In the summer of 2014, a year before the Whitney Museum of American Art reopened to the public in its new, downtown quarters on Gansevoort Street, David Hammons and several other artists were invited to walk through the unfinished galleries. The Whitney curators Scott Rothkopf and Donna de Salvo were planning a sequence of exhibitions that would inaugurate the fifth floor as an open, undivided space, and Hammons was an obvious but impossible candidate: an internationally renowned African-American artist who, during the past four decades, had risen to the summit of the art world by following his own rules, one of which was to turn down invitations from leading museums. Hammons was standing near the big fifth-floor windows that overlooked the Hudson when Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, joined him.
“I had met David, but I didn’t really know him,” Weinberg told me recently. “He was looking at the river, so I went over and said, ‘You know, Gordon Matta-Clark did his famous pier cut right down there.’ ” Weinberg was referring to five large openings that Matta-Clark had cut in the walls, roof, and floor of an abandoned pier shed in 1975, turning it into an immense public art work. (Both the shed and the pier were demolished in 1979.) “David didn’t say anything,” Weinberg recalled. “But a few days later we got a small drawing by him in the mail, with no explanation, no message of any kind.” The drawing showed, in schematic outline, the metal framework of a long, rectangular structure, a sort of ghost image of the pier, floating on water. Under it was the pencilled caption “Gordon Matta-Clark Monument Pier 52.”
Neither Weinberg nor Rothkopf knew what to make of it. Was this a proposal? Or was it a whim on Hammons’s part, a thank-you note for being invited on the gallery tour? So much was going on at the museum in the period leading up to the opening that the mailing went unanswered for some time. Over the next year, though, Rothkopf had several exploratory meetings with Hammons, and in the summer of 2015 the Whitney began preliminary studies for an immense structure based on Hammons’s drawing, fifty-two feet high by three hundred and twenty-five feet long, made of stainless-steel rods. In September, in a groundbreaking ceremony at the museum, Weinberg announced to about two hundred and fifty art-world insiders that work was about to begin on David Hammons’s “Day’s End,” a project that “has taken not a village but literally a city to realize.” Hammons was present, a slight figure in loose, earth-toned clothes, with his wife, Chie. The famously reclusive artist had worked with the Whitney’s performance curator, Adrienne Edwards, in planning the ceremony, which included a fireboat on the river deploying its water cannons to spectacular effect, and six musicians performing a new jazz suite by the composer Henry Threadgill. Hammons had agreed to say a few words. Standing next to him, I could see his long fingers with their elegantly squared-off nails folding and unfolding a scrap of paper, but when Weinberg walked over to offer him the mike he shook his head. “David’s actually a very shy man,” Weinberg explained later.
It had taken the museum four years to negotiate the necessary permits and authorizations from the city, the state, the Hudson River Park Trust, the Army Corps of Engineers, and other official bodies, and to raise the seventeen million dollars that “Day’s End” was expected to cost. A few Whitney Museum trustees questioned the wisdom of taking on such an expensive public art work, which the Whitney would not own—it’s on city property—but which it would have to maintain. Weinberg is a world-class persuader, though, and a majority of the trustees and a surprising number of benefactors and city officials fell in love with Hammons’s ghost pier. One side of the structure will be on land; the other sides will rest on steel piles in the river. Guy Nordenson, the chief engineer, plans to complete it by next fall. Inspired by the project, the city has cleared the Gansevoort Peninsula, the piece of land adjoining the former pier, of storage sheds and utility buildings that were being used by the Department of Sanitation, and the landscape-architecture firm James Corner Field Operations will soon start turning the peninsula into a five-and-a-half-acre public park, with a sandy beach and a landing for kayaks.
Hammons, whose eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch drawing could be said to have precipitated both projects, has played a quiet and somewhat gnomic role in the first one’s realization. He attended about a dozen meetings at the museum, during which he struck Nordenson as being “like a Zen master, enigmatic and unexpected.” He wore a hat, usually a round felt one with holes cut into it, and looked through “third eye” glasses, whose delicate wire frames held a single small lens, centrally positioned between his eyebrows. When asked to make a decision, he was firm and precise. Should the structure be lighted at night? No, Hammons said, it should disappear. “One thing David made absolutely clear was that it had to be on the exact same site as the pier that had been there,” Weinberg told me. “And the only reason we got permission to do it was that it was on the exact same site. He wanted the steel rods to be as minimal and pared down as we could make them. ‘A great tailor makes the fewest cuts,’ he’d say. When a question came up at a meeting, Hammons occasionally said, ‘What would Gordon do?’ ” His title for the work, “Day’s End,” was what Matta-Clark had called his pier cut. Weinberg sometimes had the impression that Hammons was submerging his identity in Matta-Clark’s. Hammons’s generosity to other black artists—buying their work, helping them gain recognition—is unending, although little known. In this case, he was paying homage to a dead white artist whom he had never met.
