Black light: David Hammons and the poetics of emptiness

1 MY UNCLE TOSSY USED TO SAY THAT THERE are two kinds of Niggers in the world: Niggers and Crazy Niggers. Tossy was in the latter category. Handsome in a rough kind of way, he was highly opinionated, always funny, and frequently drunk. For Tossy, style was content, and he was stylish in a Pierre Cardin suit, Stacy Adams shoes, Kangol hat, Kojak sort of way--so fresh and so clean. Tossy (his real name was Elton, but nobody ever called him that) lived in my grandparents' basement, which was set up as a kind of mock bachelor pad with a sofa bed covered in gray-pink mohair, a teak coffee table with blue tile inlays, and a console radio/record player that miraculously picked up long-wave transmissions from Europe. It was on that machine that my older cousins introduced me to James Brown, Parliament/Funkadelic, and Richard Pryor, and it was in that basement that they introduced me to "practice" kissing. Tossy's favorite song was "Come Spy with Me" by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. He would sing it in a kind of slowed-down bass voice punctuated with staccato laughs and swigs of the whiskey du jour.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I was crazy about Tossy even though he was disdainful of my budding artistic talents: To the gift of a handmade Christmas card he muttered, "The boy needs to get outside more." But even as a child I knew that Tossy's life was not a model of how to live my own. His indifference to the niceties of lower-middle-class black life scared me and challenged my other relatives' messages of uplift and racial pride. At heart, Tossy was a nomad, although he had lived in that basement for twenty years, worked at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving for even longer, and essentially had never left his parents' house. He fascinated me because he took what he had, which was almost nothing, and made something fabulous out of it, made it seem to encompass the whole world. When I first saw the work of David Hammons, with its attention to the poetics of emptiness, I saw in it echoes of my Uncle Tossy's life.

2 A PASSAGE FROM A 1991 INTERVIEW WITH David Hammons by Robert Storr, then curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York:

  Storr: How does the question of race affect the reading of your work
  and the scope of its development?
  Hammons: I'm trying to get away with the redundancy of being an
  African-American or making African-American art. It's like a double
  negative, a double noun. So I'm trying to figure it out. Everyone
  knows that I am black, so my work doesn't have to shout it out
  anymore.... I am black. The work will automatically be thought of as a
  part of my African-American culture.

Being black, Hammons says, the work will automatically be thought of as coming from African-American culture. To be sure, Hammons uses materials that are culturally specific: fried chicken wings, cotton plants, gold chains, black hair, jazz, Night Train bottles, hoodies, and basketballs. And a Chinese gong. And spades. And snowballs, burning cigarettes, grease, cardboard boxes, blue cellophane, and "How you like me now?" But it's more difficult than that. "African-American" or "African-American Art" has always been a complicated place to live. A noisy cul-de-sac at the end of a long and winding road that lots of folks are curious about but only want to visit during the summertime. I have always gotten stuck on Hammons's "double negative." I think I know what he means, but the words make me uneasy, with their echoes of DuBoisian double consciousness and "If you're black, get back." In the 1990 film Paris Is Burning Dorian Corey says, "When you're all the same then you have to go to the fine point. In other words, if I'm a black queen, and you're a black queen, we can't call each other 'black queens.'... That's not a read, that's just a fact." So really it is about how the terms "African-American" and "African-American Art" are used--and by whom. We need to go to the fine point. "African-American" or "African-American Art," they're part of the conversation, not the end of it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

3 ANOTHER QUOTATION BY HAMMONS--THIS time from a 1993 interview with Deborah Rothschild, curator at the Williams College Museum of Art. In reference to James Turrell, Hammons says:

  Turrell, he's on a different wavelength. He's got a completely
  different vision. Different than mine, but it's beautiful to see
  people who have a vision that has nothing to do with presentation in a
  gallery. I wish I could make art like that, but we're too oppressed
  for me to be dabbling out there.... I would love to do that because
  that also could be very black. You know, as a black artist, dealing
  just with light. They would say, "How in the hell could he deal with
  that, coming from where he did?" I want to get to that, I'm trying to
  get to that, but I'm not free enough yet. I still feel I have to get
  my message out.