Good evening again.
You've multiplied.
[LAUGHTER]
It's an honor to be here, and thank you
for that lovely introduction and thank you for having me.
I am going to organize this reading
around the artwork in Citizen, and which means I'm
going to start with the cover.
David Hammons did this piece in 1993
after the beating of Rodney King.
It's called In the Hood.
And I wanted to start there because many
thought that this piece referred to Trayvon Martin
when they saw it.
And the fact that it was done so many years before
speaks to the fact that because we are just
getting the videos now doesn't mean that this hasn't been
going on and on and on and on backwards for as long as on
can be understood.
David Hammons is influenced by Duchamp.
He likes to say that he's the CEO of the DOC, Duchamp
Outpatient Clinic.
And those of you who know Duchamp, he did the urinal.
It's a question of taking ready mades, things
already in the culture and moving it
into the space of art as a critique.
And that seemed to speak to the exercise in a sense of Citizen
overall project.
But I also want us to look at some of Hammons other work.
So that's David Hammons there.
Maybe we could go down on the lights a little bit.
That's Hammons holding snowballs that he
sold on the side of the road.
I like to think of it as giving others
a chance to feel whiteness melting their hands.
And this is another canonical piece as he did.
It doesn't really show you the entire thing.
If you saw these pieces when they were first displayed,
they had the bejeweled basketball hoop
at the height of the ceiling to symbolize
the unattainable aspect of this--
that the basketball court became for inner city youths,
a way that aspirationally live.
And so he put it at a height that was not attainable.
That's Hammons inside his own piece called
Concerto in Black and Blue.
If you had gone to see this piece,
you would have entered a room this size that
was completely dark.
When you walked into the space, they
gave you a blue flashlight, and that flashlight
allowed you to see what was immediately in front of you,
but to have no sense of what was coming towards you
and where the walls of the rooms was.
And it seemed to me a good metaphor
for thinking about race in America,
and there is a piece in Citizen that
is an expresses poem, a poem written off of a piece of art.
And so that piece appears in the book.