David Hammons and Gordon Matta-Clark were both born in 1943. They showed their work in New York galleries during the nineteen-seventies, but in those days artists of color barely registered on the mainstream art scene. Matta-Clark was born into it. His father, the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta, had joined the exodus of artists from Paris to New York in the early years of the Second World War. He had married an American art student named Anne Clark, but the birth of their twin sons, Gordon and Sebastian, so unhinged him that he fled marriage and parenthood, and returned to France soon after the war. The boys grew up in New York. Gordon, who added his mother’s name to his own in 1971, eventually reconnected with his mercurial father. He interrupted his architectural studies at Cornell to spend a year in Paris, taking courses in French literature at the Sorbonne, and he later decided, as his father had, to abandon architecture for art.
New York in the seventies was a great place for young artists exploring far-out ideas. Rents were low, and the city, after nearly going bankrupt, was full of abandoned buildings and uncollected garbage. Matta-Clark responded by developing his own art form, called “anarchitecture,” which initially consisted of chainsawing sections out of derelict buildings and presenting them as sculptures. For “Splitting,” his breakthrough work, from 1974, Matta-Clark and two assistants gained access to a suburban house in Englewood, New Jersey—it was scheduled for demolition—and sawed it in half, from roof to basement. (Widely circulated photographs of the bisected house had a powerful impact on many artists, including David Hammons.) Matta-Clark was a galvanizing presence in the downtown art world. He co-founded an artist-run restaurant, called Food, at the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets, in SoHo (Hammons went there a few times), and he helped start one of the first nonprofit, “alternate” spaces to show art, at 112 Greene Street. “Gordon was smart and funny and mischievous and quite adorable,” Alanna Heiss, who founded the Clocktower Gallery and PS1, told me. When he decided to cut holes in Pier 52, at the end of Gansevoort Street, he was acting on his own, without permits or authorization. The waterfront there had been in decline for years. Several of the piers were no longer in use, and had become gathering places for the gay community; Matta-Clark’s hope was that his light-pierced shed, with its huge, west-facing “rose window” that framed the sunset, could be part of this subculture. That didn’t happen, because two municipal inspectors appeared at the site one day and shut it down, citing unauthorized use of city property. Matta-Clark, fearing arrest and prosecution, fled to Paris, where he and a colleague, with full permission from the city, bored a very large round hole through an ancient house in the area around Les Halles. His expanding career was cut tragically short three years later, when he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of thirty-five. His brilliant but troubled twin, Sebastian, who never found his way in the world, had died two years earlier, after falling from a window in Gordon’s New York studio.
David Hammons’s art, which also made use of urban detritus, resonated with the pain, anger, and absurdity of being a black man in the United States. Born in Springfield, Illinois, he was the youngest of ten children in a very poor family. They lived with their mother in a small house near the railroad tracks, and survived on her earnings from a variety of menial jobs—their absentee father dropped in on the family once or twice a year. When Hammons was twenty, he moved to Los Angeles. He lived with an older sister, worked at odd jobs, and took classes in commercial art and design. Hammons’s interest soon shifted to fine art. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (which later became the California Institute of the Arts) and then at the Otis College of Art and Design, a small private school in Los Angeles. Charles White, an African-American artist whose powerful, realistic paintings and prints had not yet been recognized by the white establishment, was teaching at Otis, and he became a mentor to Hammons. “I never knew there were ‘black’ painters, or artists, or anything until I found out about him,” Hammons once said. White let him attend night classes at Otis from 1968 to 1972, free of charge—he was never officially enrolled—and Hammons began the series of “body prints” that launched his career.
Coating his head and body with margarine, he pressed the greased areas down on large sheets of paper and dusted the resulting image with powdered pigment. (Hammons readily acknowledges that he borrowed the idea from the French artist Yves Klein’s slightly earlier Anthropometries, in which nude women, their bodies slathered with blue paint, became “living brushes.”) Many of the prints included drawn or collaged elements, and most of them bore witness to racial oppression. “Injustice Case” (1970), the most famous one, shows a black man sitting in a chair (not Hammons—he had started using bodies other than his own), gagged and bound, his head thrown back, in an obvious reference to the Black Panther activist Bobby Seale at his trial, in Chicago, for conspiracy and inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. (The image is framed in an American flag, twisted into a ropelike fabric; the flag makes an ironic appearance in several other prints.) “Injustice Case” now hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, whose director, Michael Govan, ranks it among the most important works in the collection. “If I had to pick an icon for American art, that would have to be at the top of the list,” Govan told me.
The spade series came next. “I was trying to figure out why black people were called spades as opposed to clubs,” Hammons said in 1986, to the art historian Kellie Jones. “I remember being called a spade once, and I didn’t know what it meant; nigger I knew but spade I still don’t.” His silk-screen paintings and body prints of black faces and playing-card spades led to sculptures made of rusted-out garden shovels, wrapped with chains or reborn as African masks. Hammons turned the racist slur into a mockery of racism. He jammed a cutoff shovel handle into the mouthpiece of a saxophone and called it “Bird,” for the jazzman Charlie Parker. Black Power and the Black Arts Movement were gaining momentum in the seventies, and a new generation of African-American artists had emerged in L.A.—Betye Saar, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Hammons’s friend Senga Nengudi, among others. Hammons’s work appeared in two small Los Angeles galleries and in group shows at LACMA and at the California Institute of the Arts. The body prints sold so quickly, some of them for up to a thousand dollars, that Hammons, who distrusted the market, decided to stop making them.
