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Body Electric
uproar broke out, culminating in ten black men knocking down the work with a sledge-hammer.2 Although Hammons seemed to have intended this piece as a critique of the lack of representation of black Americans, these men, and they weren’t alone, saw it as racist. At a minimum, by switching black skin for white in How Ya Like Me Now?, Hammons used seemingly simple—yet nuanced and sometimes problematic—strategies of provocation, negation and resistance to expose how deep the social value of a skin colour goes and, thus, instigated a reaction from the surrounding community. Reception and the Gaze David Hammons works in the street often. Throughout his career, he has remained sensitive to his chosen environments—their community dynamics, specific history, and politics of place—often installing work in empty lots in his Harlem neighbourhood. In many ways his work’s meaning relates directly to its location.3 In 1985, he set up a version of his twenty-to-thirty-foot tall, ornate, basketball nets, Higher Goals, on the same street corner in Harlem where Malcolm X used to orate.4 More recently, he has responded to invitations from international art events with equal contextual appropriateness. In 2004 he held a sheep raffle at the Dak’Art Biennial in Dakar and for Paris’s 2008 Nuit Blanche, as a subversive reaction to the sensationalized art event, he predicted that a double rainbow would appear over the city during the night.5 (The organizers removed his name from the exhibition program three days before the opening.)6 2 Barbara Gamarekian, “Portrait of Jackson as White Is Attacked,” New York Times, December 1, http://query.nytimes.comgstfullpage. htmlres=950DE6D81738F932A35751C1A96F948260. 3 Ibid. 4 Kellie Jones, “The Structure of Myth and the Potency of Magic,” in David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble (New York: Institute for Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991), 29. 5 Stern, “A Fraction.” 6 David Hammons, “500 Words,” Artforum, November 24, 2008. http://artforum.com/words/id=21506.