“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.”
David Hammons’ Untitled (Body Print) from 1975 is at once an exceptionally detailed and enigmatic portrait that documents the origin of the artist’s groundbreaking visual vernacular, which continues to prompt critical discourse for over half a century. The present work blurs the taut lines between printmaking and performance art and immortalizes the artist’s brief encounter with the material. Emerging with an ethereal delicacy consistent across Hammons’s Body Print series from 1968 to 1979, in the present work the artist presents himself in profile, clad in a long-sleeved shirt as amorphous impressions of the artist’s fingers trail down the frame. The wispy imprints of Hammons's fingers abstract the artist’s portrait without sacrificing its fine details; pressed imperfectly against the surface, Hammons’s body reveals through the hair on his head, the folds of his skin, and the texture of his shirt. While other Body Prints of Hammons commonly feature symbols like flags, maps and playing cards to signify American culture, the present work maintains exclusive focus on the artist’s own body, documenting the essential moment in Hammons’ performance when artist and medium radically merge as one.
Hammons created his seminal Body Prints series 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. To execute the present work, Hammons firmly pressed and rolled his face and hair onto the paper, then repeated the process with the outside of his arm. In a series of decisive movement, he then slid his hand and fingers up and down the side of the paper, before finally applying a white chalky pigment in different directions to cover the oiled areas across the surface. 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. As critic Alexandre Stipanovich describes:
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Using his own body as both agent and medium of his art, Hammons delivers a groundbreaking and experimental intervention in art historical processes to investigate the body politics of race. In the present work, Hammons leaves behind a ghostly impression of his pressed face and quick gestures and continues to probe themes of racial identification and embodiment consistent throughout the Body Print series, wherein the figures present” a struggle for a third dimension, a human dimension…The subject tries to transubstantiate, passing through his skin and his socio-cultural status where he is restrained by white society. The pressed bodies impart a sense of absolute rejection: a door closed on them forever, an existential racist gate that cannot be crossed…” (Ibid.)
“The level of precision is mind-boggling, with a resulting image that is somewhere between a photogram and an ectoplasmic apparition, a magical trick”
Celebrated for his sculptural odes to Black culture, public street performances, and Duchampian assemblages, Hammons operates both within and against a staunchly critical understanding of art history. In Untitled (Body Print), Hammons’s use of unconventional materials such as grease to prepare the body for imprinting calls to mind the unassuming materials of Arte Povera, while the artist’s positioning of the body as subject recalls the Anthropometries of Yves Klein and the Blueprint cyanotypes of Robert Rauschenberg. 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 and perceiving Blackness. 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).