In 1975, he had his first New York show, at Just Above Midtown (JAM), on Fifty-seventh Street—a new space, which its director, Linda Goode Bryant, had started to present artists of color. Although Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles White, the leading black artists of the previous generation, had shown in New York galleries, until the mid-eighties the art world there remained overwhelmingly white and predominantly male. Bryant, one of the first to challenge that imbalance, became a mother superior to any number of young artists, including Hammons. She was impressed by his insatiable curiosity. “David would spend hours and hours on the street, watching people and letting it all filter into him,” she recalled. “Once, when he was having a show at JAM, he installed a piece on the ceiling of the gallery and refused to have anything that identified it. ‘The only people that should see it are the ones who see it,’ he said. He really does work that is intended to make us see.”
Hammons called his JAM show “Greasy Bags and Barbecue Bones,” a sardonic title that accurately described the content—grease-stained paper bags and gnawed ribs sprinkled with glitter, along with pyramids of hair that he had collected from Harlem barbershops. During the next few years, Hammons made frequent, extended trips to New York. He had two more shows at JAM, and produced a lot of hard-to-sell work: empty wine bottles (Night Train, the poor man’s choice) glued together or impaled on tree limbs in vacant lots; “rock heads,” found stones capped with hair; elephant dung, painted and wrapped with chains; wires threaded with hair, which he planted, reedlike, on Los Angeles beaches; delicately beautiful wall pieces called “Flight Fantasies,” whose elements were broken and melted records, reeds, eggshells, wire, and hair. Hammons’s uncanny ability to put found objects together in ways that evoked meaning and emotion was reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s early work. He believed there was spiritual energy in everyday elements of black street culture. “I was actually going insane working with hair,” he said, in the 1986 interview with Kellie Jones. “That’s how potent it is.” With the wine bottles, “a black person’s lips have touched each and every one . . . so you have to be very, very careful.” Hammons had sought out Robert Farris Thompson, the Yale historian of African art and culture, whose 1983 book, “Flash of the Spirit,” dealt with the art, music, and architecture of six African civilizations—Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Ewe, Fon, and Mande. “You have to go back to what we were before you go forward to what we want to be,” Hammons had said to Thompson, as Thompson recalls in a 1992 essay. “I be into memory, more than the avant-garde.”
By 1980, after several years of dividing his time between Los Angeles and New York, Hammons was living permanently in New York. His work had changed radically, from images that reflected or commented on black life to street actions, provocations, and found objects. Two of his street actions, both in 1981, involved Richard Serra’s “T.W.U.,” a massive, steel-plate sculpture that had been installed in Tribeca a year or so earlier. Unloved by the community, it was regularly defaced by graffiti. In “Pissed Off,” Hammons urinated on one of the towering steel plates, and, in “Shoe Tree,” he and an accomplice lobbed tied-together shoes at the top edge until they caught and hung there. Both actions took place at night, and were documented (at Hammons’s request) by the photographer Dawoud Bey, whose camera also captured an amused-looking police officer talking with Hammons beside “T.W.U.”
“Higher Goals,” a basketball net at the top of a fifty-five-foot pole that was decorated with hundreds of bottle caps, went up on an empty lot in Harlem in 1983. It was the first of many basketball-themed art works by Hammons, whose own hoop dreams died when he stopped growing at five feet eight. His street actions were anonymous—they appeared without warning, and people learned about them by word of mouth or from Bey’s photographs. On a cold winter morning in 1983, Hammons placed a rug on the sidewalk outside Cooper Union, and laid out ten rows of perfectly formed snowballs in graduated sizes. Hammons and his snowballs stayed there all day, and, aside from Bey, who took a lot of pictures, the people who saw them were street merchants and passersby—local shoppers, women pushing baby strollers, art students and others, some of whom stopped to laugh, or to ask the price (a dollar a snowball, regardless of size), and in some cases—this being New York—to buy one.
Thirty-six years later, “Bliz-aard Ball Sale” (the title he subsequently gave to the snowball action) is Hammons’s most famous art work. Elena Filipovic, the director of the Kunsthalle Basel, published a fine book about it in 2017, which also sheds light on Hammons’s other work and on his life. The snowballs tapped into the iconoclastic spirit of Marcel Duchamp, who once peddled his “Rotoreliefs,” small disks that formed a visual image when turned on a Victrola, at an inventors’ fair in Paris. Echoes of Duchamp are everywhere in Hammons’s work: puns and wordplay; irreverent humor; urinals and dust and everyday objects used as readymade art materials; the artist’s withdrawal from the art market, while bending it to his needs. Hammons’s “The Holy Bible: Old Testament” is a copy of Arturo Schwarz’s “The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp,” rebound in black leather. “I am the C.E.O. of the D.O.C.—the Duchamp Outpatient Clinic,” Hammons told the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, in 2002. “We have a vaccine for that smartness virus that’s been in the art world for the last fifty years.” When I asked Hammons about the quote—did it suggest a struggle to escape the Master’s shadow?—he smiled and said, quietly, “You never get free of Duchamp. He’s always there.”
