Los Angeles
David Hammons returns to the abjection of darkness with an interesting reprisal of Concerto in Black and Blue (on view through May 25, 2025) at Hauser and Wirth’s posh Downtown Los Angeles location. More than 20 years after the installation’s initial staging in New York at Ace Gallery, it now nestles in a rear gallery of the former Globe Grain and Milling Company complex—a dark room that invites and repels, its supposed nothingness harboring an imperceptible space that plunges anyone who enters into a sea of uncertainty and unsettling affectations. While both iterations have followed immense tragedy—9/11 and then the Palisades and Eaton fires—what Hammons attunes us to is not the instance of tragedy itself, but the infinitely combinatory and socially contingent conditions that inform the spaces we occupy.
Before entering Concerto’s dedicated gallery, visitors are instructed by a desk agent to place their phones in a locked protective bag. It’s easy to forget that camera phones and social media were essentially matters of science fiction when Hammons first presented Concerto in late 2002, and already with this gesture, he has provoked and altered an implicit social contract of contemporary exhibition viewing: How are we to share this experience on our favorite platforms? The stakes are much higher now—the metric of the work lies not in its visual narrative, but rather in its living up to the necessity of such a withholding. Once phones have been stowed away, a small sign directs the viewer to a bowl filled with coin-size LED lights, which emit a shallow blue light when clicked. Armed with one small light, protective case in hand, you enter the darkness.
By definition, a concerto is an instrumental composition for one or more soloists accompanied by an ensemble. Its popularity grew during the Baroque era, a period in which painters like Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Velazquez catered to concerns of light and darkness. In Concerto, Hammons layers the sonic and chronopolitical templates of the Baroque and stretches them to their logical extent. Each patron is simultaneously soloist and ensemble. There are no instruments or objects, just bodies moving around, with the occasional dissonance of clicks, shuffles of feet, and flashes of blue light coming together to form a semblance of structured rhythmic orchestration.
Hammons never promises or even alludes to any salvation in his architectural chiaroscuro treatment. There are no walls to feel around, no guides to assist you. The room feels dishearteningly bigger with each step. Maybe that’s the point. Because while the work can be reduced to the rhetoric of satire, the eloquence of its rather voluminous appeal to the dark underbelly of form remains significantly poignant. It’s as if the haunting, sardonic gaze of the black, gap-toothed figure in Kerry James Marshall’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) has been resurrected to remind us that the ordered, humanist conceits of Modernism are once again in turmoil, gloating—with Hammons’s endorsement—in a proverbial “I told you it would happen again.”
We wouldn’t be far off in thinking, pace the artist’s response to Light and Space artist James Turrell in an interview with curator Deborah Rothschild in 1993, that Hammons still feels he isn’t free enough yet not to make work that in one way or another engages the minor frequencies of being. While requiring radical situational attention, the recursion of this fact should serve as a portent for the often taken-for-granted values we hold dear.
