In reference to James Turrell, Hammons says:
“Turrell, he’s on a different wavelength. He’s got a completely different vision. Different than mine, but it’s beautiful to see people who have a vision that has nothing to do with presentation in a gallery.
I wish I could make art like that, but we’re too oppressed for me to be dabbling out there….
I would love to do that because that also could be very black. You know, as a black artist, dealing just with light.
They would say, “How in the hell could he deal with that, coming from where he did?”
I want to get to that, I’m trying to get to that, but I’m not free enough yet. I still feel I have to get my message out.”
Ten years after that interview Hammons indeed figured out how to make light “very black” for Concerto in Black and Blue, 2002, his exhibition at Ace Gallery in New York. At the entrance to the gallery visitors were given tiny pressure-activated LED flashlights no bigger than gumballs. When the flashlights were clicked on they gave off a blue light, which lasted until the pressure was released. Visitors were ushered through a door into the main gallery space, which comprised more than twenty thousand square feet spread over several rooms with twenty-five-foot ceilings. The gallery was completely dark. And what was in that twenty-thousand-square-foot space? Nothing. It was completely empty except for the blue light emitted from your flashlight and from those of other people walking around in the space with you.
When talking about Turrell, Hammons said, “We’re too oppressed for me to be dabbling out there,” and “I want to get to that, I’m trying to get to that, but I’m not free enough yet.” The movement to “get free,” to cross boundaries, is what’s interesting in Hammons’s recent work, in particular its radical dematerialization over the last several years. But let me reject a reading of Hammons’s project that sets up too strict an opposition between “free” and “not free,” “message” and “post-message,” objects and dematerialization, “white” work (Turrell) and “black” work (Hammons). For one, Hammons’s work has never been “on point” because it’s always too Fellini, too carnivalesque, too damn freaky-deke to be useful as a set of cheering fictions, an expression of an essential, unchanging blackness, or a standard-bearer for some multiculturalist agenda. What to make, for example, of a work like Flying Carpet, 1990, where fried chicken wings are attached with fish hooks to a Persian carpet hanging on the wall? Or Traveling, 2002, a drawing made by bouncing a basketball covered in Harlem dirt on a piece of paper with a suitcase stuck behind the frame pushing the drawing off the wall: playground virtuosity, nomadism, performance art, and Rauschenberg’s tire print, all elegantly rolled into one? Also, it would be a misreading of Hammons’s project to describe it as a linear movement toward dematerialization, for that doesn’t take into consideration earlier pieces like Cold Shoulder, 1990, giant blocks of ice with coats thrown over them, or Bliz-aard Ball Sale, 1983, where the artist sold snowballs on the streets of New York, or more recent pieces like Global Fax Festival, 2000, an empty exhibition hall with ceiling-mounted machines spewing faxes, or his Flashlight Drawing, 2000, which records the movement of a flashlight in a darkened room. Process, ephemerality, and transformation have always been part of Hammons’s work. In a word: Lightness.
From “POETICS OF EMPTINESS” by Glenn Ligon