The word “elusive” sticks to Hammons like a Homeric epithet. He’s the cat who goes his own way, refuses interviews, doesn’t attend his openings, and avoids the art world. But this was not always the case. In Los Angeles, Hammons was a charismatic figure in the Black Arts Movement. His studio on Slauson Avenue became a meeting place for black artists, many of whom were interested in performative processes and sculptural forms derived from African traditions. After he moved to New York, he was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where his influence on black artists was immediate. “David gave artists—and not just black artists—a new way of imagining what an art practice could be,” Naomi Beckwith, a former curator at the Studio Museum, told me. It was influence by example, because Hammons was becoming more and more elusive. Like most people who know and admire him, the artist and writer Arthur Jafa does not feel that he can call Hammons a friend. “For me, personally, he’s more like an older brother—a brother who doesn’t give you the attention you want but you’re too cool to ask for,” Jafa told me. In 2004, the Studio Museum began flying a new iteration of Hammons’s 1990 “African American Flag”—its red, green, and black stars and stripes echo the ones in Marcus Garvey’s black-liberation flag—above its entrance. His continuing influence was recognized in a 2009 group show there, organized by Beckwith and called “30 Seconds Off an Inch”—the title came from a Hammons comment about vernacular carpentry, where “nothing fits but everything works.” Most of the forty-two artists represented came to the opening, and so, for once, did Hammons.
In the eighties, Hammons received consistent recognition from the arts establishment—grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, commissions from the Public Art Fund and Creative Time. In 1989, the Washington Project for the Arts sponsored “How Ya Like Me Now?,” his billboard-size image of Jesse Jackson (who had run for President the year before) with white skin, yellow hair, and blue eyes. It was installed in a parking lot across from the National Portrait Gallery, where a group of young black men, incensed by what struck them as a racist insult, attacked it with sledgehammers—an event that drew national news coverage. None of this kept Hammons far from the edge of poverty. For several years in that decade, living by himself in a Harlem studio, he had no bank account, no credit card, no telephone, and no hot water. To get in touch with him, you sent out “smoke signals,” as the curator Philippe Vergne described it, and Hammons might or might not send back instructions to call the pay phone on the street outside his studio at a specified time. He took showers in friends’ apartments, and survived on grants and occasional sales of his work to A. C. Hudgins, an African-American financial investor who was his first real supporter, and one or two others. In 1990, he won the Prix de Rome, and spent much of the year living at the American Academy there. He showed new work in Rome, Venice, and the town of Temse, Belgium, where he mounted porcelain urinals (Duchamp, ahoy!) on trees in a wooded area. Back in New York, he had two shows in quick succession at the Jack Tilton Gallery—Tilton had roomed across the hall from Hudgins at Babson College. The second Tilton show featured used fur coats draped over blocks of ice.
The real turning point came late in 1990, with “Rousing the Rubble,” Hammons’s retrospective exhibition at PS1, the large contemporary-art space that Alanna Heiss had founded in a former public school in Long Island City. The show, organized by Tom Finkelpearl, PS1’s deputy director, travelled to museums in Philadelphia and San Diego and led to a MacArthur Fellowship and to rising prices for his work. In 1992, the Whitney paid a hundred thousand dollars for “Untitled,” a massive sculpture in which lengths of construction rebar coated with hair spring like dreadlocks from a base of large stones. The Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman, who had recommended the purchase, ached to put Hammons in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which she was co-curating, but Hammons, who had previously turned down a number of Whitney Biennials, wouldn’t allow it. “He was already a myth to black artists,” Sussman recalls. “It was all ‘Why do I want to be in a Biennial?’ ”
After “Rousing the Rubble,” he didn’t have another exhibition in New York for twelve years. He continued to show in Europe, though, and, in 1998, he made his first trip to Japan. The Gallery Shimada, in Yamaguchi, was presenting his work, and he stayed there long enough to become deeply impressed by Shintoism and by Japanese culture. For his second show at the Gallery Shimada, in 2001, he placed a huge boulder in the bed of a truck, planted a garden around it, and drove around the city. Nobody seems to know exactly when Hammons met his second wife, Chie Hasegawa, the Japanese-born artist, but it was in New York, where she had lived for some time. (There had been an earlier marriage, in Los Angeles, and two children.) They have been together for more than a decade, and every year they spend a month or two in Japan.
