“Hammons was aware that he needed proof of these things that he had done. Work would be on the street for a couple of days and then swept away,” Tully says. “So much of his work would have been literally invisible if it hadn’t been for the work of Dawoud Bey. These are the fruits from the neighbourhood that I live in.”Īlthough eager to disappear from view personally, Hammons had a friend, the photographer Dawoud Bey, who documented much of his work-a crucial job, given the fragile materials involved. The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. Standing in what was then his Harlem studio on 125th Street, Hammons explains in a rare video clip that “the objects that I use to make images from are from my community… and I call them culture sculptures, because they’re from the culture that grew up in today. Cannon, who was blind and died in 2019, describes how Hammons picked up objects when he rode his bicycle downtown from Harlem. The documentary shows work from that Los Angeles exhibition, and then shifts to the poet Steve Cannon, founder of A Gathering of the Tribes, a place for art and talk on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that is now shut. In 1966, the artists Noah Purifoy and Judson Powell organised 66 Signs of Neon, an exhibition of art assembled from materials found on the streets of Watts. For Hammons, an admirer of the French artist Marcel Duchamp, the neighbourhood was a ruin, but also an ominous expanse of readymades. Much of South Central Los Angeles, a community with a large African American population, had burned. In six days, 3,400 people were arrested and 34 killed. “Every time there would be a next idea,” she says.Ĭrucial for Hammons was the Watts Rebellion of 1965 that began on 11 August with a Black man’s arrest for drunk driving. Hammons would always return with more work to sell. One of those students, Suzanne Jackson, remembers Hammons complaining that White “drew all over my drawing” and her replying: “He never did that to me, ’cause I can draw.” Jackson also remembers Hammons urging her to convert part of her studio into a gallery, which she did, reading off prices that were discounted to high double figures. And the story of his students begins then,” the curator Ilene Susan Fort tells the filmmakers. “It was in 1965 after the Watts Riots that Charles White became the first non-white to teach at Otis. His influential mentor there was the artist and professor Charles White. The project took ten years to assemble, and it took Tully and Crooks to Los Angeles, where Hammons lived and studied as a young man. Hammons is present in his influence on multiple generations of artists, curators and critics. The project involved an archaeology of probing the layers of people who interacted with a man who is now determined not to be seen. He was reassured when someone attending an early screening said the audience was all but unaware that Hammons had not participated in the film.
“This is not a biopic and it was never intended as a biopic,” Crooks says. He is not interviewed for the film and the filmmakers stress that they never asked him for an interview. The elusive Hammons, now 79, is sometimes called the Thomas Pynchon of the art world.
The documentary, by Judd Tully (a contributor to The Art Newspaper) and Harold Crooks, surveys Hammons’s artmaking over six decades, with appearances and disappearances of works of art, but mostly disappearances by the artist himself. The film ends with the legacy today of one such snowball. A woman who thought she was helping a homeless man bought one and put it in her freezer in Queens. The snowballs were objects in a performance. The new documentary The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art and Times of David Hammons begins with a memory of Hammons selling snowballs on the pavement outside the Cooper Union in the winter of 1983.
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