David Hammons’ Untitled (Body Print) brings together the disparate practices of printmaking and performance art in a haunting yet tender portrait of the artist which itself documents the origin of the artist’s groundbreaking visual vernacular, one that has continued to prompt critical discourse for over half a century. Executed circa 1970, the present work belongs to Hammons’ pivotal Body Prints which he executed between 1968 and 1979. In the present work, a ghostly figure confronts the viewer, clutching in his hands a basketball that appears wrapped in an American flag. Captured with immense detail and exacting precision, Hammons records in works like the present not only his own face and likeness, but also records the act of his creation. The inclusion of the American flag and basketball distinguish the present work: both serve as recurrent motifs throughout his oeuvre, serving to investigate histories of racial oppression and American nationalism. The American flag is notably featured in Hammons’ most acclaimed portraits, including Pray for America (1969), held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Created shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, amid a tumultuous era marked by nationwide protests, race riots, and anti-war demonstrations, Untitled (Body Print) stands as an enduring and formidable innovation in mark making that attests to Hammons’ place at the vanguard of American figurative art.

Hammons created his seminal Body Prints with a simple yet radical and dynamic process of his own invention to make visible the otherwise invisible phenomenology of Blackness. First applying grease or margarine throughout his skin, Hammons would imprint his own corporeality against paper, before sprinkling graphite, charcoal or other powdered pigments onto the silhouette of his own Black male body. Resulting in an image of the artist’s figure and the faint traces of his movement that seems to glow against the black background with silver luminescence, the present work recalls the photogram negatives executed by Dadaist artists Man Ray and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy in their experimental abstractions of light. In Untitled (Body Print), Hammons’ figure clutches a ghostly sphere in a gesture of nurture and contemplation. By wrapping the ball – understood to be a basketball – in an American flag, Hammons not only conflates imagery of Black identity and American culture, but he also creates a visual analogy. The figure in Untitled (Body Print) takes on traces of the divine, the abstracted basketball in his hands suggestive of a globe or planet; the quotidian ball transformed into an object of veneration in Hammons’ imagined symbology, amplified by Hammons’ own expression.

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. 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 phantom-like record of his corporal presence, Hammons critically examines his existence as a Black man by 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)

Anatomy of an Artwork: David Hammons’ ‘Untitled (Body Print)’

• 

  Hammons is a successor to Klein's choreographed process but supplants it through his decisive inclusion of markers of Black identity, such as the basketball and his afro in the present work, which he created by pressing a mop into the canvas, and American nationalism, such as the American flag.

• 

  Palming a flag-wrapped basketball between his hands, Untitled (Flag) recalls imagery of the Greek titan Atlas, who shouldered the heavens for eternity. The weight of the globe perhaps likens to the historic gravity of the Civil Rights Movement – and the exhaustive fight for equality that Black Americans heroically championed in the latter half of the twentieth century – while alluding to the tenuous reality of this struggle.

• 

  Hammons created the Body Prints by greasing his body with margarine and baby oil, pressing or rolling body parts against paper, and sprinkling the surface with charcoal and powdered pigment, a process so involved and bodily it evokes the performative Anthropometry paintings by Yves Klein.

• 

  Here, Hammons engages with American iconography and reimagines such ubiquitous nationalistic symbols as the U.S. flag in the same spirit as his contemporary, Robert Colescott’s take on Emanuel Leutze’s masterpiece.

• 

  Though wrapped in a flag, the sphere between Hammons’ palms remains legible as a basketball. Hammons draws in the object’s historic association with Black American culture but shrouds it in a loaded, complex, and often fraught image of both pride and pain: the American flag. Elsewhere in his oeuvre, he uses the basketball not only as a motif but as a medium itself, as in his celebrated Basketball drawings.

Reflecting on the time when Hammons executed this series, The Drawing Center notes: “In a decade that was an inflection point for racial tension and racial justice in the United States, Hammons chose to use his own body to depict the quotidian joys and entrenched injustices of living as a Black man in mid-century America. More than a half century after they were made, these early works on paper remain a testament to Hammons’s desire to reinterpret notions of the real; his celebration of the sacredness of objects touched or made by the Black body; his biting critique of racial oppression; and his deep commitment to social justice.” (The Drawing Center, Press Release for David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979) Indexing the details of his corporeality as a Black man, Hammons’ Body Prints constitute a seminal chapter of his long and enduring career as they examine the underlying mechanics of how racial identity operates and is encoded onto the surface of human bodies. What distinguishes Untitled (Body Print) is that the work is not merely a distant recollection of a past, but rather an intimate portrait of the artist himself that challenges the notions of representing the body politics of race.

Artist

David Hammons