Much has been written about artist David Hammons and his recurring basketball imagery, ostensibly symbolizing African American youth’s dreams of success in the National Basketball Association and, alas, the futility of those pie-in-the-sky fantasies for so many dreamers. “It’s an anti-basketball sculpture,” Hammons famously proclaimed in a 1990 interview with Sports Illustrated about Higher Goals, one of his most famous basketball-themed works. “Basketball has become a problem in the black community,” he continued, “because kids aren’t getting an education. They’re pawns in someone else’s game.” Hammons’s published thoughts about the allure of sports for black youth, especially basketball, often leading young men to overlook other viable avenues for future successes, are frequently echoed in the career counseling literature for young people, stating over and over the odds against talented, young black athletes being selected for one of those coveted places on a major league sports team. “His over-sized basketball hoops, exquisitely adorned in bottle caps in mock Islamic designs,” notes artist/critic Coco Fusco and art gallerist Christian Haye, “become blistering critiques of black youth’s obsession with financial success through sports stardom as the admonitory title, Higher Goals (1986), comes into focus.” Or what museum curator Franklin Sirmans describes as “the absurdity of the perpetuation of the myths around getting out of the ghetto via sports.” “That’s why it’s called Higher Goals,” Hammons explained to Sports Illustrated about his bottle-cap-decorated basketball backboards and hoops, installed in Harlem and Brooklyn, NY, and placed on soaring telephone poles. “It means you should have higher goals in life [other] than basketball.”
Perhaps not prominent enough in the discussions about these basketball references in David Hammons’s art – neither in the artist’s own commentaries, nor in critiques by other pundits – are meditations on the underlying ambiguities and dialectical thinking that Hammons invariably utilizes in these works. Rather than casting African American “hoop dreams” as chimeras and hopelessly futile, Hammons frequently infuses these works with an uncanny optimism, allusions to bold ambitions, profound spirituality, and a cultural pride that, rather than shutting down or disparaging the dream, transforms it into a living and breathing concretization; an altar-like appendage to the black community that, in all of its reiterations and amplifications by Hammons, is more interminable and aspirational than limiting and delusional.
“Probability Theory: David Hammons’s Money Tree,” in Open This End: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Blake Byrne, ed. Joseph R. Wolin (Los Angeles: The Skylark Foundation, 2015), 42-49.
