Film Review: The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art And Times of David Hammons (2022) Dirs. Harold Crooks And Judd Tully
© Susan Norget Film Promotion
Written by Belle McIntyre
The trajectory of this iconoclastic, visionary and confrontational artist from his beginnings in the 1960s LA art scene punctuated by the Watts riots unleashed a flood of passionate reactions and outpourings among the Black artistic community and brought them together. The work of these artists was personal and pointed at the racial disparities they were experiencing. Among them were Betty Saar, Lorna Simpson, Suzanne Jackson, among others. Hammons work was confrontational, opaque and often anti-art and yet it was so insistent that it could not be ignored. The list of curators, art historians and gallerists who weigh in for this film is impressive and helps to fill in the portrait of Hammons’ brilliant creative intelligence.
© Susan Norget Film Promotion
Initially, Hammons, who had no money was making sculpture out of trash and found objects. Rousing the Rubble was literally reorganizing and augmenting the rubble where he found it. One of his best remembered works was a performance piece which he set up on a table with a display of various sized snowballs for sale. His presentations were always done with the utmost candor even though the joke was surely on the viewer. Some of the snowballs actually sold.
© Susan Norget Film Promotion
He made many very spooky looking sculptural pieces using black hair attached to long wires which could be shaped into plant-like forms or decorative scrolling shapes. As he began to sell and have enough money for art supplies he was able to buy large sheets of paper on which he made extraordinarily evocative prints using his body to apply the paint. He fashioned super tall basketball nets completely covered with nailed-on bottle caps forming a mosaic called Higher Goals. Concerto in Black and Blue invited viewers into a darkened room with blue flashlights with which to illuminate the room with eerie shadows.
© Susan Norget Film Promotion
Hammons himself was not involved with the making of the film, being a semi-reclusive person who seemed to be wary of public scrutiny. The footage of the man himself was made by friends and associates of which he had many and who loved to tell David Hammons stories. In the opinion of his friend, spoken word poet, Steve Cannon, the more Hammons told the art world to fuck off the more they wanted him. The gallerists allowed him space for shows without having a clue to what the work would be until it was installed. In the case of his uptown retrospective at the upscale Mnuchin Gallery, he even came in after the show opened and re-installed the whole show. This whole impossible-sounding, fascinating glimpse of a legendary artist is marvelously presented with animations and an inspired soundtrack by Ramchandra Borcar, based on free jazz, percussion using African instruments and spoken word by Steve Cannon. The man himself, remains true to himself even though he is now a global art star.
© Susan Norget Film Promotion
