David Hammons has had an extraordinary career. Moving to Los Angeles from his native Illinois in 1963, when he was 20, he studied with the great Social Realist painter and illustrator Charles White and soon found his way to the middle of the burgeoning Black Arts Movement.
Along with a handful of other young artists, he helped define what Black American art would be going forward. For him, it would be conceptual and incisive, a decades-long leveraging of symbols — fair or unfair, positive or pejorative, self-applied or externally imposed — of Black identity. He’s made sculptures out of chicken bones, originated a widely reproduced American flag in Pan-African colors and sold snowballs on the street. If there’s a line between art as activism and art for art’s sake, he’s walked it like a tightrope.
His most famous series may be the body prints he started making in the late 1960s, inspired by Yves Klein and by other art students in Los Angeles. (Hammons took classes at Otis Art Institute and visited other local programs.) But where Klein and the other kids used paint, Hammons greased up his body — or, later, someone else’s — and sprinkled powdered graphite on the paper only after he’d made an impression. It was a formidable innovation. Instead of the vague, if graphic, smudges a painted body would produce, these soft-edged, X-ray-like images caught every last detail. They look less like ordinary art works than like the Shroud of Turin.
But while the most iconic of them were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, “David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968-1979” at the Drawing Center, which combines MoMA’s icons with a room full of rarely seen pieces from private collections and some wonderful documentary photography by Bruce W. Talamon, is the first show to concentrate on the body prints exclusively. And 50 years later, they could hardly be more relevant. In a moment of heightened attention to Black culture, when a new generation of Black painters is at the vanguard of American figurative art, it’s worth looking back to see how Hammons’s work has retained its power for so long.
Start with “Black Boy’s Window,” one of the show’s earliest pieces, from 1968. A real wooden window with elaborate grilles and a grimy roll shade, it features a body print of a boy silk-screened on the back of the glass. The overtones are pretty clear: The boy’s hands are raised over his head, as if in surrender; the vertical grilles are a fence, if not prison bars; there’s a definite whiff of violence.
The same print appears on the following year’s “The Door (Admissions Office),” a free-standing door with a large inset window. The fact that you can now stand on either side of this image — view its picture of racial exclusion, so to speak, from the inside or from the outside — doesn’t change how blunt it is. But what saves both pieces from looking didactic is the hands. Full of detail while also evoking fingerprinting, they’re a kind of abstraction of specificity, a generalized refusal to generalize. They assert that, whether you know his name or not, there was exactly one human individual pressed against this glass.
With this kind of specificity as his anchor, Hammons became free to dive into the most pregnant ambiguities without ever losing his footing. On the contrary, the more ambiguous the prints become, the stronger their impact. One untitled piece captures Hammons in a hooded winter coat with palms pressed together, as if he were a cowled monk praying. In “Pray for America,” he adds the American flag as a hood. It’s impossible to parse — who exactly is he, and what is he praying for? — but completely arresting.
In later works, Hammons left more room for sensuality, both in his depictions of the oiled-up human bodies themselves and in his treatment of art materials. In “Untitled (Double Body Print Collage),” 1976, a naked man and woman lie sleeping together against a background of wallpaper-like patterns and blocks of red, gold and green. In a sense, this has all the political and high-concept content of the earlier, starker works. It’s a glowing, intimate portrayal of two Black bodies just as they are — but also reveals, with an exaggerated pelvis, a sideways buttock and other details, just how setting them to paper distorts them. But there’s also a distinctively 1970s feeling to this and the show’s other lesser-known pieces. They’re no less pleasurable to look at, but they don’t seem as shockingly relevant, as vertiginously ageless, as “Black Boy’s Window.” Why is that?
To put it simply, it’s the difference between conceptual art and the regular kind. In the 1970s, with more people participating and a broader range of paints and pigments, Hammons moved into using body prints as just another visual technique. In his earlier pieces, though, he was presenting his idea — essentially that a Black body was worth looking at — unadorned. It was the body itself that carried the work’s rich cultural and historical context. That’s what made the idea so brilliant.
David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968-1979
Through May 23. The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, Manhattan. drawingcenter.org.