ART CITIES: Athens -David Hammons

Over the course of his career David Hammons has carved out a singular position. He first came to prominence in the ‘70s with a series of prints made using his own body. He went on to make Performances, Sculptures and Installations. He discreetly injects sociological content into the tropes of Conceptual art, offering mordant commentary on the position of African-Americans within the dominant culture, as well as his own status as a maverick black artist within an elite art system.

By Dimitris Lempesis

David Hammons’s strategies for engaging with this system, as well as his incursions into the market, have rendered him a legendary figure whose impact is all the greater for his apparent elusiveness. Hammons is a provocateur par excellence. The George Economou Collection presents “David Hammons – Give Me A Moment”, an exhibition of rarely seen works of the artist. The exhibition includes works made in Los Angeles in the late ‘60s and in his New York studio in the past year. With body prints, sculptures, paintings, and documents relating to Hammons’s performances and public projects. His earliest works, the “Body Prints”, in which he greased himself up with margarine, pressed himself against canvas or paper, and then dusted it with pigment, in works that evoke Yves Klein’s ‘Anthropometry’ paintings., represent the concerns of Black Americans in the late ‘60s, this exhibition includes The “Wine Leading the Wine”, from the series. By the mid-70s, Hammons would abandon this kind of work, beginning to create an abstract art from the materials of black culture. Beginning with greasy bags and barbeque bones, he soon began to use black hair, bottles, and broken records. Hammons has been based in New York since 1974, but spent time in Rome and Japan. His contact with both places will be evident in other works in the exhibition. His scepticism about the role given to ancient Roman culture as the foundation place of history led to sculptural works such as “Roman Homeless” (1990), that evokes an impoverished Italian woman’s head and shawl by draping a stained embroidered cloth over a piece of metal mesh that may once have been a garbage can. Alongside works from private collections never publicly exhibited, the exhibition includes some of Hammons’s most iconic works: his “UNIA Flag” (1990), in which the red, white, and blue stars and stripes are re-interpreted in Marcus Garvey’s red, black and green. This year that David Dinkins was sworn in as the first black mayor of New York City. This period was by no means a time of racial harmony, but it’s safe to say that the political climate in Harlem was much different than that of the ‘20s when Marcus Garvey walked neighborhood streets. Hammons, an artist whose work was first provoked by the Watts riots, pays homage to his America, his version of history by melding the Black Liberation Flag with the traditional stars-and-stripes. In “Untitled” (1996), a work made by fastening together fake African masks and hanging them from the wall like a sporting trophy, and that indicates Hammons’s scepticism about the trade in “Afro-kitsch” and his desire to create a new kinds of sacred objects.

Info: Curators: Mark Godfrey and Skarlet Smatana, The George Economou Collection, Leoforos Kifisias 80, Marousi, Athens, Duration 13/6-30/9/16, www.thegeorgeeconomoucollection.com