Hammons contra Serra: Piss and Policing in Revanchist New York
A research paper presented at the 21st Annual Historical Materialism Conference: Countering the Plague: Forces of Reaction and War and How to Fight Them
On an unknown date in 1981, conceptual artist David Hammons visited Richard Serra’s minimalist sculpture, T.W.U. (1980-81) — a 72 ton cor-ten steel public art work temporarily installed by the Public Art Fund at the junction of Franklin Street and West Broadway in Lower Manhattan. Entering its inner space, Hammons proceeded to urinate against the rusted surface of Serra’s sculpture – an act captured by Hammons’s long-term collaborator, photographer Dawoud Bey. Bey’s photographs from that day also show Hammons being booked by a passing NYPD police officer, presumably on some sort of disorderly conduct charge. In a later intervention Hammons returned to Serra’s sculpture and tossed 25 pairs of shoes over one of its central ledges – mimicking the look of a ‘shoe tree’, an urban phenomenon in which laced together shoes are tossed over telephone lines, or up into the branches of trees.
Assembled some years later into a single work comprising four archival pigment photographic prints, in this paper I consider Hammons’s interventions – which went under the collective title Pissed Off / Shoe Tree (1981) – in two ways. First, as a radical response to the ‘rhetoric of power’ expressed in Serra’s looming, monolithic minimalist sculpture. Second, as a repository of historical symptoms linked to New York City’s ‘revanchist’ embrace of neoconservative politics, racialised policing, and surveillance from the late-1970s onwards.