Hammons produces a lot of art. Always wary of dealers and galleries, he began, in the early nineties, to work with Lois Plehn, a dedicated, market-savvy art collector. For nearly three decades, she has handled virtually all of Hammons’s connections with the outside world. What their arrangement is, or if they have one, is unknown, but she acts as his manager and his bulwark against people he doesn’t want to see. Having dispensed with galleries (and their forty-to-fifty-per-cent cut of all sales), Hammons was in financial territory that most artists have no urge to explore. But he thrives on the freedom of his lone-wolf status. He tantalized the Whitney, in 1997, by allowing “Phat Free,” a seven-minute, inexplicably riveting video of Hammons kicking a bucket along an empty Harlem street, to appear in that year’s Biennial. But there has been no softening in his attitude toward museums. He thinks museums should buy work from artists early, when they need help, not just wait for wealthy collectors to give it to them. “The Whitney needs me, but I don’t need the Whitney,” he told Kellie Jones, who has continued to write about him. (Her father was the poet LeRoi Jones, who changed his name, in 1968, to Amiri Baraka.) Chrissie Iles, a Whitney curator, and Philippe Vergne, who was then at the Walker Art Center, were determined to have Hammons in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, which they were curating together. Public anger over the Iraq War was building, and Iles and Vergne, who wanted their show to reflect the political climate, had invited a lot of politically aware young artists. “David was really the key for us, the artist who had consistently questioned whiteness and the white power structures,” Iles told me. Nothing by Hammons was in the Biennial. A persistent rumor spread, however, that a painting called “RU Legal,” by the jazz legend (and amateur painter) Miles Davis, was there on loan from Hammons. Vergne told me that a viewer had challenged him when he was giving a gallery tour, saying that he knew the painting had come from David Hammons. Vergne said, “If you want to believe that, it’s your right.”
The Museum of Modern Art has the most significant collection of Hammons work in any institution—eighteen objects, ranging from body prints to tarp paintings. The curator Rob Storr put him in a group show there in 1991, and acquired a basketball-net piece for the museum. Several other works were purchased, including “The Holy Bible: Old Testament,” but more than a third of the total was donated by A. C. Hudgins, who joined the museum’s board of trustees in 2012. Hammons has never had a solo show at MOMA, although several curators have offered to give him one. In 2017, when the museum acquired “Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man),” by Charles White, Hammons’s mentor, Christophe Cherix, the curator of drawings, asked Hammons for advice on how to present it. A somewhat mysterious image of a heavily robed man wearing an ecclesiastical headdress, “Black Pope” was one of White’s greatest works, Hammons told him, and the only way to do it justice was to pair it with a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. Complex negotiations with the Royal Collection, in London, ensued, aided by Glenn Lowry, MoMA’s director, and the Tate Gallery’s Nicholas Serota, and from October 17, 2017, to January 3, 2018, “Black Pope” and a brush-and-ink drawing by Leonardo, identified as “The drapery of a kneeling figure,” were on view in a two-artist exhibition at the museum.
Hammons’s ability to make lords of the art world turn somersaults for him is based on the avalanche of money that transformed the art market in the two-thousands, making a few contemporary artists more expensive than Post-Impressionists and more powerful than museum directors. Hammons, keenly aware that pricing affects the way we look at art, was out to prove that work by a black artist could command as much as work by Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, and other contemporary-market stars. By making financial manipulation a part of his process, he has become one of the most expensive artists living. (A dazzling “basketball chandelier,” from 2000, with a cut-crystal net and a backboard flanked by twin candelabra, brought eight million dollars at auction in 2013, and would almost certainly be worth three or four times that today.) To show Hammons’s work, a dealer has to buy it first, at prices set by Hammons. According to Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, a dealer who has bought and sold works by Hammons for many years, “You have to understand that it may be a fantasy price, and you have to believe in the fantasy.”
In 2007, Hammons surprised the art world by having a show at the L & M gallery, on the Upper East Side. He conceived and installed it with no help from the gallery. “We took the risk of giving him carte blanche,” said Dominique Lévy, the gallery’s co-owner, who had been buying work from Hammons for years and was “fascinated by him, by the poetry and by the anger.” Lévy said that she and her partner, Robert Mnuchin (whose son is Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury), had no clue of what was going to be in the show. Hammons brought the work in a small truck: six very expensive fur coats, all of which he had stained, seared with a blowtorch, or smeared with paint. The idea, a comment on luxury and its relation to art, had come from Hasegawa, who was listed on the show’s announcement as co-artist. Just before the opening, Hammons asked Lévy to walk down Madison Avenue wearing one of the coats, a chinchilla, while he filmed her. “The whole thing was very theatrical, a sort of sculptural–conceptual performance,” Lévy said. “David insisted that there could be no sales talk in the gallery, no press release, and no catalogue until a year later.” The gallery had to buy the coats in advance, for an undisclosed sum, which, we can assume, was steeped in fantasy and belief.
Hammons refused to participate in a survey show of his work over the decades, which Mnuchin put together (without Lévy) in 2016. It included body prints, hair pieces, the Whitney Museum’s 1992 “Untitled,” a paint-slathered fur coat, an earlier version of his “basketball chandelier,” and many other works borrowed from public and private sources. Hammons did not attend the opening. Just before it, though, he came by and made changes—removing some pieces and adding others.
