Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of tactical evasion.
One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging salesman. He called the evanescent and unannounced street action Bliz-aard Ball Sale , thus inscribing it into a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of ephemeral actions and self-consciously "black" materials to comment on the nature of the artwork, the art world, and race in America. And although Bliz-aard Ball Sale has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through a mix of eyewitness rumors and a handful of photographs. Its details were as elusive as the artist himself; even its exact date was unrecorded. Like so much of the artist's work, it was conceived, it seems, to slip between our fingers -- to trouble the grasp of the market, as much as of history and knowability.
In this engaging study, Elena Filipovic collects a vast oral history of the ephemeral action, uncovering rare images and documents, and giving us singular insight into an artist who made an art of making himself difficult to find. And through it, she reveals Bliz-aard Ball Sale to be the backbone of a radical artistic oeuvre that transforms such notions as "art," "commodity," "performance," and even "race" into categories that shift and dissolve, much like slowly melting snowballs.
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Elena Filipovic

Afterall Books

MIT Press

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

Afterall One Work Series, 2017

One work, London, 2019

One work, London, 2017

2017-09-08

PS, 2017

lg2620801

producers:
Adobe PDF Library 11.0

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Memory of the World Librarian: Slowrotation

"One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging salesman. He called the evanescent and unannounced street action 'Bliz-aard Ball Sale', thus inscribing it into a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of ephemeral actions and self-consciously black materials to comment on the nature of the artwork, the art world, and race in America. And although 'Bliz-aard Ball Sale' has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through a mix of eyewitness rumors and a handful of photographs. Its details were as elusive as the artist himself; even its exact date was unrecorded. Like so much of the artist's work, it was conceived, it seems, to slip between our fingers -- to trouble the grasp of the market, as much as of history and knowability. In this study, Elena Filipovic collects a vast oral history of the ephemeral action, uncovering rare images and documents, and giving us singular insight into an artist who made an art of making himself difficult to find."-- Quatrième de couverture

One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging salesman. He called the evanescent and unannounced street action 'Bliz-aard Ball Sale', thus inscribing it into a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of ephemeral actions and self-consciously black materials to comment on the nature of the artwork, the art world, and race in America. And although 'Bliz-aard Ball Sale' has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through a mix of eyewitness rumors and a handful of photographs. Its details were as elusive as the artist himself; even its exact date was unrecorded. Like so much of the artist's work, it was conceived, it seems, to slip between our fingers -- to trouble the grasp of the market, as much as of history and knowability.0In this study, Elena Filipovic collects a vast oral history of the ephemeral action, uncovering rare images and documents, and giving us singular insight into an artist who made an art of making himself difficult to find

Contents 12
Part 1: What We Know 14
The Images 14
The Myth 16
Part 2: The Evasions of David Hammons 35
Where He’s From 35
Making a Stereotype Literal 39
Outside 42
The Bad Guy 43
Exit 46
Part 3: Stalking Bliz-aard Ball Sale 66
A Blizzard 66
The Daringness of the Act 69
Fugitive Evidence 74
Temporary Business Ventures 77
The Colour of Money 80
As Black as Their Art is White 91
Like Dirt to a Snowball 96
Black Skin, White Cubes 101
Colour Theory 103
Ice and Dust and Rumours 122
The Last Snowball 125
What It Is 138
Endnotes 142

2020-07-26