Unseen Realities: David Hammons and T.W.U.

In 1981, David Hammons confronted the work of Richard Serra through two site-specific interactions with the sculpture T.W.U. in Tribeca, New York. Numerous exhibition catalogs and monographs on Hammons have touched on these works—Pissed Off, in which Hammons urinates on T.W.U., and Shoetree, in which he tosses twenty-five pairs of shoes over the top of the sculpture. Because documentation exists only in Dawoud Bey’s photographs and because of Hammons’s evasiveness, they are generally viewed as minor works, predecessors to later pieces that address art and public space, or considered straightforward Duchampian anti-art declarations. While Hammons’s work owes a debt to Duchamp, reducing these pieces to mere precedents and influences overlooks the important social meaning of their performance.

Newly published texts and documents provide insight into Hammons and Serra, allowing a deeper dive into these performances. By examining the processes that informed Hammons's work conceptually, as well as Serra’s artistic thought in general, this paper will explore how the performances relate to the claiming of space, phenomenology, and their contribution to the ongoing debates about public monuments. While addressing the gentrification inherent in the placement of Serra’s sculptures, Hammons’s actions look beyond Serra and directly address the insensitivity and lack of awareness that underlies the commissioning of much public sculpture, especially at that time. This paper will demonstrate how these Hammons’s works, straddling a physical and conceptual space within and outside the established art world, provides a poignant and powerful critique of public art in its representation of marginalized voices.