David Hammons: “The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticise, not to understand and it never has any fun.
Why should I spend my time playing to that audience? That’s like going into a lion’s den. So I refuse to deal with that audience, and I’ll play with street audience. That audience is much more human and their opinion is from the heart. They don’t have any reason to play games, there’s nothing gained or lost.”
The New Yorker. 2002: “
Hammons’s brand of Dada isn’t substantially original. Yves Klein exhibited a vacant gallery, entitled “The Void,” in 1958. Innumerable artists have exploited the poignance of shabby materials. Hammons freely admits to having been influenced by Arte Povera. (He told me that he was thrilled when that movement’s master, Jannis Kounellis, agreed to a dual show with him in Rome in 1993.) But nothing in contemporary art matches his poetic compound of modesty, truculence, and wit. His radical independence stands out, to say the least, in today’s scrabbling art world. It also distinguishes him from the itinerant artist-shamans who pop up regularly at international festivals. He regards that circuit as a trap. “The way I see it,” he said, “the Whitney Biennial and Documenta need me, but I don’t need them.”
Quote from ‘from Studion to Situation, chapter “New Situationalists” page 10: “
Despite increasingly sophisticated curatorial appraisals of what place might mean to artists and participants in projects which profess to ‘engage’, there is still considerable debate about whether projects can or should respond directly to a place, considering the itenerancy of most international artists and the consequential lack of sustained contact with the host city or context. Being ‘out of place’ seems to be a new norm, a ‘must have’ for modern artists”.
Check also blog
‘making a space into a place’ .
David Hammons: “The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticise, not to understand and it never has any fun.
