ART REVIEW : Beauty in Discards and Discord

David Hammons’ art is about power, and about locating the sources of power within the personal and social context of one’s life. For an artist who is black in a world where established power is white, this generates an art with considerable power of its own.

The entrance lobby to the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, where Hammons’ important retrospective exhibition opened Sunday, houses two recent works that introduce the breadth and depth of the 47-year-old artist’s longstanding interest in the subject. One is frankly political, the other slyly so.

“How Ya Like Me Now?” (1988) achieved some notoriety last summer when the billboard--which features an image of the Rev. Jesse Jackson done over in blond hair and blue eyes, as if he were white--was attacked with sledgehammers by offended neighborhood residents. Hammons’ big picture, its sneering title spray-painted across the bottom in the manner of graffiti, scathingly asserts that only an African-American cast in the comfortably familiar guise of European-Americans would have a chance for authentic power in the United States.

The assault against this billboard, which came at the hands of blacks, represented a determined and heartfelt rejection of any blue-eyed alteration of a political leader whose rise to national prominence had come from within the black community itself. Pleased by this vivid response, Hammons incorporated it into the work: Now the billboard is displayed behind a fence-like barricade made from sledgehammers and with an American flag standing to one side.

The second work in the lobby is a coatrack filled with dresses, pants, shirts and jackets, all of them jet black; propped on the floor beneath them is a blind person’s white cane. “Death Fashion” (1990) lines up clothing that represents the hip, de rigueur costume of denizens in the mainstream art world. For Hammons, of course, blackness is more potent than a changeable uniform or mere fashion statement for a white-dominated art world. Leave your blindness at the door, his funerary wardrobe suggests.

Hammons traffics in the unpredictable, socially volatile intersection between the worlds of politics and art. He’s done so from the start. The retrospective, which includes some 75 assemblages and mixed-media works from about the last 25 years, and which was organized by curator Tom Finkelpearl for the Institute of Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Museum in New York, features a room of more than two dozen early drawings and “body prints” made in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Inking his own body and pressing it onto paper--or, in the case of a 1968 sculpture called “Admissions Office,” pressing it against a window pane fitted in a locked door--Hammons paired the exclusion of African-Americans from the mainstream structures of social life with their exclusion from the imagery of the visual world. Pressing his own body into the service of reproduction could not have been more pointed.

Hammons pulls together a variety of sources in his work. Artistic traditions of assemblage and Dada are everywhere to be seen--not least in sculptures such as “Kick the Bucket” (1988), in which a graceful loop made from dozens of joined bottles of cheap, rot-gut wine traces a cartoon-like trajectory for a tin bucket held aloft by the loop. The punning title invokes the important precedent of Marcel Duchamp; and the street aesthetic of employing common materials in the service of racially specific commentary recalls the work of Mel Edwards, whose “Lynch Fragment” sculptures turn steel shackles into Cubist-related fetishes and masks.

The concise visual economy that marks Hammons’ best work also speaks of the artist’s early training in advertising. Like an advertiser, he plainly wants to grab an audience by speaking from a position of accessibility in a setting that is not hermetic.

For instance, making a basketball hoop from a plastic milk case nailed to a beat-up door or an old trash can atop a pole (the series “Higher Goals,” 1986-1990) restores to the high-stakes corporate business of sports the original, ad hoc playfulness of James Naismith’s peach-basket game. Decorating the homemade hoops with bottle caps fashioned in patterns adapted from African textiles confers a totemic poignancy on basketball’s contemporary image as a narrow escape route for athletically gifted ghetto kids.

The pristine, white-walled galleries of a contemporary art museum, especially in a wealthy enclave such as La Jolla, might not seem to qualify as an accessible place--which may explain Hammons’ witty decision here to paper several gallery walls with stenciled and floral wall coverings. The austere institution is given a down-home look.

And, as always, Hammons is playing by his own rigorously perceptive rules, not by the museum’s. Last spring, the artist--a 25-year “overnight success”--turned down an invitation from New York’s Whitney Museum to participate in its prestigious biennial exhibition. His refusal declared that his participation is what confers status on the museum, not the other way around. Long ignored by the institutional Establishment, he wasn’t about to become a blue-eyed blond for the occasion.

Direct confrontation and biting wit are ever-present in his art. Yet, in his evocative use of materials Hammons is also capable of remarkable grace and delicacy. Two of the most elegantly beautiful works in the show are generic portraits installed side by side: “Bag Lady in Flight” (1982), in which greased and flattened paper-bags, decorated with nappy hair, trace a sinuous arabesque across the wall; and “Roman Homeless,” executed last year in Italy, where he now lives, in which a cornucopia-shape of wire mesh is festooned with scavenged tennis balls and crystal teardrops and shrouded beneath a sumptuous rag of stained brocade.

The exhibition’s tour de force is an installation that magically distills and makes visceral a central quality of black experience in the United States. It begins with the loud and joyous sound of a gospel choir singing “Jesus Is the Light,” which emanates from a darkened room. Inside, a hundred glowing, phosphorescent little figures of a crucified Christ hover miraculously in the darkness, like a Milky Way of salvation twinkling in the night sky.

Suddenly, and without warning, the music stops in mid-chord with deafeningly silent abruptness, as the blinding light of a half-dozen naked bulbs flashes on. The joyful chamber is revealed to be a blistered tenement room or shanty, built from tin walls and peeling paint. A cheap plastic fan blows across the plastic crucifixes dangling from the ceiling, and a “boom box” sits quietly on a high shelf.

Your eyes (and brain) slowly adjust to this grim sight, but soon the lights go out again and the inspiriting music swells. Renewed and revivified by the illuminating reality of the street, the phosphorescent light of Jesus glows more brightly overhead.

It’s hardly a revelation, intellectually, to say the church has been a stout anchor for black culture in a hostile America. But what that visceral dynamic means, underneath the skin, has never been more eloquently told than in David Hammons’ art.

* San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla, (619) 454-3541, through Nov . 10. Closed Mondays.