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Lot Essay
The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize, not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience? The street audience is much more human, and their opinion is from the heart. They don’t have any reason to play games; there’s nothing gained or lost.
– David Hammons
Originally shot in 1995 to memorialize David Hammons’ late-night street performance and produced four years later as part of an independent video work, Phat Free opens with several minutes of arresting and foreboding darkness overlaid with a mystifying, metallic sound. A tall man cloaked in an overcoat, felt hat and sneakers emerges, kicking a metal bucket down a forsaken nocturnal city street. At first seemingly aggressive, the cacophony of the bucket transforms into a rhythmic beat syncopated with the protagonist’s purposeful footsteps. Over the course of a five-minute loop, Phat Free invokes at once the extemporized tempo of jazz and the sharp lyricism of rap and hip-hop.
World-renowned for this installations, paintings and drawings that unswervingly investigate the oppositional forces between black cultural identity and past heritage, David Hammons works across multi-disciplines in Phat Free, the one and only example in the medium of performance and video. Harnessing the detritus of African American life, he confronts black history, African culture, racism and poverty with beauty, grace and complexity that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Frequently sourcing his materials from scraps found on the streets of New York City, such as basketball hoops, dreadlock clippings and discarded restaurant leftovers, or using his own body in the execution of his critical series of Body Prints that he began in the 1970s, Hammons upends traditional modes of production to create vividly symbolic work that confronts critical issues of race and poverty. In a de facto manifesto, the artist has stated, “I think I spend 85 percent of my time on the streets as opposed to in the studio. So when I go to the studio, I expect to regurgitate these experiences of the street. All of the things that I see socially—the social conditions of racism—come out like a sweat” (D. Hammons quoted in the Art Institute of Chicago’s https://www.artic.edu/artworks/185068/phat-free).
Filmed in a candid and rough style, perhaps conjuring memories from the obscured footage of the Rodney King trial only a few years prior, while performed with the organic autonomy of a reality tv show, Phat Free bridges visual opacity with poignant audio effects. The grainy texture of the video represents the harsh reality on the streets, while placing the artist in a lineage of early video performance art among other 1990s artists including Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci. Through the poetic and metaphorical action of “kicking the bucket”, Hammons quite hauntingly evokes the impermanence of life while instigating the existential search for meaning within the contemporary black urban experience. Other examples from the edition reside in major private and public institutions worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, London, the Harvard Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, and the François Pinault Collection at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
– David Hammons
Originally shot in 1995 to memorialize David Hammons’ late-night street performance and produced four years later as part of an independent video work, Phat Free opens with several minutes of arresting and foreboding darkness overlaid with a mystifying, metallic sound. A tall man cloaked in an overcoat, felt hat and sneakers emerges, kicking a metal bucket down a forsaken nocturnal city street. At first seemingly aggressive, the cacophony of the bucket transforms into a rhythmic beat syncopated with the protagonist’s purposeful footsteps. Over the course of a five-minute loop, Phat Free invokes at once the extemporized tempo of jazz and the sharp lyricism of rap and hip-hop.
World-renowned for this installations, paintings and drawings that unswervingly investigate the oppositional forces between black cultural identity and past heritage, David Hammons works across multi-disciplines in Phat Free, the one and only example in the medium of performance and video. Harnessing the detritus of African American life, he confronts black history, African culture, racism and poverty with beauty, grace and complexity that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Frequently sourcing his materials from scraps found on the streets of New York City, such as basketball hoops, dreadlock clippings and discarded restaurant leftovers, or using his own body in the execution of his critical series of Body Prints that he began in the 1970s, Hammons upends traditional modes of production to create vividly symbolic work that confronts critical issues of race and poverty. In a de facto manifesto, the artist has stated, “I think I spend 85 percent of my time on the streets as opposed to in the studio. So when I go to the studio, I expect to regurgitate these experiences of the street. All of the things that I see socially—the social conditions of racism—come out like a sweat” (D. Hammons quoted in the Art Institute of Chicago’s https://www.artic.edu/artworks/185068/phat-free).
Filmed in a candid and rough style, perhaps conjuring memories from the obscured footage of the Rodney King trial only a few years prior, while performed with the organic autonomy of a reality tv show, Phat Free bridges visual opacity with poignant audio effects. The grainy texture of the video represents the harsh reality on the streets, while placing the artist in a lineage of early video performance art among other 1990s artists including Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci. Through the poetic and metaphorical action of “kicking the bucket”, Hammons quite hauntingly evokes the impermanence of life while instigating the existential search for meaning within the contemporary black urban experience. Other examples from the edition reside in major private and public institutions worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, London, the Harvard Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, and the François Pinault Collection at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.