of race and class. But Hammons also finds power and beauty… in the process of making his art reveals an elegant, affirmative use of dirt.” (Tom Finkelpearl, ‘On the Ideology of Dirt’ in: Exh Cat., David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble, op. cit., p. 88)
