Purple Magazine
— F/W 2016 issue 26
David Hammons
FIVE DECADES
AT MNUCHIN GALLERY
NEW YORK
Virtually every major contemporary art museum has tried, unsuccessfully, to land a retrospective of David Hammons (b. 1943), possibly the most important African-American artist today. His elusiveness is legendary. As one story goes, when Larry Gagosian offered him a solo show at his new space in Rome, Hammons was amenable on two conditions: firstly, nothing would be for sale and secondly, he needed a $3 million display fee. Not surprisingly, this exhibition never came to fruition. Hammons is like the late Miles Davis — he over-charges because he can. Case in point, all the prices for available works at the Mnuchin Gallery show are net to the artist, with a 10% fee on top so the gallery gets a taste of the action: gangster capitalism and a political statement. As to why Hammons prefers a private setting over a public institution, I think that having control over the curating is non-negotiable: Hammons has changed the installation at least three times since the previews, even after reviews in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Artforum.
text by BILL POWERS
photography by OLIVIER ZAHM
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Champ, 1989, rubber inner tube and boxing gloves, collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; museum purchase with funds from the Awards in the Visual Arts program, 1989
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Untitled, 2013, glass mirror with wood and plaster frame and fabric, courtesy of Mnuchin Gallery. In 2011, Hammons unveiled his tarp paintings at Mnuchin. The series consisted of abstract paintings, mostly obscured by sheets of torn plastic. A few of the underlying paintings appear whipped or flayed on the surface. To debut his covered mirror pieces in the same environment where the tarp paintings were initially shown feels like a nod within a nod, meta-friendly. In popular culture, vampires cover mirrors because their image is not reflected in them — a visual indication of their soullessness — so the haphazard manner in which the grand mirror upstairs has been obscured by sheet metal takes on folkloric connotations. A Mnuchin Gallery representative also pointed out that in the Jewish tradition, mirrors are covered in houses in mourning.
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Basketball Chandelier, 1997, mixed media, private collection. Generally speaking — and materiality aside — there are two kinds of David Hammons basketball-hoop sculptures: supported (emphasizing the sculptural) and unsupported (accentuating the painterly). It’s both fitting and poignant, then, that the most iconic of these works, Higher Goals, no longer exists and therefore defies ownership, much like the fabled snowballs Hammons sold outside Cooper Union. Higher Goals was a set of five impossibly tall basketball hoops — at least double or triple regulation height — tiled with bottle caps in patterns evoking African textiles and installed at Cadman Plaza Park, Brooklyn, in 1986. Any subsequent basketball hoops, such as the chandelier piece here from 1997, are progeny of Higher Goals.
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Which Mike do you want to be like…?, 2001, electric microphones, metal stands, and electrical cords, dimensions variable, private collection. This work presumably urges us to choose between the triumvirate of Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, and Michael Jordan; the latter was the star of a 1992 Gatorade commercial with the tagline, “Be Like Mike.” The cluster of vintage microphones suggests a press conference yet to start or a missing witness called to testify. Tension is created here between the private life and public face of a superstar, which stand in permanent contrast.
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Standing Room Only, 1996, taxidermied cat on wooden drum, private collection. Another musical sculpture, this time silenced by a sleeping cat. The few times I’ve seen Standing Room Only reproduced in photographs, the taxidermied cat is always facing us. For his retrospective, Hammons turns the animal toward the window, as though it were sunning itself.
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Untitled, 1989, glass and silicone glue, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 1990. When confronted by these used Night Train bottles bound together in an endless circle, I think about the cycle of addiction. Maybe more striking is how much of a foil Hammons plays to Jeff Koons and vice versa. Both men are deeply influenced by Marcel Duchamp but with radically different outcomes. They both use the same touchstones of liquor, basketball, Michael Jackson, house cats, and mirrors. Koons sells us the promise of eternal newness, while Hammons bathes in the noble melancholy of the half-discarded.
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In the Hood, 1993, athletic sweatshirt hood with wire, Tilton Family Collection
