Slideshow
THE MELT GOES ON FOREVER:
THE ART & TIMES OF DAVID HAMMONS
Opens Friday, May 5
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY HAROLD CROOKS
PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY JUDD TULLY
“The more he tells the art world to go fuck itself, the more they want him.” – poet Steve Cannon, describing David Hammons, the brilliant, subversive, and elusive art star and provocateur. In the late ‘60s to mid-‘70s, Hammons captivated the art world with his body prints (using his naked body as a printing plate in meditations on African-American existence), and later works including a snowball-selling performance in the East Village and sculptures made of hair collected from Harlem barbers — all the while sharply defying establishment categories and rules of commerce. Not a conventional chronicle of Hammons’s life and work (now 79, he believes “the less they know about me the better”), the film captures his playful, no-bullshit spirit and conceptual integrity, using archival footage and rare interviews, dynamic animation and sound art, and candid accounts by artists (Betye Saar, Suzanne Jackson, Henry Taylor, Lorna Simpson). Hammons’s profound critiques of racial and social inequality illuminate and implicate simultaneously.
With support from the Helen Frankenthaler Endowed Fund for Films on Art, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund, and the Richard Brick, Geri Ashur, and Sara Bershtel Fund for Social Justice Documentaries
2022 101 MIN. USA / CANADA GREENWICH ENTERTAINMENT
Reviews
“The art world’s Thomas Pynchon…THE MELT GOES ON FOREVER tracks the revered US artist’s career, without his direct participation, to illuminating effect… Electric and evocative… Filled with glimpses of a witty, inventive imagination.”
– David D’Arcy, The Art Newspaper