David Hammons at Ace - New York - "Concerto in Black and Blue"

David Hammons returned to Manhattan for his first high-profile exhibition in more than a decade. His installation was a gutsy, engaging public spectacle that he created through the elegant manipulation of space, light and human form. Ace Gallery's sprawling interior spaces were left dark and empty, punctuated only by the flicker of small blue-beamed lights, which were available to viewers as they entered the gallery. The wry and oddly beautiful conceptual indulgence was called "Concerto in Black and Blue," invoking an old blues lyric--"Lord, why was I born so black and blue?"

The show reflected the best of Hammons: his knack for wordplay in making atmospheric works tied to black American life, ingeniously fashioned out of whatever happens to be at hand. Like most of his projects, this piece was orchestrated on a metaphorical canvas of symbolic blackness; it was then moodily articulated by the drifting movement of shadowy groups of viewers, the piercing pinpoints of shifting blue light and prismatic washes of colored light on the walls.

At the opening, this chiaroscuro effect was in full force. Crowds of viewers stumbled through the light-speckled darkness, their jostling creating the very work of art that they had come to examine. Writer and Lower East Side arts impresario Steve Cannon, who is legally blind, cracked that Hammons made art that blind folks could relate to. Funnier still, Hammons's reputation for artful trickery, for sly offerings that don't look like art, had some viewers considering whether the odd wall mark might be a cryptic Side installation.

"Concerto in Black and Blue" was reminiscent of two works in Hammons's last big New York exhibition at P.S. 1 in 1991. He organized a straight-up 3-on-3 pickup basketball game in the gallery that was comical and animated by the game's social implications, as well as by its inherent energy and rhythmic movement. Another piece played Aretha Franklin's music in a periodically dark gallery space, eerily illuminated by a network of light-absorbing, glow-in-the-dark crucifixes suspended from the ceiling.

But there's another wry dimension to the new work. Despite being an international influence and art star, Hammons nurses an arch, almost tactical alienation from a New York art scene he ostensibly considers insufferable. What could be more ironic, from a Hammonsian slant of mind, than the New York art world singing his praises over a big empty gallery?

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