David Hammons | The Holy Bible: Old Testament

David Hammons 

The Holy Bible: Old Testament 

London, UK: Hand/Eye Projects, 2002 

1002 pp., 30 x 24 x 2.5cm, leather 

Edition of 165 

David Hammon's first published bookwork is a kind of appropriation closed circuit, taking Duchamp's assisted readymades to the their logical conclusion. Hammons rebound the soft-cover edition of Arturo Schwarz’s 1969 book The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp as a leather-bound, gilded edge bible, complete with slip-case. 

The work is often read as a critique, a black artist mocking the exaltation of Duchamp in the contemporary art world, and it could also function as an update of Rauschenberg's patricidal gesture in Erased de Kooning (note the use of the old testament). But Hammons' work has frequently nodded to Duchamp in the past. Their practices share the regular use of found materials and a penchant for puns, for example. 

Bag Lady In Flight (1982) has echoes of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and selling snowballs on the streets of Manhattan might be seen as an update on placing a urinal on a pedestal in an exhibition. Even the territorial pissings of the Ricahrd Serra intervention Pissed Off can’t help but evoke Duchamp’s Fountain. Toilet Trees from 1990 [see below] makes the connection even clearer: the work consists of urinals affixed to trees by black rubber tubing. 

“I am the C.E.O. of the D.O.C.—the Duchamp Outpatient Clinic,” Hammons told New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, in 2002. “We have a vaccine for that smartness virus that’s been in the art world for the last fifty years.” 

When asked about the quote by the same magazine several years later — "did it suggest a struggle to escape the Master’s shadow?" - Hammons’ smiled and quietly replied, “You never get free of Duchamp. He’s always there.”