Ben Okri, a Nigerian-born poet and novelist who lives in London, learned, in 2014, that David Hammons wanted to meet him. Hammons had been deeply impressed by a collection of Okri’s essays called “A Time for New Dreams.” (In a Japanese restaurant last winter, Hammons wrote the book’s title on the paper that his chopsticks came in, handed it to me, and said, “I want you to read this.”) “David kept asking the White Cube gallery”—where Hammons had just had a show in London—“to connect us,” Okri told me. “And eventually they sent me to New York so we could have a conversation—a weeklong conversation.” On his arrival at J.F.K., Okri was heading for the taxi stand when he noticed “a rather strange-looking man in an unusual hat,” who seemed to be following him. “I said, ‘David?’ He nodded and said, ‘It’s nice to be greeted at the airport, isn’t it?’ We walked to his car, and I got borne into Hammonsland.”
In the week that followed, they took long walks in Harlem, the East Village, the Bronx, and other parts of the city, and they talked “as though we’d known one another for a long time,” Okri said. “David knew the houses where the great jazz musicians lived. To walk with David is a lesson in seeing, and not just ordinary seeing. He’s a supernatural noticer. He’d draw my attention to people working and the materials they used, and to trash and discarded things, and the relationships between them. You realize how little you see. David didn’t like the look of the hotel they’d booked me into, so he pulled me out and took me somewhere else, much nicer. You see the care that people put into their work, but it’s quite rare to find that same care in their dealings with others. I’ve had all kinds of extraordinary experiences in my life, but this one is kind of up there. I came back to England a different person.”
“And did I mention how funny David is?” Okri added, in an e-mail. “In his work humor complicates the levels of meaning. If you look closely at pictures of him after a certain age, you will see a hidden smile.”
A major Hammons retrospective, by far the largest exhibition he has ever had, opened, in May, at the international mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth’s lavish new space in Los Angeles. For a decade or more, he’d had standing invitations from most of the important museums in the U.S. and abroad to show whatever and whenever he wanted, and he had made it clear that he wasn’t interested. “As an artist I am not aligned with the collectors or the dealers or the museums; I see them all as frauds,” he had said in a 1990 interview. So why, in his mid-seventies, did he deliver the prize to Hauser & Wirth? There was talk that the owners had paid him a huge amount up front—forty or fifty million dollars. Marc Payot, the firm’s New York-based partner, scoffed at this. “The rule was that we had to buy a couple of his works—not for fifty, not for forty, not for twenty,” he told me. “But we don’t comment on these things.” What the gallery also gave Hammons was what he had demanded from Lévy and Mnuchin: complete control. “Whatever I asked for, the answer was yes,” Hammons told Stacen Berg, who runs the Los Angeles gallery.
Manuela and Iwan Wirth had been wooing Hammons for fifteen years. Like almost everyone in the art world, they had been captivated, in 2002, by “Concerto in Black and Blue,” his first New York exhibition since the 1990 PS1 retrospective, a conceptual labyrinth where viewers were given tiny, key-chain flashlights to navigate the empty, pitch-dark rooms of the downtown Ace Gallery. That show, to me, was quintessential Hammons—an evanescent but indelible experience, made out of nothing, with nothing for sale. Hauser & Wirth had done a show with Hammons in 2004, at its Zurich gallery. “We went many times to his studio after that, and six years ago I started discussions with Lois Plehn,” Payot told me. When the gallery, which has showrooms in Zurich, New York, London, and Hong Kong, opened its Los Angeles space, in 2016, Hammons was interested. “Los Angeles was an important part of my life,” he told Payot. Because the gallery was letting Hammons decide what would be in the show and how the works would be presented, Payot was in the dark until two weeks before the opening. Crates from Hammons’s studio had been arriving for a month or so, but Hammons was going to install the exhibition, and, as Payot said, “He could have decided to show just three pieces.” In fact, he used almost everything he had shipped—nearly a hundred objects or groups of objects, a few of them made for the exhibition, and all of them (with three exceptions) owned by Hammons.
The first thing viewers saw was a cluster of thirty or forty pop-up tents crowded together in the gallery’s outdoor plaza, many of them stencilled with the phrase “This could be u.” They were the same kind of tents that had taken over the sidewalks on Skid Row, four blocks away, and in other sections of L.A., stark evidence of the city’s growing homeless population. (Hammons requested that his tents go to a homeless shelter when the show closed.) The message here—that privilege and poverty were close relations—carried over into the first galleries of the show, where paintings in various sizes (some very large) were hidden from view by worn and dingy tarps, blankets, sheets of metal or plywood, and other opaque materials. Small rips or holes in the coverings gave tantalizing glimpses of lyrical abstractions underneath. When Hammons’s tarp paintings first appeared, at L & M, in 2011, they had struck me as a return to the anger and violence of his body prints and spade pieces—the artist throwing beauty our way but not letting us see it. That was overly simplistic. Beauty and ugliness cohabit in these works, enhancing and negating each other, forcing us to confront the beauty in ugliness, and vice versa. “With David you can be sure it’s not just about the appearance of the thing,” the artist Kerry James Marshall said to me. “He’s incredibly disciplined, and there’s a level of poetry in the work that other people don’t seem to get to.”
