Over the past forty years, David Hammons has produced sculptures, installations, prints, drawings, paintings, performances, and videos that, with a sense of the sacred and the humorous, investigate the intersection of art and daily life. Hammons' Holy Bible: Old Testament is a limited-edition artist's book that consists of a 1997 softcover edition of The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, by Arturo Schwartz, that has been rebound to resemble a Bible. As the originator of the "readymade"—a work of art made from an unaltered found object placed in an art context—Marcel Duchamp, perhaps more than any other artist, influenced the course of art-making over the past one hundred years. Here Hammons celebrates Duchamp's close-to-sacred status but is also gently critical of it: the book is bound as the Old Testament, leaving open the possibility of more recent artistic revelations.
2013.
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David Hammons
American, born 1943 21 works onlineDavid Hammons once commented that “outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol." For the past 50 years, Hammons has created a vocabulary of symbols from everyday life and messed around with them in the form of prints, drawings, performances, video, found-object sculptures, and paintings.
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