pairs of sneakers tied by their laces. In another action, sometimes called Green Chip Pissed-Of (1981), Bey’s photos show a dashiki’d Hammons frst posing with, David Hammons then urinating into, the inside corner of Serra’s T.W.U. at Hauser & Wirth And then, gradually, wealth returned to New York. Hammons augmented his found materials (empty The last solo show David Hammons had bottles of Night Train, piles of rubble, in was a small survey in the cigarette butts and hair clippings) student gallery at Cal State University, with bought ones: basketball hoops Los Angeles, in 1974. That same year, with jeweled nets, artfully ruined fur Hammons would move to New York. coats, big abstract paintings draped At the time, the city was arguably in with dirty tarps in a way that makes much worse shape than Los Angeles. them no less big or abstract. Rather would famously nearly than resisting the entropy of the go bankrupt in 1975, while the Southland potholed streets, Hammons artfully, was enjoying a housing boom that petulantly, entered the vitrifcation wouldn’t bust until the Reagan years. of the blue chip galleries that wanted As New York clawed its way up from to show him—that even tried, with rock bottom, Hammons built a career of mixed results, to sell his snowballs. of actions resembling busking, littering, scavenging, and good old fashioned § antisocial behavior—pieces made in the possibilities of a fraying civil fabric. And then, at Hauser & Wirth— Conditions were harsh indeed; the tents. The streets that spider away 8 just surviving was an art. Somewhere from the Arts District into Skid Row in , the artist are lined with brightly colored tents. was living on the streets, unsheltered, It looks for all the world like, after driving for 365 days (minus a few hours in jail), around Los Angeles a bit, noticing and calling it One Year Performance as one must the largest stable concen- 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece); a group tration of homeless individuals in the of artists called Colab were prying the country, Hammons formalized that locks of a Lower East Side storefront squalor into an installation. At Hauser to mount the squat exhibition called & Wirth, a mess of tents flls the central The Real Estate Show, held on January 1, courtyard as if to remind you that, 1980. hey, you may be enjoying that mimosa Hammons’ Bliz-aard Ball Sale at Manuela, but in another life, or (1983) was another urbanist polemic: maybe even later in this one, “This could selling snow in a snowstorm, a white be u and u.” Hammons has stenciled product in a white marketplace. this phrase in red on several of the tents. In Hammons’ recent and oblique retro- More tents, tumbled over in piles in spective at Hauser & Wirth (ostensibly the breezeway, lay beneath the rainbow a tribute to jazz musician, Ornette irony of a semi- permanent neon by Coleman), there’s a small tearsheet Martin Creed, which reads, depicting the aftermath of another “EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE one of his public actions in Manhattan: ALRIGHT.” a black and white photo by Dawoud Hammons’ installation depends, Bey taken from the base of Richard for its blunted sort of efcacy, on two Serra’s sculpture T.W.U. (1980), three pieces of information: (1) that Hauser & towering, self-supported panels in Wirth is a blue chip commercial gallery the shape of an extruded c-beam. The that is (2) located mere blocks from sculpture’s lines plunge skyward— the Skid Row of a city that, hardest and there, dotting the rusty lip, are 13 hit by the 2008 Great Recession, is