Desecrated fur coats were in another gallery, and, farther on, an antique armoire lay on its back, mirrored front facing up. The exhibition filled two buildings. There was a room with ten vintage household scales, each one holding (weighing) a stack of art books interspersed with paperback nonfiction. In another space, three empty Plexiglas boxes rested on pedestals that stood on the feet of African sculptures—the kind you can buy on the sidewalk outside museums. (The title, written on the wall, was “UNDERSTAND.”) There were drawings that looked like misty Chinese landscapes, made by Hammons bouncing a street-soiled basketball on sheets of paper. There was a Navajo rug, and a cactus plant, and a red plastic ball that filled a medium-sized gallery from floor to ceiling—post-Duchampian readymades, chosen and sometimes altered by the artist. There were many photographs, and paintings made with Kool-Aid powder, and paintings or drawings by artists Hammons admires, including Willem de Kooning, Agnes Martin, and Jack Whitten (on loan from Hauser & Wirth, and thus the only works in the show that he didn’t own), along with paintings he does own by Ed Clark and Miles Davis. Except for “UNDERSTAND,” the non-Hammons works were the only ones with labels, pencilled on the wall by Hauser & Wirth’s registrar, who also inscribed some droll comments by Hammons (“It’s Been Done Before”; “This reminds me of”). In a corridor between two galleries, there was a carved-wood font holding a pool of water, and, just to the right of it, a printout of a 2003 e-mail, in which the writer declines to purchase one of the 1983 snowballs that Hammons is said to have frozen and preserved. Stacen Berg smiled when I asked her if we were to think that the holy water here was a melted snowball. “I’m happy to keep the myth alive,” she said.
Berg told me that she was “terrified” when she met Hammons last February. “He was seeing the space for the first time, and we were all holding our breath.” For a man who shields his private life so implacably, Hammons can be surprisingly open and winning. His gentle, courtly, and often playful manner quickly put Berg’s anxieties to rest. When he took his hat off for a moment, she saw that his hair was dyed pink. “He sat on a bench in the gallery’s garden for hours one afternoon, watching people walk by,” she recalled. “When I asked what he was doing, he said, ‘I want to know what kind of medicine they need.’ ” Soon after that, Hammons told Payot that the gallery shop, which sold ceramics, jewelry, and other craftwork, was “a problem.” What was needed in that space was a “healer.” Berg interviewed several spiritual healers—they’re not hard to find in L.A., apparently—and brought in a psychic worker to “cleanse” the gallery.
Hammons dedicated his Los Angeles exhibition to Ornette Coleman, the revolutionary jazz musician and composer, whom he described to me as “the Duchamp of music, the one who changed everything.” A room at the entrance was a Coleman showcase, with record covers and posters and stills from Shirley Clarke’s 1985 film about him, and samples of a limited-edition LP recording that viewers could buy, with the proceeds going to Coleman’s family. Hammons never met Coleman—or Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, or any of the other jazz greats whose music he reveres. “I didn’t want to know the artist, just the music,” he told me, when I sat next to him at a small dinner given by Hauser & Wirth on the night before the Los Angeles show opened. He asked me if I knew that Miles Davis had white musicians in his band “because he didn’t want the music to be too black.” That reminded me of something Hammons had said, years earlier, to Kellie Jones: “I hate the system, every black man does, but too much work about racism is redundant. You’ve got to take your anger and make it beautiful, like Dr. J going to the hoop or like Duke Ellington.”
The dinner was in a private room at the gallery’s restaurant. Hammons had indicated that he was too tired to attend—he had worked all day on the installation—but he changed his mind. The conversation was boisterous and sometimes loud, but Hammons, who never raises his voice, had no trouble making himself heard. He told several jokes: “What did zero say to eight? Nice waist.” “Who paid for the Last Supper? We did, and we’re still paying.” Afterward, as we were leaving, I said I’d like to sit down and talk with him at some point. “Yes,” he said. “Come to my studio in the autumn.” Autumn was four months away. Lois Plehn warned that he might decide against it, but in late August she called to say that the meeting was on—my wife and I could have an hour with him if we went to his studio in Yonkers at noon on the following Wednesday.
We arrived early, and drove around the city, eleven miles north of Manhattan, until noon. Hammons, who owns properties in Harlem and in upstate New York, bought the Yonkers building five years ago—a former warehouse in an old, run-down part of town. After four years of extensive renovations, it is now his main base. A young man in a floppy hat opened the door for us. He shouted “Mr. D.,” and a moment later Hammons appeared at the end of a long hall. He was wearing a loose white overshirt, and white pants that stopped two or three inches short of his ankles, and the inevitable felt hat, round and short-brimmed. He offered us water, and went off to get it—gesturing for us to sit on a low, beautifully contoured wooden bench that looked ancient and Japanese. The renovated, twenty-nine-thousand-square-foot warehouse resembles a Chelsea art gallery, with its polished concrete floors and twenty-foot-high walls. I had heard that he planned to have shows here, of his own work and also work by artists he admires, but right now it feels like a sanctuary, light-years away from the art world.
