Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
David Hammonss newDays Endis a mystic gift to New York and a permanent recognition of his artistic importance.
He has said that showing has never been that important to me and calls himself an art gangster.
It was mind-fuck and fuck-you.
Hammons was making art dangerous just as the art world was launching itself into hyper-marketability.
He was playing with fire, playing Russian roulette with his career.
He fired the bullet and won.
I loved but didnt know what to make of this one-man cartel and new conquistador for decades.
In 1981, wearing a dashiki, he urinated on a 110-ton Richard Serra sculpture in Tribeca.
That same year he threw 25 pairs of sneakers over the top of those 36-foot-tall steel plates.
(Both works were documented by Dawoud Bey, himself now the subject of a Whitney Museum retrospective.)
His largest public sculpture does that.
I envision it as some four-dimensional hypercube tesseract or stereoscopic time machine.
Nearby, there were cattle tunnels underneath 11th and 12th Avenues.
The spot is filled with ghosts.
Back then, newspapers posted daily schedules of ships coming into and out of the ports along the shore.
Id go and dream of places Id never go and adventures Id never have.
I think that some negative ozone charge of the water had me under its sway.
It still draws me there.
But the hyperlocal history goes much deeper than that.
In World War II, the piers were used to deploy troops.
Then demons descended into the area.
Hammons reminds us that all ground is sacred ground.
The work was brought to fruition by the Whitney Museum with the Hudson River Park Trust.
On the south side, it hovers over the river on cement pilings.
On the north, it is anchored to a peninsula of land that is soon to be a park.
Fifty-two feet high, it extends 325 feet toward New Jersey.
you’ve got the option to see the New York Harbor through its frame.
This makesDays Endmore aurora than monument.
These are shamanic vocabularies.
Tellingly, the 2014 drawing had the words Monument to Gordon Matta-Clark written on it.
The monument that resulted calls forth layered histories and a rattle of shadows past.
The title,Days End,is taken from Matta-Clarks lodestone 1975 urban installation in Pier 52.
For a while, I lived a door down from where Charlie Parker lived!
We should get fever dreams and feel the holy spirit of creativity when we walk our streets.
