VIFF 2022: The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons illuminates elusive art-world rule-breaker
Animation, interviews, and archival footage bring to life the works that turn urban detritus into subversive, allegorical statements
Artist David Hammons adjusts a sculpture that integrates human hair.
The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons screens September 30, 6:15 pm, at International Village 10, October 2 at 4 pm at International Village, and online from October 2 to 9 on VIFF Connect, as part of VIFF
BOTTLE CAPS, AFRO HAIR, sweatshirt hoods, ripped tarps, chicken bones, and discarded liquor bottles: those are just some of the found materials and urban detritus David Hammons has turned into allegorical, bitingly subversive artworks.
By any measure, the Black American artist’s rise from poverty to international art star would make for a fascinating documentary. But there is one challenge: Hammons resists the celebrity machine of the art market, and he is intensely private. He simply won’t do interviews—guarding his status as a cultural outsider.
That elusiveness was a starting point for filmmakers Harold Crooks and Judd Tully, who decided early on that they would respect the artist’s privacy to make The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons.
“Our approach from the beginning was we never really intended to get to David Hammons; we certainly were able to find the right people to let him know very specifically about what we set out to do, but we respected his own sense of privacy,” says Tully, a respected art journalist who spent 20 years as editor-at-large of Art & Auction Magazine, via Zoom. “For that same reason, we didn’t go into his personal life, any of his relationships over the years, et cetera, in the film. And that worked well for us, eventually.”
“It was different,” says Crooks of the process, drawing on his own experience as the veteran Canadian documentarian behind the tax-haven exposé The Price We Pay and co-writing the narration for The Corporation. “But I think it was completely appropriate for David: it’s not an exaggeration to say that his career is without precedent in modern contemporary art in the way that he has used what one writer on him called ‘tactical evasion’—invisibility as his modus operandi. So it was important to be respectful of that, to respect his practice and not be disrespectful of this kind of shield that he required as the basic tool for being an artist.”
The result, nine years in the making, is a definitive film about Hammons’s life and art, blending animation by Tynesha Foreman, rich archival footage from the era of social change that surrounded him, and a wealth of interviews with prominent artists, curators, and art historians—including MacArthur Fellow Kellie Jones.
Fittingly, The Melt Goes on Forever begins with one of Hammons’s most famous art projects: selling snowballs on a Moroccan rug on a New York City sidewalk (1983’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale). Part performance, part conceptual installation, it perfectly encapsulates Hammons’s witty subversion. Near its end, the film circles back to the project, when an art dealer tries to resurrect Bliz-aard Ball Sale, and a high-rolling collector descends—Hammons responding with a brilliant act of cheekiness. As Crooks puts it, so much of Hammons’s art has the “dimension of the trickster”.
For VIFF fans who have never heard of Hammons, The Melt Goes on Forever will be a mindblowing discovery; for those who have, it brings together his expansive output over the decades—one project more insanely inspired than the next—in a way that one gallery show could never contain. At the same time, it contextualizes Hammons’s work, setting it against the racism, civil-rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Watts riots, Malcolm X’s assassination), as well as the overt marginalization of Black artists from the gallery system.
“From where I’m sitting, Hammons is this iconic figure in the elite contemporary art world and young artists are completely flipped out about him,” says Tully. “But beyond that he's completely unknown. So that was definitely one of our goals: to bring him to other audiences.”
Hammons keeps the details of his past fairly private, but we know he was born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, the last of 10 children born to a single mother. He headed to Los Angeles at 20 to study art, making a life-changing connection with African-American painter, printmaker, and activist Charles White, and becoming part of the Black Power Arts Movement.
Hammons’s earliest 1960s works, his “body prints”, still hold incredible power today; he produced them by coating himself in grease, imprinting his body on paper, then dousing the imprint in pigment. In 1974, he settled in Harlem; among his most fascinating, larger-scale public works in the film is the mid-80s Higher Goals—30-foot telephone poles topped with basketball hoops, and covered in thousands of discarded bottle caps with the intricacy of African or Islamic mosaics. Like so much of Hammons’s work, its messages are complex, encompassing the lure of NBA hoop dreams, and the politics of that route up to “higher goals”.
Hammons’s politically charged work carries right through to Black Lives Matter, where his African American Flag, the star-spangled banner rendered in the colours of the Pan-African flag, has become a symbol.
Along the way, Hammons has been enthusiastically taking the piss out of the absurdities of the art world and its pretensions. The film recounts the experience of one Upper East Side gallery who gave him carte blanche, only to find him arriving with a bunch of fur coats he’d blowtorched and smeared with paint—presumably a direct diss to the snooty clientele.
“The more he tells the art world ‘fuck you, fuck off’, the more they want him,” his close friend, blind gallery owner and poet Steve Cannon, says with a laugh in the film.
Still, there’s no doubt he’s been among the first Black artists to break into the gallery system—one where other people of colour and the African diaspora are now belatedly being embraced.
“There's been this remarkable breakthrough of artists of colour, and David Hammons is at the forefront of that,” says Crooks. “And what’s so unique is he did this through a disruption of the rules.”
“Since we started this project, Hammons’s fame has grown exponentially,” Tully adds. But it’s important to remember that, not so long ago, he was an outlier. “Literally, the art world was a form of apartheid.”
One of the most memorable remarks in the film comes from one Black curator, who says that if someone had told him in the 1980s that a retrospective of Hammons’s work, from his bottle-cap basketball hoops to his Afro-hair vases, would one day take centre stage at New York’s hallowed Museum of Modern Art, he would have asked what they were smoking.
And yet even with the recognition Hammons has today, with billionaire collectors pursuing his work, and now a wide-spanning film about him, the artist's biggest success has been staying on the outside. As Hammons himself has said: “I would like to be a myth, be on the invisible side of things. The shadow.”
David Hammon works with cotton in The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons.
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