Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated
examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of
tactical evasion.
One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East
Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly
laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging
salesman. He called the evanescent and unannounced street action
Bliz-aard Ball Sale, thus inscribing it into a body of work that, from
the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of ephemeral actions
and self-consciously "black" materials to comment on the nature of the
artwork, the art world, and race in America. And although Bliz-aard
Ball Sale has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it
has long been known only through a mix of eyewitness rumors and a
handful of photographs. Its details were as elusive as the artist
himself; even its exact date was unrecorded. Like so much of the
artist's work, it was conceived, it seems, to slip between our
fingers--to trouble the grasp of the market, as much as of history and
knowability.
In this engaging study, Elena Filipovic collects a vast oral history of
the ephemeral action, uncovering rare images and documents, and giving
us singular insight into an artist who made an art of making himself
difficult to find. And through it, she reveals Bliz-aard Ball Sale to
be the backbone of a radical artistic oeuvre that transforms such
notions as "art," "commodity," "performance," and even "race" into
categories that shift and dissolve, much like slowly melting snowballs.
