The work of David Hammons is a good example of the use of flatness and form in art. He uses his own body in his work in order to demonstrate his experience with stereotypes as well as those of African Americans as a whole. He turns his body into a flat image; stripping away his personal identity, just as stereotypes do. As David Joselit writes, "In his work flatness signifies identification, and identification is a violent process indeed" (Kocur and Leung 301). The flat image is identified just as easily as a stereotype is used to identify and "flatten" or strip away the true identity of an individual.
Hammons' body print, Injustice Case from 1970 is featured on page 302 in Kocur and Leung, but not much is said about the specific meaning behind it. In Amalia Amaki's African American Diaspora class, this image was shown, and she instructed the class to look up the issue behind it. Joselit writes, "One thing is clear: the repetition and re-framing of normative images drawn from the media and elsewhere has become a dominant postmodern strategy. More than that, such repetitions are regularly regarded as political acts - as "subversions" - both by artists themselves and by art critics" (Kocur and Leung 301). In the case of Injustice Case Hammons is making a political act in recreating the image of Bobby Seale of the Chicago Seven bound and gagged in the courtroom (Chicago Seven). Instead of removing Seale from the courtroom, his freedom and rights were stripped away. Hammons binds his own body, and strips away his own freedom to create a flattened image of a real life event that expresses his own anger about the stereotypes and racism present in not only society, but in a court of law. He backs the image up with an American flag, which contrasts an image a justice with an image of something very unjust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Seven
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Your explanation of David Hammons' "Injustice Case" helped me understand Joselit's point about stereotyping and flatness. His mid-paragraph jump from Johns to Hammons in section II of "Notes of Surface" left me grasping for connections from Johns' and Pollock's universal, articulated unconscious and the "non-specific ethos of imprisonment" to the very explicit, forceful imagery of Hammons' work. (Joselit, pp 9&10)
ReplyDeleteYou cleared that up by reiterating the stripping-away nature of stereotypes. Stereotyping is like flattening layers in Photoshop at the end of a drawing session, essentially erasing your ability to interact with the parts and leaving you only with an unchanging, umbrella-like singularity?