When he returned from the kitchen, my wife, Dodie, asked if it would be O.K. to use a recorder. “I think if you left it off you’ll remember the things that you need to remember,” he said, quietly. Sitting on the low bench was awkward. I began by asking how “Day’s End” had come about, and he held up his hand. “Wait,” he said. “We have to talk about something first. I’ve only done one interview, about thirty years ago. When someone wants to interview me, I feel like it’s an interrogation, not a conversation. That comes from being stopped by the police so many times, for, you know, ‘What are you doing in this neighborhood? Do you have an I.D.? Is that bicycle yours?’ When people want to talk with me about art, it’s another kind of interrogation, the question-and-answer thing. I don’t see it that way. I follow the spirit that tells me when to say something and what to say.” He was speaking very slowly, with visible emotion. “I’ve been practicing this, how to handle this interview,” he said. “Lois told me, ‘You can do it.’ But I don’t trust the word. I trust the eye. And I just can’t talk about how things came about, because it’s so personal—it’s almost like raping me to talk about it.” Hammons, I realized, was close to tears. Dodie said, “We don’t have to talk about that, or about anything. It’s wonderful just to be here.”
Clearly relieved, Hammons stood up, and opened a door to a very long room, with a few of his tarp paintings and other works on the walls. I felt as though we had passed a test of some kind. He ushered us into the room, and said, “This is turning out better than I thought it would.” We paused to look at a small object on a stand, an open-fronted box holding a single, delicate wire that was attached to the box at one end and held in place at the other by an invisible magnet. “My wife did it,” Hammons said. “I asked her for a birthday present, and she gave me this. Her studio is behind that wall, but I’m not allowed to go there.”
We sat around a small table, and because our conversation was random, and unrecorded, and at times a bit arcane, the parts I remember may not be the ones that needed remembering. Hammons noticed that Dodie was wearing mismatched shoes—the same model, but one black and the other blue. He was delighted. “That tells me everything about you,” he said. And to me, “Your wife is a rascal. I saw them shoes, and I said this is a rascal, alive and well.” Hammons’s playful side had taken over. “We are not going to talk about Duchamp,” he announced, gleefully. When I asked about his third-eye glasses (which he was wearing), he said, “That’s interrogation,” and we all laughed. Donald Trump pushed his way in. Hammons blamed the Trump catastrophe on President Obama, “because of the backlash.” But now, at least, “we have the truth. Yes, yes, Trump is the truth about America, because America has been like this forever. White people haven’t seen it before, but we have. You know, the reason we never see aliens is that everyone in the galaxy knows this planet is a bad planet. They all know to stay away. I used to have a girlfriend who was a dancer. Dancers are always in pain, and she told me the thing to do was relax into the pain. That’s a good metaphor for the time we’re living in.”
In a tenor whisper, Hammons sang some words from a Joni Mitchell song: “I’ve looked at life from both sides now.” He made a telephone call to the artist Senga Nengudi, whose Los Angeles studio he used to crash in during his poverty years—we had told him we’d been unable to reach her. The recorded message was Nengudi singing, “La-la-la, la-la-la-la-la-a-a . . . ” Hammons hung up and said, “Now you’ve talked with Senga.” When Dodie commented on his unwrinkled, youthful-looking hands, he held up a finger and said, “Black don’t crack.”
Some of what he told us strained credibility. The thirty-years-ago interview, which must have been the one with Kellie Jones in 1986, was not the only time he has answered questions. He also did so with Elena Filipovic (after she’d talked to forty-four people about him), and there are several published Q. & A.s with other people. What surprised me was that, at the age of seventy-six, he was still nourishing the Hammons myth—making himself appear more reclusive and otherworldly than he is. “There is something magnificent and powerful about David,” Arthur Jafa had told me. “It’s his ability to retain his equilibrium in the face of being the first crab out of the barrel. Not the first—Jean-Michel Basquiat was able to integrate the mainstream art world. He was in the game. But Basquiat didn’t survive. David survived. He’s the one who came through.”
The strongest impression I took from our Yonkers meeting was that Hammons thoroughly enjoys being an enchanter, and that he will continue to elude us all. The Hammons myth is impervious. It may be his most enduring art work—an ongoing one, which he can alter and shape and use as he sees fit. By the time we left the studio, having overstayed our appointed hour (at his insistence) by twenty minutes, a lot of warmth had come into the conversation. He walked us outside, gave Dodie a hug, and said to us, “I’m very glad you’ve accepted my way of seeing things.” ♦
An earlier version of this piece misstated the period when Naomi Beckwith was a curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the number of artists in the show “30 Seconds Off an Inch,” and Tom Finkelpearl’s title at PS1.
