The Brooklyn Rail

David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis met when they exhibited together at the American Academy in Rome in the early 1990s, and they formed a friendship that lasted until Kounellis’s death in 2017. This exhibition brings together important works from both artists made from the 1950s to near the present moment. The artists come from very different cultures, and thus bring different expectations to their work, but we nonetheless find commonalities in their use of material objects that circulate, expand, and undercut the conventions of both painting and the notion of art generally. The works by each artist are placed throughout the two floors of White Cube’s Madison Avenue gallery and are not grouped as separate presentations. In this way we get to experience the different ways the two artists insist on political and aesthetic coexistence, side by side.

At 100 by 72 inches, David Hammons’s untitled gestural abstract painting (2014–16), is as monumental in scale as any Abstract Expressionist canvas. The surface is veiled, and almost but not entirely obscured, by construction-site plastic netting. Hammons has said, “It is my belief that artists should disturb, upset, criticize and make fun of the establishment.”¹ The hermetic, expressive qualities of large-size American abstract painting, eventually valorized by both mainstream culture and the market values of the blue-chip galleries, positioned the African American artist as a kind of outsider. Hammons’s work reflects this condition: it has great elegance and beauty, but of a different type from the lyrical abstract painting of a Jackson Pollock or a Willem de Kooning. His sensibility is leavened with irony and critique, but crucially, there is never bitterness.

Hammons grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and after graduating from Otis Art Institute in California, he moved to Harlem. He has described spending more time in the street than in his studio, and what he saw there he brought back into the studio. Registering the social conditions for urban Black people, Hammons brought that experience together with objects and materials, both the used and discarded, to use as his medium—not aesthetic theory, not canvas and oil paint. His works included here utilize human hair, rock, furniture, wine bottles, and dirt, to name just a few of his materials not usually found in a specialist art stores.

Jannis Kounellis too left his home city, the port of Piraeus in Greece. He moved first to Athens, but left after a short time for Rome to study painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti, and he lived in Rome thereafter. “I have the mindset of a painter. That’s my identity. I couldn’t abandon that even if I wanted to. In Greek, the word for painter is zōgraphos, which means someone who draws life. The Greek is much more precise. It’s a matter of living experience.”² One untitled sculpture (1990) is made up of industrial materials: iron sheeting, crucibles used for molten metal, and rope. It’s a wall-based piece—precisely composed like a painting. The pale rope is a repeated vertical line; the black crucibles suspended by the rope serve as punctuation on the iron sheets behind, welded together with a vertical seam. Such materials speak of the exploited labor, often under dangerous conditions, necessary to generate wealth for the few. Like Hammons’s work, it is indexical of social class relations.

European industrialism, with its abusive class system, and the enduring effects of American slavery in racism and inequality of opportunity should both haunt us. The works presented here show us that fact. But at the same time, Hammons’s irony and humor and Kounellis’s material expression of tragedy make for an ultimately elevating and hopeful provocation. These artists do not once again simply represent information that can easily be rationalized or ignored. Instead they deploy beauty, power, and courage to show us how to confront injustice head-on rather than implicitly condoning it from a position of comfort and privilege.

We will need this lesson as we face the new challenges posed by rapidly evolving technologies, which will likely expose society’s unreconciled stresses yet more dramatically. Both Hammons and Kounellis, without didactic pretension or instrumentalized messaging, demonstrate just how potent poetic material can be in this struggle.