A talk given at the Ontario College of Art and Design, part of the MA Program in Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories’ graduate symposium, “Art & Struggle.”
This paper examines the indirect confrontation between Richard Serra and David Hammons in a series of performance interventions by Hammons, who acted upon Serra’s 1980 sculpture T.W.U. through, Pissed Off (1981) and Shoetree (1981). Serra’s and Hammons’ relay exposes the synchronicity of their artistic practices in New York while making apparent their stark differences in commitment. The tension between Serra’s burgeoning blue-chip celebrity and Hammons’ underground artistic identity frames one site of struggle between artists committed to political, often racially grounded meaning, and those whose work and its canonization would seem to suppress the commitments of the former. Seeking a more complex mapping of contemporary art history and African American art history, this presentation interrogates both artist’s commitments to experience, phenomenology, materials, the monumental, and their motivation of public space.
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