The new documentary The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art and Times of David Hammons begins with a memento of Hammons selling snowballs on the sidewalk outside the Cooper Union in the winter of 1983. The snowballs were objects in a performance. A woman who thought she was helping a homeless man bought one and put it in her freezer in Queens. The film ends with the legacy today of such a snowball.
The documentary, by Judd Tully (a donor For The arts journal) and Harold Crooks, examines the artistic creation of Hammons over six decades, with appearances and disappearances of works of art, but especially disappearances by the artist himself. The elusive Hammons, now 79, is sometimes called the Thomas Pynchon of the art world. He is not interviewed for the film and the filmmakers point out that they never asked him for an interview.
“It’s not a biopic and it was never intended as a biopic,” Crooks says. He was reassured when someone attending an early screening said the audience was virtually unaware that Hammons had not been in the film.
The project involved an archeology of probing the layers of people who interacted with a man who is now determined not to be seen. Hammons is present in his influence on several generations of artists, curators and critics.
The project took ten years to put together, and it took Tully and Crooks to Los Angeles, where Hammons lived and studied in his youth. His influential mentor was artist and teacher Charles White. “It was in 1965 after the Watts Riots that Charles White became the first non-white [artist] teach otis [Art Institute]. And then the story of his students begins,” curator Ilene Susan Fort tells the filmmakers.
One such student, Suzanne Jackson, recalls Hammons complaining that White “doodled all over my drawing” and she replied, “He never did that to me, because I can draw.” Jackson also recalls Hammons urging her to convert part of her studio into a gallery, which she did, reading cut prices to high figures. Hammons always came back with more work to sell. “Each time there was a next idea,” she says.
Crucial to Hammons was the Watts Rebellion of 1965 which began on August 11 with the arrest of a black man for drunk driving. In six days, 3,400 people were arrested and 34 killed. Much of South Central Los Angeles, a community with a large African American population, had burned. For Hammons, an admirer of French artist Marcel Duchamp, the neighborhood was a ruin, but also an eerie expanse of readymades.
In 1966, artists Noah Purifoy and Judson Powell organized 66 neon signs, an exhibition of art assembled from materials found on the streets of Watts. The documentary shows work from this Los Angeles exhibit, then cuts to poet Steve Cannon, founder of A Gathering of the Tribes, a now-closed venue for art and discussion on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Cannon, who was blind and died in 2019, describes how Hammons picked up items while riding his bike in downtown Harlem. Standing in what was then his Harlem studio on 125th Street, Hammons explains in a rare video clip that “the objects I use to create images come from my community…and I call them cultural sculptures, because they belong to the culture that has grown up today. The fruit does not fall far from the tree. These are the fruits of the neighborhood in which I live.
Although eager to disappear personally, Hammons had a friend, photographer Dawoud Bey, who documented much of his work – crucial work, given the fragility of the materials involved. “Much of his work would have been literally invisible if it hadn’t been for Dawoud Bey’s work. The job would be on the street for a few days and then swept away,” says Tully. “Hammons was aware that he needed proof of these things he had done. Dawoud was literally the focus of David Hammons’ work.
As for the snowballs Hammons sold on the street in performance work Sale of Bliz-aard ballsphotographed by Bey 40 years ago, audiences will see that Hammons has the final say.
- The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art and Times of David Hammons, daily newspaper, Film Forum, New York
