Modern Painters

FROM TOP: H&R BLOCK ARTSPACE AT THE KANSAS CITY ART INSTITUTE; MNUCHIN GALLERYBLOUINARTINFO.COM JUNE/JULY 2016 MODERN PAINTERS 103``````fl imsy tartan plaid–patternedplastic totes that were fi rstnoticed internationally in theearly 1980s, when carried byGhanaian refugees fl eeingNigeria. In recent years, thesesame bags have graced high-fashion runways, decontext-ualized from their historicalfunction and reassembled intoluxury objects. Nearby, acluster of oversize porcelaincowrie shells hang suspendedfrom the ceiling. Once acurrency used among Africanpeople, the cowrie monetarysystem was subvertedwhen used by European andAmerican traders to buyactual Africans. Scaled to thewatermelons whose shapethey mimic, Leigh’s cowriesspeak to a currency unhingedfrom value.Other encounters betweenmaterials and forms across``````time include Cupboard IV,2016, a raffi a-covered hut whoseshape resembles an amalgamof the temporary housing ofnomadic Africans and NativeAmericans before conquest;the traditional mud hutsof the Musgum people ofCameroon; Victorian hoopskirts; and a mammy-shapedpancake house in Mississippi,where one enters throughthe mammy’s skirt. Formallyunited by the bell-shapestructure and conceptuallylinked by the mechanisms ofpower enacted in the trans-atlantic slave trade, these refer-ences speak to the entangle-ment of women’s sexuality withviolation, home, and shelter.Through this kind of coresampling, Leigh extracts fromhistory forms that embodyideas at the nexus of race,gender, and sexuality. —RP``````NEW YORK``````David HammonsMnuchin Gallery // March 15–May 27``````THE ART HISTORIAN Darby English has written,“It is an unfortunate fact that in this country, ablack artist’s work seldom serves as the basis ofrigorous, object-based debate.” David Hammons,an elusive if highly generative artist who isthe subject of this abridged retrospective, is aparadigmatic example of the phenomenonEnglish describes. This interpretive “baggage”is literalized in the object that undergirdsan elegantly canted framed abstractionon paper—by far the show’s most austereLQFOXVLRQ³RQWKHH[KLELWLRQ·VVHFRQGÁRRUwhich conceals behind it a wedged-inblack suitcase, visible if you sidle up to thewall upon which the piece is mounted. Andthe ghostly chiaroscuro within the frame ofthis work, Traveling, 2002, wasn’t achievedwith ordinary pigment and brush—it wasrendered, in fact, with basketballs dribblingHarlem earth on paper. For those keepingscore at home, that makes the work’s title acounterfactual double pun.Though Duchampian subversion and anArte Povera sensibility might characterize,in impoverished canonical terms, thenature of Hammons’s objects, he has alwaysunderstood the constructedness of art’slegitimation and maintained a healthydistance from—or derision toward—theart world’s machinations. Not too far fromTraveling RQHÀQGVUntitled (Shoe Tree),1981, a picture documenting Hammons’sintervention on a tall steel Richard Serrasculpture installed on a Tribeca street corner:7KHDUWLVWÁXQJWLHGWRJHWKHUSDLUVRIVQHDNHUVRYHUWKH``````work and urinated on it. This was also, one mightrecall, the year in which outrage over the proposedremoval of Serra’s Tilted Arc dominated theclannish New York scene. (Talk about “tribalart,” to cite the words Hammons stenciled in redover a Summer 2007 issue of Artforum, onview here in a Plexiglas box near the entrance.)There is at least one other totemic workin this rich but sparse survey of the artist’sRXWSXWRYHUWKHSDVWÀYHGHFDGHVIn the Hood,1993, the decapitated hood from a dark-graysweatshirt. That this work predated by19 years the killing of 17-year-old TrayvonMartin, and the concomitant emergenceof the hoodie as a marker for the extrajudicialincrimination of blackness in America, isalmost entirely beside the point. Whatmatters is how this object surpasses itsVLPSOLÀFDWLRQE\H[WUXVLYHSROLWLFVRIdifference and the casting of its author as akind of celebrity-curiosity (“11 Things YouShould Know About David Hammons,” toquote a typically asinine headline on Artnet).Playing Hammons’s subconscious mark, theNew Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl had this tosay about In the Hood: “It’s rivetingly clever,but may strike some, at least, as menacing.”This queasy impression of “menace” is,of course, not given but insinuated by theviewer who triangulates between object andauthor—a menace à trois. But Hammons’sart expects this triangulation, already inanticipatory subversion of the conditions of itsvariously coded reception and circulation.—Mostafa Heddaya``````David HammonsUntitled, 2013.Glass mirrorwith wood andplaster frame,fabric,75½ x 38 x 11½ in.``````Simone LeighCupboard IV,2016. Steel,stoneware,porcelain,and raffi a,103 x 107 in.