UNTITLED
DAVID HAMMONS, 1969
This is not really a drawing. It's more like a stain his body left behind. Hammons covered his face, hands, and clothes with grease, pressed himself against a board, then dusted the mark with powdered pigment until the print came up. Which sounds ridiculous. Then you look at it. There's his face in profile. His hands together. The body is there and barely there at the same time. Showing up and disappearing in the same gesture. It's 1969. The country outside is protests, police, Vietnam, Black Power. None of that is pictured directly. No crowd. No raised fist. No slogan. Just one Black man pressed flat against a surface. And Hammons is in a room by himself, putting grease on his face. Hammons said he felt a "moral obligation as a Black artist to try to graphically document what I feel socially." This is what that looked like. Not a poster. Not a speech. A body pressed down and lifted off. He kept making these body prints for about ten years, using his own body and sometimes other people's. Here, the hands come together like prayer. It doesn't feel peaceful. It feels like praying when you're not sure anybody's on the other end. In 1969 there was one other place a Black man might be pressed onto paper and kept on file. Ink on the fingers. A card at a booking desk. They called that a print, too.