Product Information
Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of tactical evasion.One wintry day in 1983,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 actionBliz-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 althoughBliz-aard Ball Salehas 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 wasconceived, 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 Saleto 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.Product Identifiers
PublisherAfterall Publishing
ISBN-139781846381867
eBay Product ID (ePID)238489626
Product Key Features
Book TitleDavid Hammons: Bliz-Aard Ball Sale
AuthorElena Filipovic
FormatPaperback
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2017
Number of Pages128 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height216mm
Item Width152mm
Additional Product Features
Title_AuthorElena Filipovic
Series TitleAfterall Books / One Work
Country/Region of ManufactureUnited Kingdom