"It was just like a chain reaction. A lot of magical things happen in art. Outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol."
An ethereal portrait of two heads divided by a row of fish, Untitled (Body Prints) is a superlative example of the experimental use of materiality and medium that distinguishes Hammons’ revolutionary visual vernacular: after visiting a friend’s apartment in Manhattan and learning of the recent demise of her pet fan tailed goldfish, Hammons decided to incorporate the body of the friend’s fish into a new artwork. Initially coating baby oil on and then impressing the faces of his and his friend on both sides of the paper, Hammons then repeatedly imprinted the fish between their faces, before pressing his arms and forearms onto the paper and finally applying powdered black pigment onto the paper to make legible the printed image. Executed in 1975, the present work belongs to the Hammons’ early works on paper, most of which the artist created over the course of a decade beginning in the late 1960s and were prominently featured in David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968-1979, a 2021 museum held at The Drawing Center in New York. Indexing the details of his corporeality as a Black man Hammons’ Body Prints series constitutes a seminal chapter of his long and continuing career as they examine the underlying mechanics of how racial identity operates and is encoded onto the surface of human bodies. While Hammons often incorporates American flags, clothing, or other found objects in his Body Prints to complicate their narratives, his integration of a dead fish in the present work stands out to evince the artist’s tactful use of sarcasm and humor as subversive mode to confront the racial issues at the foundation of his practice.
In the intricate and grey-scale composition of Untitled (Body Print), Hammons captures a spectral portrait of the dual presences of him and his friend. Turned away in both directions, their heads avoid clear identification as they avoid the direct gaze of the audience, but they confront us with the ghostly contours of their facial features, nonetheless. Between the life-size imprint of their faces, Hammons also indexes his arms and fingers and fossilizes the corpse of a fan tailed goldfish in patterned repetition, creating a near-symmetrical image that resembles a figure who outwardly proffers the fish, as if creating an altar for it. In this absurdist and ironic gesture that invokes Classical religious iconography while defying clear interpretation, Hammons also leaves behind traces of his playfully sardonic personality and creates a curious composition that complicates the truth suggested by the impression of his corporeality when he states, “By using the body, I’m going to have the truth whether I want it or not.” (The artist quoted in Mark Godfrey, “Flight Fantasies: The Work of David Hammons,” in Mark Godfrey, ed., David Hammons: Give Me a Moment, Athens 2016, p.20.)
During the late 1960s, David Hammons found himself at the onset of his artistic career in Los Angeles, where a scene for radical art burgeoned in the aftermath of intense social upheaval. The capital of the West Coast Civil Rights Movement following the Watts Riots of 1965, Los Angeles saw the rise of a community of Black avant-garde artists including Betye Saar and John Outterbridge, who answered the politically charged climate of the city with their resounding articulations of the marginalized Black experience. Drawing from a range of influences including the Anthropometry technique of Yves Klein, the conceptual underpinnings of Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaist found-object assemblages, and the Black representational draftsmanship of Charles White, Hammons materialized his own marriage between social discourse and art during this time by inventively using his body as a vehicle through which to aesthetically explore race. In the ethereal assertion of his corporal presence, Hammons critically examines his existence as a Black man by both documenting his quotidian experiences and exposing the legibility of race, affirming his reflection that “I feel that my art relates to my total environment – my being a black, political, and social human being.” (The artist quoted in Ebria Feinblatt, ed., Three Graphic Artists: Charles White, David Hammons, Timothy Washington, Los Angeles, 1973, p.7).
"I feel that my art relates to my total environment—my being a Black, political, and social human being. Although I am involved with communicating with others, I believe that my art itself is really my statement. For me, it has to be."
As with the best of his Body Prints, the final product in Untitled (Body Print) oscillates dynamically between performance and drawing by capturing a precise moment in time. In the groundbreaking Body Print series, Hammons invents his own technique based on trace and imprint and discovers the origins of an artistic language he would develop throughout the next half century to investigate the enduring complexities of race in America across his versatile oeuvre of sculpture, performance, and assemblage. A phantomlike record of the bodies of the Hammons and his friend – as well as a goldfish – Untitled (Body Print) is a quintessential example of the artist’s seminal and radical intervention into the process of Black racialization, which achieves a delicate balance between poignancy, confrontation, and sarcasm at once.
