David Hammons' Nelson Mandela Sculpture Rocks Conventional Notions About Art

This article originally appeared April 29, 1987 in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution 

"This piece is about work-in-progress, and this is one of the phases, " Hammons deadpans, turning the chore over to an embarrassed parks employee, who mumbles, "I don't want to water no rock, " under his breath.

"I'm bringing attention to it, " Hammons says. "I think I'll water it every da y."

Hammons revels in such absurdities and the truths they contain. Watering the rock is his way of dealing with one of the requirements of his residency, which has left him between a rock and a hard place. How to work in public, when the real work - welding the prison bars that will be affixed to the rock - must be conducted in the sculpture studio at Georgia State University?

(Hammons, who has painstakingly built structures out of bottle caps and devoted a good bit of time to painting elephant dung, relishes the fact that students are doing the welding for him. "I just direct, " he said. "I'm in my Spike Lee period.")

He is considering additional art-in-progress activities and is quite taken with the suggestion that he don a smock and beret, find an easel and palette and sit by his rock to paint.

Another absurdity. Hammons is more than a stone's throw from that traditional conception of the artist working with paint and canvas. For one thing, he frequents the streets rather than the art supply stores for his materials. "My main rule is low overhead, " he said.

His motives, however, are more than economic. "I like using everyday materials so that people will never see them in the same way again.

"Found objects have their own presence. I don't control them at all. Using them, you can come up with things that are outside your own spirit."

For a while, he used human hair salvaged from barbershops, but, he told an interviewer, he had to stop. "I was actually going insane working with that hair. . . . That's just how potent it is. You've got tons of people's spirits in your hands when you work with that stuff. . . . Plus I got really bad lice. Everyone kept telling me I was going to get lice. I shrugged it off as just a possible occupational hazard."

Materials, such as the condom packages he transformed into earrings, make their own social commentary, and Hammons, 44, sees himself as a political cartoonist. "I can't do art for art's sake, " he said.

When completed this week, the Mandela piece will be an imposing monument to the black South African who has been imprisoned for more than 20 years. The sculpture, to be 16 feet high, will be transferred to Piedmont Park for the duration of the September festival and then relocated to a permanent site somewhere in Atlanta.

He chose the rock for its associations. "When you're in prison, you're 'on the rock, ' " he explained. It is also, in a way, an homage to Atlanta's natural beauty. "It's embarrassing to make art here, " he said. "You can't beat a dogwood. In New York, there are no trees, so people go to see art instead."

Not Hammons. He hates to go to galleries and to show in them. This slight and rather impish man prefers to make his art and find his audience where he finds his materials and subject matter - on the street, outside of the art establishment. Living and working at the edge (or is it the curb?) is better for art, he says. It also makes for a better position from which to heckle.

"Art is like the enemy of the people, " he said, warming to his shtick as he blasts artists' role in the gentrification of such neighborhoods as New York's Lower East Side. "First it's the sheet rock, then its the Rolling Rock."

It's a love-hate relationship. Where does Hammons, himself a Harlem, N.Y., resident, hang out? "On the Lower East Side."