David Hammons arrived at my door thick with promise and pages. It’s a “post-exhibition catalogue,” per Hauser & Wirth, who launched the e book about six years after the artist’s 2019 present on the gallery’s Downtown Los Angeles location. As a self-professed e book lover and exhibition catalog collector, I used to be practically beside myself to obtain such a present. Eradicating it from its wrapping, I let the e book fall on my eating desk with a satisfying thud, earlier than working my palms throughout the sleek onerous cowl. The 12-by-12-inch tome weighs slightly below 7 kilos and contains a numerous variety of pages—numerous, as a result of there are not any web page numbers to rely.
I didn’t expertise the 2019 Hammons present in LA, billed as the most important complete survey of the artist’s work so far, and this catalog, I assumed, would provide distinctive perspective on his six-decades-long enigmatic follow. I opened the e book and shortly found that there was no textual content. The title web page flips to disclose a full-page coloration picture with no title or yr. Think about my fervent page-turning as I opened the e book to search out no desk of contents, no part headings, no exhibition textual content, no timeline, no bibliography, and no essays. No essays. Only a humble colophon and the artist’s title. Assuming does certainly make an ass out of you and me.
As a catalog—a e book kind historically meant to doc an exhibition—David Hammons disappoints. This style of e book usually supplies context for the artwork, the artist, and an exhibition; this e book doesn’t try this work. It provides tons of of gorgeous photos—gallery set up pictures, art work reproductions, ephemera—with no titles, no dates, no materials lists, organized in no discernable order. It may be assumed that the catalog encompasses the breadth of the 2019 exhibition as a result of that’s the event on which it was revealed, but it surely leaves little for the hungry viewer to cope with past the artwork itself, offered in a uncooked and unapologetic sequence of photos.
View of David Hammons’s 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles.
©David Hammons. Photograph ©Fredrik Nilsen
It might be simple to dismiss this “post-exhibition catalogue” as a mislabeled espresso desk e book, stunning and simply consumed, or as a response to the anti-intellectual wave in our tradition that’s drastically impacting the manufacturing and publication of the analysis that undergirds our subject. This e book, I’d argue, is doing the intelligent work of constructing itself inaccessible—to not the broader public, however to artwork historians, curators, and students who may search to specific some authority over Hammons’s work or his life. Thumbing intuitively, about midway by the pages, you’ll discover a sequence of unimaginable set up pictures of a previous Hammons exhibition the place his works are offered collectively in opposition to white partitions. With no textual content to supply context and no dates to anchor us in time, every featured work is left to be contended with through eyesight alone.
David Hammons doesn’t perform like an exhibition catalog; it capabilities like an artist’s e book and, extra considerably, like a murals itself. After turning just a few pages, readers will come throughout documentation of the collaborative 2011 set up of fur coats by David and Chie Hammons, made for L&M Arts within the Higher East Aspect neighborhood of New York Metropolis. The pictures present the pristine frontal views of floor-length winter coats beside views of the altered backs, which the artists used very like canvas, making use of varied paints, char, and detritus. These conversant in these works could know of their apt critique of sophistication and sophistication efficiency, a persistent critique for Hammons. For many who don’t, the work has been faraway from the context of the gallery, making it appear as if the coats have been seen spontaneously on the town road, which is the place he typically sources his supplies.
Spreads from David Hammons, 2025.
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Publishers
The press launch for the e book states that David Hammons is a “singular e book created fully beneath the artist’s course.” Hammons has been labeled “elusive” for his rejection of the institutional constructions of the artwork world and its extremely sought types of validation. Why ought to his e book be any totally different? With out an authoritative curatorial voice, the pictures are left to claim the artist’s voice above all others. The result’s a rhythmic, nearly stream-of-consciousness movement of vivid photos that inform one another. There are not any references to the artwork historic canon, no comparisons to different inventive expressions of Blackness. The works develop into practically unattainable to historicize, not to mention determine with out robust earlier data of Hammons’s profession. In different phrases, Hammons mentioned what he mentioned already; this e book of photos permits him to say it repeatedly and once more.
Right here, I discovered myself questioning my need for this e book to be legible, typical, and helpful. Is he difficult me, scolding me, or flirting with me? His refusal to make it simple to intellectualize his work looks like an invite to a wider viewers to train a distinct set of expertise: he’s inviting us to see as he sees whereas making room for our personal responses and interpretations. It’s evident by the e book’s photos that a lot of Hammons’s work is made potential by on a regular basis audiences, whether or not that viewers is indulgently buying ephemeral artworks or just taking time to witness the chic within the mundane. You journey by the pages and expertise what compels you. It might be wholly cliché to say, however the e book reads very like jazz—there’s a rhythm, however it isn’t constant. It lingers right here or there, it will get loud and sizzling earlier than lulling to a assured hum.
Trying, as this textless catalog calls for, stands out as the prevailing lesson. The worth of the e book comes not solely from the knowledge it paperwork, but additionally from the expertise and endurance required to devour it. Many up to date artists owe their careers to Hammons, and as you flip by the pages it turns into more and more clear that his follow—not a singular work, however the strategies and means by which he makes—have come to outline up to date artwork. His use of discovered supplies, his iconoclastic appropriation of cultural symbols, his experimentation with temporality, and his reverence for the detritus of life have all shifted and expanded the edges of portray, sculpture, and efficiency as we have now come to know them. Maybe that is why his title is the one mandatory quotation—the whole lot it’s worthwhile to know is correct there on the title web page.
