A New David Hammons Book Will Challenge You, Scold You, Flirt with You

David Hammons arrived at my door thick with promise and pages. It is a “post-exhibition catalogue,” per Hauser & Wirth, who released the book about six years after the artist’s 2019 show at the gallery’s Downtown Los Angeles location. As a self-professed book lover and exhibition catalog collector, I was nearly beside myself to receive such a gift. Removing it from its wrapping, I let the book fall on my dining table with a satisfying thud, before running my hands across the smooth hard cover. The 12-by-12-inch tome weighs just under 7 pounds and features a countless number of pages—countless, because there are no page numbers to count.

I did not experience the 2019 Hammons show in LA, billed as the largest comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date, and this catalog, I assumed, would offer unique perspective on his six-decades-long enigmatic practice. I opened the book and quickly discovered that there was no text. The title page flips to reveal a full-page color image with no title or year. Imagine my fervent page-turning as I opened the book to find no table of contents, no section headings, no exhibition text, no timeline, no bibliography, and no essays. No essays. Just a humble colophon and the artist’s name. Assuming does indeed make an ass out of you and me.

As a catalog—a book form traditionally intended to document an exhibition—David Hammons disappoints. This genre of book typically provides context for the art, the artist, and an exhibition; this book does not do that work. It offers hundreds of beautiful images—gallery install shots, artwork reproductions, ephemera—with no titles, no dates, no material lists, organized in no discernable order. It can be assumed that the catalog encompasses the breadth of the 2019 exhibition because that is the occasion on which it was published, but it leaves little for the hungry viewer to contend with beyond the art itself, presented in a raw and unapologetic series of images.

It would be easy to dismiss this “post-exhibition catalogue” as a mislabeled coffee table book, beautiful and easily consumed, or as a response to the anti-intellectual wave in our culture that is drastically impacting the production and publication of the research that undergirds our field. This book, I would argue, is doing the clever work of making itself inaccessible—not to the wider public, but to art historians, curators, and scholars who might seek to express some authority over Hammons’s work or his life. Thumbing intuitively, about halfway through the pages, you’ll find a series of incredible install shots of a past Hammons exhibition where his works are presented together against white walls. With no text to offer context and no dates to anchor us in time, each featured work is left to be contended with via eyesight alone.

David Hammons doesn’t function like an exhibition catalog; it functions like an artist’s book and, more significantly, like a work of art itself. After turning a few pages, readers will come across documentation of the collaborative 2011 installation of fur coats by David and Chie Hammons, made for L&M Arts in the Upper East Side neighborhood of New York City. The images show the pristine frontal views of floor-length winter coats beside views of the altered backs, which the artists used much like canvas, applying various paints, char, and detritus. Those familiar with these works may know of their apt critique of class and class performance, a persistent critique for Hammons. For those who don’t, the work has been removed from the context of the gallery, making it seem as if the coats were seen spontaneously on the city street, which is where he often sources his materials.

The press release for the book states that David Hammons is a “singular book created entirely under the artist’s direction.” Hammons has been labeled “elusive” for his rejection of the institutional structures of the art world and its highly sought forms of validation. Why should his book be any different? Without an authoritative curatorial voice, the images are left to assert the artist’s voice above all others. The result is a rhythmic, almost stream-of-consciousness flow of vivid images that inform each other. There are no references to the art historical canon, no comparisons to other artistic expressions of Blackness. The works become nearly impossible to historicize, let alone identify without strong previous knowledge of Hammons’s career. In other words, Hammons said what he said already; this book of images enables him to say it again and again and again.

Here, I found myself questioning my desire for this book to be legible, conventional, and useful. Is he challenging me, scolding me, or flirting with me? His refusal to make it easy to intellectualize his work feels like an invitation to a wider audience to exercise a different set of skills: he is inviting us to see as he sees while making room for our own responses and interpretations. It is evident through the book’s images that so much of Hammons’s work is made possible by everyday audiences, whether that audience is indulgently purchasing ephemeral artworks or simply taking time to witness the sublime in the mundane. You travel through the pages and experience what compels you. It may be wholly cliché to say, but the book reads much like jazz—there is a rhythm, but it is not consistent. It lingers here or there, it gets loud and hot before lulling to a confident hum.

Looking, as this textless catalog demands, may be the prevailing lesson. The value of the book comes not only from the information it documents, but also from the experience and endurance required to consume it. Many contemporary artists owe their careers to Hammons, and as you flip through the pages it becomes increasingly clear that his practice—not a singular work, but the methods and means by which he makes—have come to define contemporary art. His use of found materials, his iconoclastic appropriation of cultural symbols, his experimentation with temporality, and his reverence for the detritus of life have all shifted and expanded the perimeters of painting, sculpture, and performance as we have come to understand them. Perhaps this is why his name is the only necessary citation—everything you need to know is right there on the title page.