Travis Diehl Fe a ture

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David Hammons (2019) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © David Hammons. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio. currently in the thick of a full-blown them at Hauser & Wirth? Better, he could homelessness crisis. buy them out for the sum of a frst and The contrast is so obvious, so last month deposit and a year’s rent— harsh, like a sign on the wall warning us what’s, say, $30,000 to your average that inequality is as baked into the Hauser & Wirth-backed artist? Or system as white supremacy. Then again, maybe the people could come too, and maybe we need such a sign. Maybe the live in the gallery for the duration of outright leadenness of the gesture— the exhibition. (Playing Santiago Sierra the clean, proud, store-bought shanty- until August 11. August 12, back on the town plopped into the literal middle streets.) He could do this with new tents, of a blue chip gallery, the undercooked too: turn the gallery into a functioning capital-g Gesture of the artist resisting homeless shelter. Another version is the institution that would gladly sell to my mind the most radical: declare anything he ever touches—is how all the tents in Los Angeles—on over- Hammons has decided to negotiate passes and underpasses, Skid Row the union of his past interventions in the and Chinatown and Los Feliz—an urban with his interventions in the fancy artwork. Call it Los Angeles. Call it gallery. And how, dear viewer, will you Homes. Of course, in that case—in negotiate your presence here? a show without so much as a checklist The gallery, for its part, inficts its to hold your hand—who but the most urban surroundings with white-walled privileged collector would ever know fantasies. To wit—among the phrases what Hammons had done? It would Hammons has penciled on Hauser & harmonize nicely, Coleman style, with Wirth’s walls, is WHAT WAS THIS PLACE his mystique. BEFORE. (It was a four mill, churning Instead, it seems like Hammons out another white commodity—then it walked into an REI, produced his was a grafti spot.) The gallery’s PR American Express, and cleaned them 10 campaign for the exhibition included out. It is formally and conceptually the black and white posters of Ornette laziest possible execution of this idea, Coleman (headlined ORNETTE the most numbingly obvious political COLEMAN, like it’s his show), wheat- airdrop, a stupid-funny fuck you to pasted on construction barriers in New Hauser, Wirth, and Hammons himself, York City and Los Angeles. At Hauser & for ever agreeing to this troll in the frst Wirth itself, a small unframed photo place. Oh, and you—the viewer—fuck shows the poster taped to an actual you, too. Maybe one day this could be u Skid Row tent. Maybe this patent afront, being homeless, sleeping rough in Los though, is what is required to add that Angeles, and then again this could also special Hammons favor of disdain be u and u entering willingly into the to the same-old polemic of big name paradox of formalizing your distaste institutional political art, in which irony for the people who love the way you and sincerity are portrayed as equally formalize your distaste. easy. It has to be this tough, Hammons That self-doubt makes Hammons seems to say—not just socially bad a great artist. This, too, is a performance. news, but cringeworthy art—for you Hammons can piss on a corten wall to pay attention. or dump paint on a fur coat, and the The piece seems to cry out for hammer-like elegance of such releases revision. It’s weird, and rare, for an spreads like the melting snow across the artwork by such a late-career artist to formalism of Hammons’ “wall works,” so readily provoke visions of other, masses of holey tarp and metal and better versions of itself. So much so, that rubber draped and fxed to cheerfully I’ve started to think that this—giving painted canvases. His warm condescen- Hammons full credit—is what his tent sion seeps westward to the accidental city is actually about. For example, beauty of a blue tarp on a purple tent what if Hammons in fact just swept up caught as sunrise races down Hollywood people’s actual used tents and re-staked Boulevard to the sea. The wrongness of 11

David Hammons, Untitled (2017). Mixed media. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © David Hammons. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. those hectoring, pretentious tents at Hauser & Wirth only formalizes, mimics, falls preposterously short of the unac- ceptable social formalism of the real tents a short stroll away. Together, the tents tell a dead serious joke—the woke equivalent of tossing shoes up on a Serra, of selling snowballs. Maybe, just maybe, it is actually funny. The Bliz-aard Ball joke still slays. At Hauser & Wirth, Hammons has installed a glass-top freezer, half flled with tousled copies of Elena Filipovic’s book on Bliz-aarrd Ball Sale, still in their cellophane. There’s also, in another gallery, a little crud-ringed glass bowl on a shelf; framed beside it is a dryly delivered letter from a potential collector to a would-be dealer saying that, unfortunately, they can’t fnd anyone to insure a snowball, and do you have any other Hammonses.

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Poker chips, traditionally, come in three colors. White has the lowest value; then 12 red; then the vaunted “blue chip.” The blue chip is the biggest, and when public companies want to hawk their stock as a sound, stable investment, that’s what they call it. And when art galleries, like Hauser & Wirth, don’t screw around with the small change, they’re called blue chip too. White, red, and blue. Hammons’ own poker set would likely use black, red, and green—the colors of his 1990 African-American Flag, an iconic work and as blue chip as it gets this side of Koons. When one came up for auction in 2017, the total price crested $2 million. Commerce keeps the bitter jest above ground.

Travis Diehl has lived in Los Angeles since 2009. He is a recipient of the Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a winner of the Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism, and Online Editor at X-TRA. 13

Dawoud Bey, David Hammons, Pissed Of (1981). © . Image courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery and Rena Bransten Gallery.