David Hammons Is On Our Mind

Hammons says ‘that art, at its best, is about beauty, and contemplation, which often means that it is about nothing at all’

Moten ‘and where we go with that is this amazing and immense relation between beauty and nothingness, between the material and the contemplative. It is as if Hammons has been post-cinematically making all those experimental films Baldwin speaks of having morbidly dreamt of in the preface to Notes of a Native Son.’

Moten again ‘Our climate doesn’t change. Nothing is nothing neither here nor there. What do we do with the newly fallen snow? The jar, the bowl, its cold arrangement of flowers, that whole art thing, art’s response to the weather?’

One of only 750 copies, this is a precious publication that does unique justice to the presentation of Hammons’ work in the absence of the body in exhibition, and the way it is on (entangled in, in and out of conversation with) our mind.

The book begins with the previously unpublished transcript of a rare artist talk given by Hammons in 1994 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in which he speaks cooly and miraculously over slides of his work. It then introduces a series of photographs the artist sent to the Wattis Institute in 2017, interspersed with texts by the Bay Area poet Tongo Eisen-Martin and the writer and critic Fred Moten.

Hardback, perfect condition. Published on the occasion of the year-long dedication of discussion and public events to Hammons at The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in 2016.